Quotes about year
page 52

Dara Ó Briain photo
Steve Keen photo
Indro Montanelli photo
Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex photo
Norman Tebbit photo
Samuel Butler (poet) photo
Bill O'Reilly photo
Thomas Otway photo

“What mighty ills have not been done by woman!
Who was ’t betrayed the Capitol?—A woman!
Who lost Mark Antony the world?—A woman!
Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war,
And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman!
Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!”

The Orphan (1680), Act iii. Sc. 1. Compare: "O woman, woman! when to ill thy mind/ Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend", Alexander Pope, Homer’s Odyssey, book xi., line 531.

Walther von der Vogelweide photo

“For five hundred years after Walther's death – until Goethe – no German lyric poet was his equal.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 101.
Praise

John Stuart Mill photo
Muhammad of Ghor photo

“When the afiairs of this tract was settled, the royal army marched, in the year 592 h., (1196 a. d.) "towards Galewar (Gwalior), and invested that fort, which is the pearl of the necklace of the castles of Hind, the summit of which the nimble-footed wind from below cannot reach, and on the bastion of which the rapid clouds have never cast their shade, and which the swift imagination has never surmounted, and at the height of which the celestial sphere is dazzled."…In compliance with the divine injunction of holy war, they drew out the bloodthirsty sword before the faces of the enemies of religion…Solankh Pal who had raised the standard of infidelity, and perdition, and prided himself on his countless army and elephants, and who expanded the fist^ of oppression from the hiding place of deceit, and who had lighted the flame of turbulence and rebellion, and who had fixed the root of sedition and enmity firm in his heart, and in the courtyard of whose breast the shrub of tyranny and commotion had shot forth its branches, when he saw the power and majesty of the army of Islam," he became alarmed and dispirited. " Wherever he looked, he saw the road of flight blocked up."”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

He therefore " sued for pardon, and placed the ring of servitude in his ear," and agreed to pay tribute...
About the capture of Gwalior. Hasan Nizami. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 227-228 Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

“The fourth phase which commenced with the coming of independence proved a boon for Christianity. The Christian right to convert Hindus was incorporated in the Constitution. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who dominated the scene for 17 long years, promoted every anti-Hindu ideology and movement behind the smokescreen of a counterfeit secularism. The regimes that followed continued to raise the spectre of ‘Hindu communalism’ as the most frightening phenomenon. Christian missionaries could now denounce as a Hindu communalist and chauvinist, even as a Hindu Nazi, any one who raised the slightest objection to their means and methods. All sorts of ‘secularists’ came forward to join the chorus. New theologies of Fulfilment, Indigenisation, Liberation, and Dialogue were evolved and put into action. The missionary apparatus multiplied fast and became pervasive. Christianity had never had it so good in the whole of its history in India. It now stood recognized as ‘an ancient Indian religion’ with every right to extend its field of operation and expand its flock. The only rift in the lute was K. M. Panikkar’s book, Asia and Western Dominance, published from London in 1953, the Niyogi Committee Report published by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1956, and Om Prakash Tyagi’s Bill on Freedom of Religion introduced in the Lok Sabha in December 1978.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

Jiang Zemin photo
Billy Joel photo
J.M. DeMatteis photo
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“Smoking stupefies a man, and makes him incapable of thinking or writing. It is only fit for idlers, people who are always bored, who sleep for a third of their lifetime, fritter away another third in eating, drinking, and other necessary or unnecessary affairs, and don’t know—though they are always complaining that life is so short—what to do with the rest of their time. Such lazy Turks find mental solace in handling a pipe and gazing at the clouds of smoke that they puff into the air; it helps them to kill time. Smoking induces drinking beer, for hot mouths need to be cooled down. Beer thickens the blood, and adds to the intoxication produced by the narcotic smoke. The nerves are dulled and the blood clotted. If they go on as they seem to be doing now, in two or three generations we shall see what these beer-swillers and smoke-puffers have made of Germany. You will notice the effect on our literature—mindless, formless, and hopeless; and those very people will wonder how it has come about. And think of the cost of it all! Fully 25,000,000 thalers a year end in smoke all over Germany, and the sum may rise to forty, fifty, or sixty millions. The hungry are still unfed, and the naked unclad. What can become of all the money? Smoking, too, is gross rudeness and unsociability. Smokers poison the air far and wide and choke every decent man, unless he takes to smoking in self-defence. Who can enter a smoker’s room without feeling ill? Who can stay there without perishing?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Heinrich Luden, Rueckblicke in mein Leben, Jena 1847
Attributed

Wanda Orlikowski photo
Theodore Kaczynski photo
Omar Khayyám photo
Timothy Leary photo

“At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

As quoted in Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia : How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (2005), by Rob Brezsny, p. 8

Freeman Dyson photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
Joey Comeau photo
H.V. Sheshadri photo
Ryū Murakami photo

“Cholera and the Thug were born in the same country and in the same year. India is their native land.”

Francisco Luís Gomes (1829–1869) Indo-Portuguese physician, writer, historian, economist, political scientist and MP in the Portuguese parli…

Quoted by Nishitha Desai in Lusotopie 2000, p. 474

MS Dhoni photo

“Dhoni is one of the finest leaders in the game in the last 30 years and is at par with the likes Imran Khan, Mark Taylor and Arjun Ranatunga.”

MS Dhoni (1981) Indian cricket player

Ian Chappell https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/dhoni-quotes/

David Puttnam photo
Nile Kinnick photo
William Foote Whyte photo
Jeff Foxworthy photo

“By art and swindling here
Men live for half the year;
By swindling and by art
They live the other part.”

Giovanni Maria Cecchi (1518–1587) Italian poet, playwright, writer and notary

Per arte e per inganno
Si vive mezzo l’anno;
Per inganno e per arte
Si vive l’altra parte.
L’Esaltazion della Croce, Act IV., Scene IX.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 390.

Charles de Gaulle photo

“Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I truly believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill 80 million Russians, even if one can kill 800 million French, that is if there were 800 million French.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Discussing the Force de Frappe. Quoted in The New York Review of Books, 29 April 2010.
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2

Richard Rodríguez photo
John Muir photo
Ernest Hemingway photo

“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Jayant Narlikar photo
Julius Malema photo

“Our people are still staying in the same houses that were given to them by apartheid. Our people still stay in the shacks. They came and abandoned you here. They have forgotten about you. They are going to come back next year during elections and say ‘no, you must remember Nelson Mandela, this is the party of Mandela, and we have come a long way with the ANC’. Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

As quoted by Siviwe Feketha in Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party, says Malema Mandela is no more. He is dead, with his party, says Malema https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/mandela-is-no-more-he-is-dead-with-his-party-says-malema-16241907, www.iol.co.za (26 July 2018)

Karel Appel photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Henry Adams photo
Bernard Mandeville photo
George William Curtis photo

“That is to say, within less than twenty years after the Constitution was formed, and in obedience to that general opinion of the time which condemned slavery as a sin in morals and a blunder in economy, eight of the States had abolished it by law — four of them having already done so when the instrument was framed; and Mr. Douglas might as justly quote the fact that there were slaves in New York up to 1827 as proof that the public opinion of the State sanctioned slavery, as to try to make an argument of the fact that there were slave laws upon the statute-books of the original States. He forgets that there was not in all the colonial legislation of America one single law which recognized the rightfulness of slavery in the abstract; that in 1774 Virginia stigmatized the slave-trade as 'wicked, cruel, and unnatural'; that in the same year Congress protested against it 'under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of country'; that in 1775 the same Congress denied that God intended one man to own another as a slave; that the new Discipline of the Methodist Church, in 1784, and the Pastoral Letter of the Presbyterian Church, in 1788, denounced slavery; that abolition societies existed in slave States, and that it was hardly the interest even of the cotton-growing States, where it took a slave a day to clean a pound of cotton, to uphold the system. Mr. Douglas incessantly forgets to tell us that Jefferson, in his address to the Virginia Legislature of 1774, says that 'the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state'; and while he constantly remembers to remind us that the Jeffersonian prohibition of slavery in the territories was lost in 1784, he forgets to add that it was lost, not by a majority of votes — for there were sixteen in its favor to seven against it — but because the sixteen votes did not represent two thirds of the States; and he also incessantly forgets to tell us that this Jeffersonian prohibition was restored by the Congress of 1785, and erected into the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was re-enacted by the first Congress of the United States and approved by the first President.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Calvin Coolidge photo
Robert W. Service photo

“Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;
From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day”

Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Canadian poet

The Law of the Yukon http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/781.html (1907)

Camille Pissarro photo
Francis Escudero photo
Emma Orczy photo
Nathalia Crane photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Axl Rose photo

“My growth was stopped at two years old. And when they talk about Axl Rose being a screaming two-year-old, they're right. There's a screaming two-year-old who's real pissed off and hides and won't show himself that often, even to me. Because I couldn't protect him. And the world didn't protect him.”

Axl Rose (1962) American singer-songwriter and musician

Quoted in "Axl Rose: The Rolling Stone Interview" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/15808548/axl_rose_the_rolling_stone_interview/9 by Kim Neely, Rolling Stone, No. 627 (2 April 1992)

Archie Carr photo

“Sea turtles of all kinds are peculiarly prone to eat plastic scraps and other buoyant debris and to tangle themselved in lines and netting discarded by fishermen, and records of such mishaps have increased markedly in recent years.”

Archie Carr (1909–1987) American university professor, zoologist, herpetologist, conservationist

[Impact of nondegradable marine debris on the ecology and survival outlook of sea turtles, Marine Pollution Bulletin, 18, 6, June 1987, 352–356, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X87800255] (quote from p. 352)

John Foxe photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“There is no doubt that to-day feeling in totalitarian countries is, or they would like it to be, one of contempt for democracy. Whether it is the feeling of the fox which has lost its brush for his brother who has not I do not know, but it exists. Coupled with that is the idea that a democracy qua democracy must be a kind of decadent country in which there is no order, where industrial trouble is the order of the day, and where the people can never keep to a fixed purpose. There is a great deal that is ridiculous in that, but it is a dangerous belief for any country to have of another. There is in the world another feeling. I think you will find this in America, in France, and throughout all our Dominions. It is a sympathy with, and an admiration for, this country in the way she came through the great storm, the blizzard, some years ago, and the way in which she is progressing, as they believe, with so little industrial strife. They feel that that is a great thing which marks off our country from other countries to-day. Except for those who love industrial strife for its own sake, and they are but a few, it indeed is the greatest testimony to my mind that democracy is really functioning when her children can see her through these difficulties, some of which are very real, and settle them—a far harder thing than to fight.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1937/may/05/supply in the House of Commons (5 May 1937).
1937

Bill McKibben photo
Boniface Mwangi photo
Elon Musk photo
Alauddin Khalji photo

“The Sultan requested the wise men to supply some rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion. … The people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twenty khiits, mukaddims, or chaudharis together by the neck, and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khuls and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans…. The Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left un- able to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy any of the luxuries of life. …. I have, therefore, taken my measures, and have made my subjects obedient, so that at my command they are ready to creep into holes like mice. Now you tell me that it is all in accordance with law that the Hindus should be reduced to the most abject obedience. I am an unlettered man, but I have seen a great deal; be assured then that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have, therefore, given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year, of corn, milk, and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Ziauddin Barani in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 182 ff.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Charlie Sheen photo

“I have a 10,000-year-old brain and the boogers of a 7-year-old. That's how I describe myself.”

Charlie Sheen (1965) American film and television actor

Piers Morgan Tonight
Quote summary in The Los Angeles Times (2011)

Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Sarah Orne Jewett photo

“The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) American novelist, short story writer and poet

Letter to Willa Cather, quoted in the preface to The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1925)

Benjamin Graham photo
Alan Greenspan photo
Christina Romer photo
Steve Martin photo

“All of a sudden I had to remember some words that Marlowe had told me over fifteen years ago: 'Dead men don't wear plaid.' Hmm… Dead men don't wear plaid. I still don't know what it means.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

As "Rigby Reardon" in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)

Dianne Feinstein photo
Lila Rose photo
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo

“Out of hundred years, a few moments were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Me hicieron de cien años algunos minutos que se quedaron conmigo, no cien años.
Voces (1943)

Anand Patwardhan photo
Tejinder Virdee photo
Eugene Rotberg photo
Kent Hovind photo
Bill James photo
Ali Khamenei photo
Slavoj Žižek photo

““I hate students,” [Zizek] said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
In a recent interview at this year’s Zizek Conference in Ohio, Zizek talked about his personal life before delving into his thoughts on teaching. “I hate giving classes,” Zizek said, citing office hours and grading papers as his two biggest peeves. “I did teach a class here [at the University of Cincinnati] and all of the grading was pure bluff,” he continues. “I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.” He received no papers that semester. But it’s office hours that are the main reason he does not want to teach.
“I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still tolerable. The problem is that here in the United States students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions [about] private problems… What should I tell them?”
“I don’t care,” he continued. “Kill yourself. It’s not my problem,””

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

As quoted by Eugene Wolters, " Professor of the Year: 'If You Don't Give Me Any of Your Shitty Papers You Get an A http://www.critical-theory.com/professor-of-the-year-if-you-dont-give-me-any-of-your-shitty-papers-you-get-an-a/'", Critical-Theory.com, May 26 2014; square brackets and lack of accent marks as in orginal

Roy Jenkins photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Gerald Ford photo
Bill Clinton photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Paul Smith (musician) photo

“We all went to university here and spent the last 10 years living here, and we are among people who live here, who come to the show.”

Paul Smith (musician) (1979) English rock singer

About a free Tyneside gig.
What's On North East http://www.whatsonne.co.uk/gb/music/news/interview-paul-smith-maximo-park

Berthe Morisot photo
Steve McManaman photo
Eugene Lee-Hamilton photo

“The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood
On dusty shelves, when held against the ear
Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear
The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood.
We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood
In our own veins, impetuous and near.”

Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) English poet and translator

Sonnet. Sea-shell Murmurs, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Gather a shell from the strewn beach / And listen at its lips: they sigh / The same desire and mystery, / The echo of the whole sea's speech", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea Hints; "I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear / And plain thou'lt hear / Tales of ships", Charles Henry Webb, With a Nantucket Shell.

Fernando Alonso photo
Lee Kuan Yew photo
Gary Johnson photo
Robert Spencer photo
Emil Nolde photo

“In the working of wood and for the determining of its character I had had enough experience in my five-year pursuit of woodcutting. I also always gladly let the various charming grainings and sometimes the knots become involved in the printing.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

in Nolde's letter, c. 1910; in Alois J. Schardt, 'Nolde als Graphiker', Das Kunstblatt 11, no. 8., 1927, p. 289; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p. 52
1900 - 1920