Quotes about year
page 72

“Homeschooling is radical, in the root sense of the word: in Latin, radicus means root. Compulsory schooling (forced attendance), and now, in the twenty-first century, compulsory education (forced learning) are very recent petals and offshoots of the root way humankind has historically nurtured its young into responsible adults and active citizens. Family, community, religious institutions, and work were all integrated into the daily lives and upbringing of children… The concept of universal compulsory schooling is a very recent idea, one that is not even two hundred years old, yet we act as if it is an ancient, sure-fire way to make sure our children 'learn something.”

Pat Farenga American activist

"
A Brief History of Homeschooling (2002)

Children, Education, School, Family

“No one really believes in an eternal existence after death. The mind staggers before the concept of infinity in either time or space. Even the Hindus, who have calculated that the present age will end precisely, in terms of our calendar, on 17 February 428,898, when the universe (with all its gods except the Trinity) will perish in a cosmic conflagration, believe that the senior member of the Trinity, Brahman, will create another universe and yet another in a process that will continue for another 311,035,680,000,000 years, after which, they modestly admit, they do not know exactly what will happen, except that the creative force itself cannot perish with the total destruction of all things, including the supreme gods. Even they draw back before the horror of infinity!”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"Afterthoughts on Afterlife", Instauration magazine (August 1980)
1970s, 1980s

Death, God, Age, Universe

“I realised that over a few years through these London Citizens campaigns we’d developed a more radical political economy than the Labour Party. For me, it was catch up, catch up, catch up. I was always a Labour, secular, left-winger and this was all new. One of the big lessons for me was which people would turn up. If the mosque said 50 people, the Catholic church says 50 people, the local black church says 50 people, they turn up. When the trade unions said 50 people, no-one turns up. So suddenly the crisis of secular institutions and their reproduction came to me.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Independent Labour, 2 December 2011 http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2011/12/02/a-conversation-with-maurice-glasman-pt-2/

People

“I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child... I remember one summer morning when I was twelve years old [1888], I was with my father. We were following a road which crossed the plain from Rueil to Croissy. The whole plain was a solid field of corn and the ears stood higher than my head. I still retain today the impression of the vast expanse, spangled with flowers and filled with the drone of insects. Often, later on, I have tried to recapture, to fix firmly in my mind once again, the impression of that world around me, of the sun which burns my face and hands... Every time a see a field of corn I an reminded of that morning.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 18-19

World, Feeling, Flowers, Time

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way, Feeling, Time, Country

“I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress

Thinking, Sense, Success, Country

“Every moment of every day and night he was able to take the measure of his failure now. Even his family's poverty which for years he had refused to admit, began to grow familiar to him, but like the memory of a companion that one has left behind. Rose-Anna…She'd been a young girl at his side, then tired, then overwhelmed, and here she was sleeping beside him on a kind of pallet, on the floor. He could hear the whimpers from the children in their sleep.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 281-282

Children, Family, Girl, Failure

“I have already dealt with MIBs, psychotronics, black helicopters, etc. There is protection around my work. It has not been fun. Nonetheless, it is what I signed on for. Twenty years ago I had an NDE. Made conscious contact with the source.... The hype reporters usually go away with nothing. Those who come with an open mind and loving heart go away transformed.”

James Gilliland (1952) American academic and author

Love, Heart

“Men’s life expectancy was one year less than women’s in 1920; today, it is seven years less, yet the federal government has only an Office of Research on Women’s Health.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Life, Women, Men, Health

“The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.”

Stella Gibbons book Cold Comfort Farm

Source: Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Chapter 1.

Education, Art, Parent

“In the years ahead, I will never hold a position higher or a covenant more sacred than that of President of the United States. But there is no title I will wear more proudly than that of citizen.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2000s, Farewell address (18 January 2001)

“For two and a half years, I rigorously trained seven to eight hours a day in two disciplines of dance but moved on to the most versatile medium called cinema which encompassed every form of art.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Kamal Hassan: A universal legend

Art, Dance, Training

“The principle of rotation… in the body of [bank] directors… breaks in upon the esprit de corps so apt to prevail in permanent bodies; it gives a chance for the public eye penetrating into the sanctuary of those proceedings and practices, which the avarice of the directors may introduce for their personal emolument, and which the resentments of excluded directors, or the honesty of those duly admitted, might betray to the public; and it gives an opportunity at the end of the year, or at other periods, of correcting a choice, which on trial, proves to have been unfortunate.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1803. ME 10:437
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Chance, Personality

“Command & Conquer is very much a part of what my style…was founded on, combining the various elements of rock, electronic, hip-hop, and contemporary edge with some orchestral and some what-not—it comes down to not having limitations on what it is you can do, and when you have a project like this that allows you that freedom and that creativity to thrive, you can really take advantage…I think the biggest difference now is, imagine my mindset and the way I was thinking and writing when Command & Conquer first came out, and add about fifteen years experience to that—I think that's what you can expect from Universe at War.”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Petroglyph Video Podcast Source: [Kevin Yu, Frank Klepacki = date=2007-03-27, http://www.petroglyphgames.com/news/index.php?id=149&year=2007, VIDEO PODCAST: THE KING IS BACK TO PREVIEW THE MUSIC IN UAW!, Petroglyph Games http://www.petroglyphgames.com/, 22 April, 2007]

War, Way, Imagination, Thinking

“Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

28 min 30 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

People, World, Justice, Imagination

“There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason […] I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It's the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future — always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism. When I was in my real Communist phase, I and the people around me really believed — but, of course, this makes us certifiable — that something like 10 years after World War II, the world would be Communist and perfect.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

quoted in "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and Space Fiction" http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-space.html (25 July 1982), Lesley Hazelton, New York Times Book Review

God, War, People, World

“Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they have tried but failed to do for over a millennium: conquer Europe. If current demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by mid-century. … Europe is now reaping what it has long sown. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economics benefits. She observe that today, "Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important poste-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitued,", i. e, Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society withits traditional Judeo-Christian more rapidly disappearing."”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Stealth jihad: how radical Islam is subverting America without guns or bombs, 2008, ISBN 9781596985568, pp. 270-273 http://books.google.com/books?id=3eLfhvNQBkgC&pg=PA270 … France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counterweight of the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.

Travel

“No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

A Journey to Sakhalin

Love, People, Faith

“During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked. I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court. “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

(He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?”
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

War, Books, School, Way

“We're leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven-and-a-half wonderful years, and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here eleven and a half years ago.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Remarks departing Downing Street (28 November 1990) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108258 Third term as Prime Minister

Time, Happiness

“When I see that there have been 3.6 million examples of road rage in the last year, I say to myself that there must have been 3.6 million examples of bad, inattentive or selfish driving.”

Jeremy Clarkson book Born to be Riled

Source: Born to be Riled (1999), p. 50

Rage, Selfishness

“I was permitted to work for many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand year history. Even if I could, I would not want to erase this period of time from my existence. I am happy to know that I have done my duty, to my people, my duty as a German, as a National Socialist, as a loyal follower of my Führer. I do not regret anything. If I were to begin all over again, I would act just as I have acted, even if I knew that in the end I should meet a fiery death at the stake. No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know He will judge me innocent.”

Rudolf Hess (1894–1987) German Nazi leader

Last statement by Heß to the International Military Tribunal in Nüremberg (31 August 1946)

Life, Death, People, History

“After two years of study, I'm happy to tell you that dire projections about declines in the U. S. work force due to technological change are exaggerated at best.”

Richard Cyert (1921–1998) American economist

Richard Cyert, cited in: Data Center's Plant Shutdowns Monitor. (1987), p. 4

Study, Change, Happiness

“I still think of myself as I was 25 years ago. Then I look in a mirror and see an old bastard and realise it's me.”

Dave Allen (1936–2005) Irish comedian and satirist

Compilation by the BBC 11 March, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/4340205.stm

Thinking

“The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.”

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) New Zealand writer

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 597

Love, Life, Beauty, Passion

“Geographers and agricultural economists have become increasingly interested in recent years in studying the associations of crops and livestock in different types of agriculture, in contrast to the separate consideration of individual crops or products.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

R. Hartshorne, S.N. Dicken (1935) "A classification of the agricultural regions of Europe and North America on a uniform statistical basis". Annals of the Association of American. Vol 25 (2), p. 99

Study

“Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 22

War, World

“Boredom, yes, as in those moments when the eyes stare without itinerary—when the brain’s hard drive revolves at low rpm, uncoupled from regimen, responsibility, the whole Logistical Life that becomes one’s life in the middle years, what Hinduism calls the Householder Phase, to do to do to do to do to do. But now alpha waves are lapping at the shore of the mind as you depart the secretarial for the sacramental realm.”

Steven Heighton (1961) Canadian writer

Workbook (2011), p. 15

Life

“We have thus shown that 1799 began the period called the Time of the End; that in this time Papacy is to be consumed piece-meal; and that Napoleon took away not only Charlemagne's gifts of territory (one thousand years after they were made), but also, afterward, the Papacy's civil jurisdiction in the city of Rome, which was recognized nominally from the promulgation of Justinian's decree, A. D. 533, but actually from the overthrow of the Ostrogothic monarchy, A. D. 539 - just 1260 years before 1799. This was the exact limit of the time, times and a half of its power, as repeatedly defined in prophecy. And though in some measure claimed again since, Papacy is without a vestige of temporal or civil authority to-day, it having been wholly "consumed". The Man of Sin, devoid of civil power, still poses and boasts; but, civilly powerless, he awaits utter destruction in the near future, at the hands of the enraged masses (God's unwitting agency), as clearly shown in Revelation.
This Time of the End, or day of Jehovah's preparation, beginning A. D. 1799 and closing A. D. 1914, though characterized by a great increase of knowledge over all past ages, is to culminate in the greatest time of trouble the world has ever known; but it is nevertheless preparing for and leading into that blessed time so long promised, when the true Kingdom of God, under the control of the true Christ, will fully establish an order of government the very reverse of that of Antichrist.”

Charles Taze Russell (1852–1916) Founder of the Bible Student Movement

Source: Milennial Dawn, Vol. III: Thy Kingdom Come (1891), p. 59.

God, Age, World, Knowledge

“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

“GG Allin: I got to tell you one thing that is really bothering me. I went to prison for two years for what I did to a girl and she did the same thing to me but because she was a girl they let her of and put me in prison because she was the weaker sex. Now if women want equal rights they got to do equal time. Ok, I cut her, I burned her, I drank her blood but she also did the same to me. It was consexual agreement but in the courtroom they said that I was to blame because I'm GG Allin, I'm the king of the underground. They need to nail me to a cross.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jerry Springer Show, May 5. 1993.
On The Jerry Springer Show

Women, Sex, Girl, Time

“No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth's interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death.”

Henri Michaux (1899–1984) painter, poet, writer

These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.
Ecuador (1929)

Death, Pain, War, Evil

“The Communist Party of Chile has a historic opportunity today of having the political representation it deserves in congress. We are a party with a 100-year history, which has waged struggles through the perspective of workers, the pobladores and students. We have had and have earned a space in this country and our ideals also need to be reflected in the national congress.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Cariola, Mujer, Matrona, Dirigente Social y Política: Abrir el Congreso Nacional a la Ciudadanía, DiarioDigital, 2013-08-24 http://www.diarioreddigital.cl/index.php/politica/36-politica/443-karol-cariola-mujer-matrona-dirigente-social-y-politica-abrir-el-congreso-nacional-a-la-ciudadania-, Original: "El PC tiene hoy una oportunidad histórica de tener la representación política que nos corresponde en el congreso. Somos un partido con cien años de historia, que ha dado luchas desde la perspectiva de los trabajadores, los pobladores, los estudiantes. Hemos tenido y nos hemos ganado un espacio en este país y nuestras ideas tienen que verse reflejadas también en el congreso nacional". Source: Pobladores is a term used in Chile to refer to working class people who reside in the most densely populated communes in Santiago, and non-metropolitan provinces, with the lowest household incomes and with very limited or no social mobility.

History, Country

“All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a super-genius…but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat…unless he has a nursemaid to watch him—as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the all-around most competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees…but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not—but two men can impregnate fifty women—or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Number of the Beast

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXXI : “—the first ghosts ever to search for an obstetrician.”, p. 321

Women, Men, Way, Memory

“The #1 change in Silicon Valley is information density. If you think about it, 30 years ago the only way you got info was during one-on-one meetings. You knew very little and the world knew very little. We just know a lot more now.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Interview with Steve Blank (2013)

World, Way, Thinking, Change

“And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army —
Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.”

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) Greek poet

Nero’s Deadline
Collected Poems (1992)

“I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2010s, (July 26, 2016)

Love, Hope, Decision, Strong

“The experiences of the years…have brought the country, particularly its young people, to a mood of depression, disillusion, and withdrawal from the effort to affect the world.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Purpose of the Book

People, World, Mood, Effort

“Strength of our culture to some extent has compensated the lack of formal education. That is how people could vote wisely in these massive elections. After all, it was the ordinary, illiterate people who exercised the votes in the general elections we have had. And they seem to have voted with sufficient knowledge of affairs, of their interests, and this is remarkable indeed. But that is no substitute for education, and we have to have a full formal education for all our people and what I find sad is that it is an eminently practicable thing to do; in a matter of 5 years, India could be made literate.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

People, Education, Sadness, Exercises

“…In the following year (AH 913, AD 1506), the king marched against Nurwur, a strong fort in the district of Malwa, then in possession of the Hindoos. The Prince Julal Khan governor of Kalpy, was directed to advance and invest the place; and should the Hindoos resist, he was required to inform the King… The King remained for the space of six months at Nurwur, breaking down temples, and building mosques. He also established a college there, and placed therein many holy and learned men.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Sikandar Lodî (AD 1489-1517) Narwar (Madhya Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Men, Strong, Learning

“I drove to a hospital for Afghan civilians with a group of nurses – we brought presents for the children. Toys, candy, cookies. I had about five teddy bears. We arrived at the hospital, a long barracks. No one has more than a blanket for bedding. A young Afghan woman approached me, holding a child in her arms. She wanted to say something – over the last ten years almost everyone here has learned to speak a little Russian – and I handed the child a toy, which he took with his teeth. "Why his teeth?" I asked in surprise. She pulled the blanket off his tiny body – the little boy was missing both arms. "It was when your Russians bombed."”

Svetlana Alexievich (1948) Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer

Someone held me up as I began to fall.
Nobel Lecture (2015)

Children, Boy, Learning

“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Marriage, Age, Home, Memory

“The FBI may decide to leave a suspected mole undisturbed for years in order to feed him false critical information at an opportune moment or to use him to catch a bigger fish.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Fish, Falseness

“I didn't choose to be alone. But I cannot explain this. I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years. There is no time sense because of things that are going on in you. I don't know, there is no explanation of this. But every time, even with someone I…. But whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this, but it means that these women, they were not sharing my solitude. I wanted to stay with somebody, but I couldn't, it wasn't possible, because of this thing moving in myself. I had to learn this. I didn't want to be alone, but I had to learn that the dimensions of my feelings are too violent. I had to learn this.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Playboy interview

Women, Feeling, Sense, Solitude

“Neither force, nor argument, nor opinion," said Merlyn with the deepest sincerity, "are thinking. Argument is only a display of mental force, a sort of fencing with points in order to gain a victory, not for truth. Opinions are the blind alleys of lazy or of stupid men, who are unable to think. If ever a true politician really thinks a subject out dispassionately, even Homo stultus will be compelled to accept his findings in the end. Opinion can never stand beside truth. At present, however, Homo impoliticus is content either to argue with opinions or to fight with his fists, instead of waiting for the truth in his head. It will take a million years, before the mass of men can be called political animals.”

T. H. White book The Book of Merlyn

The Book of Merlyn (1977)

Men, Truth, Stupidity, Thinking

“It is possible to see Keynesian and Schumpeterian ideas as complementary. Keynes is about short-run economic fluctuations brought about by erratic variations in the willingness of investors and governments to spend; Schumpeter is about the long-run trajectory driven by the erratic march of technological progress. This complementarity only became clear later, after both men had died, when economic growth became an explicit objective of public policy and topic of systematic analysis. Schumpeter was left frustrated by the younger generation’s affinity for his rival. In any case, the “preliminary volume” never materialized.
The world turns. Today, some sixty years after their deaths, Schumpeter’s star probably outshines Keynes’s. The business cycle has receded in importance, partly because the large industrial economies have sprouted a more stable structure, and partly because the lessons that Keynes taught have been learned by central banks and finance ministries. Instead, long-term economic growth has moved to the top of the political and intellectual agenda, and that was Schumpeter’s topic. As Robert Lucas memorably put it, once you have begun to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else. It is a pity that troubled old Schumpeter did not live to see the triumph of his obsession.”

Robert Solow (1924) American economist

"Heavy Thinker" (2007)

Death, Men, World, Star

“I only work every couple of years. I go into retirement between films.”

Paul Hogan

Interview with Spence D. - USA, April 21, 2001

“Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. II
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Night

“There is nothing the country needs so much as another Wesley or Whitefield…To-day the world seems more irreligious than it has ever been in the Christian era. Irresponsible pleasure-seeking and prodigal luxury abound; church-going has lost the hold it had in our childhood; and candidates for the Ministry are less in number than years past. But I believe this condition of affairs will pass.”

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

Speech at the Langham Hotel (11 February 1926), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 195-196.
1926

Pleasure, World, Past, Childhood

““It is the principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called ‘religion,’ and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.”
“What’s that?” Carmody asked.
“It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, ‘Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.’ The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Carmody said.
“I’ve made it too complicated,” Maudsley said. “There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.”
“What’s that?”
“Just consider its style—bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans—fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 13 (pp. 88-89)

Women, God, War, Peace

“If someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago, and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately?”

Noam Cohen (1999) American journalist

[Noam, Cohen, The New York Times, April 18, 2010, What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do With the Pentagon Papers Today?, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/business/media/19link.html, October 30, 2014]

Waiting, Personality

“The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1980s, GNU Manifesto (1985)

Life, Art, Effort, Time

“Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary. wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.
And then it’s another day.”

Douglas Coupland book JPod

JPod (2006)

Life, Fools, Music, Feeling

“Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years.”

Wilhelm Frick (1877–1946) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn - History - 2007

“Scientific management… has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the two are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employe, and vice versa; and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants high wages and the employer what he wants a low labor cost for his manufactures.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, p. 10; As cited in: Frank B. Gilbreth (1912). Primer of scientific management https://archive.org/stream/primerofscientif00gilbrich#page/1/mode/1up, p. 12.

“If the coup victories so we can look forward to a long conflict because we refuse to bend. We are not afraid of their guns. Honduras army pattern just 7000 men. If we take up arms, we would quickly run away so few soldiers. But our goal is to allocate the regime in a peaceful and honorable way. Women, children, youth, students, workers - we all have united us in a civic front against the coup. Even my 80 year old mother to the streets and practice non-violent resistance.”

Manuel Zelaya (1952) President of Honduras

Women, Men, Children, Youth

“It is a curious paradox that several of the greatest and most creative spirits in science, after achieving important discoveries by following their unfettered imaginations, were in their later years obsessed with reductionist philosophy and as a result became sterile. Hilbert was a prime example of this paradox. Einstein was another.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Imagination, Science

“Fifteen years ago, there was this country called the Soviet Union that had over 10,000 nuclear warheads pointed at us… they're not there anymore. That's a good thing. And when people talk about how the world is more dangerous now than it was because we had these terrorists running around, my reply is, you know, a terrorist is like a buzzing mosquito. About 15 years ago, there was a great, big vampire bat; that's several orders of magnitude different from a mosquito. So the world is much safer — a lot safer than it was. It's not perfectly safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than it was.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, Larry King Live (2000)

People, World, Country

“In [18]35, I made a study trip about Utrecht and Nijmegen to Dusseldorf, Cologne and [w:Koblenz|Coblentz]], together with Samuel Verveer, who had already left the studio of van Hove. My painting 'View of the Moselle Bridge in Coblentz' – exhibited in the same year here - was bought by Schelfhout and, in addition to the satisfaction it gave me, I was allowed to find a counselor in him from then on; he became and remained my friend since then.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

origineel citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands: In [18]35 maakte ik met gekocht en, behalve de voldoening, die daarin voor mij was gelegen, mocht ik van toen af een raadsman in hem vinden, die mij sinds ook een vriend is geworden en gebleven.
p. 9
1880's, Een en ander betrekkelijk mijn loopbaan als schilder

Study, Painting

“This country has been so rich in human and material resources that it is only recently that the importance of waste elimination has come to be realized. The material element received the first consideration, and in the comparatively few years during which the subject has received attention, an enormous amount has been done to conserve natural resources, to economize in the use.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: "Motion Study as an Increase of National Wealth," 1915, p. 96

Nature, Country

“It is not fair to accuse the Arabic language of being old-fashioned and static as if it were independent from what we mean and do, or unaffected by the outcome of our deeds. It is our language, and we are ultimately responsible for its static condition. It is our duty to restore it to its glory so that it can return to what it used to be hundreds of years ago – the language of science and literature, a language of building bridges to other civilizations, a language that affected others through its scientific and cultural achievements, pushing them to learn it.”

Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned (1958) wife of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

Speech in Doha; quoted on official website http://www.mozabintnasser.qa/en/Pages/ArticlePreview.aspx?ArticleGuid=ed017dde-d770-42a3-80e7-441a15d0a89f&Type=Speech (May 31 2012)

Literature, Fashion, Learning, Science

“Twenty-six years ago knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on the subject in any language, in the seven centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years of correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they were dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernoy revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. She expressed it in writing more than a year before publication of Duvornoy's book.”

Arthur Guirdham (1905–1992) British physician, psychiatrist and writer

Source: The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), p. 10-11

Books

“All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.”

Bobby Seale (1936) American activist

Interview with The Guardian (February 1970)

Exercises, Thinking

“As for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Family, Home, Boy, Housing

“I stand in a land of roses,
But I dream of a land of snow,
Where you and I were happy,
In the years of long ago.”

Fred Weatherly (1848–1929) English lawyer, author, lyricist and broadcaster

Song Thora

Dreams, Happiness

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“That is why I say the nation needs a leader. Dr. Manmohan Singh has not even visited all the states in the five years of his prime ministership, while Advaniji is a leader who has, at some point in time, spent a night in our 400 districts.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2009, "The nation is waiting for a strong, experienced leader", 2009

Time, Night

“One great state says to others, as each in effect has been saying during the ten years of armament debate: "It is true that we ask for considerable power. Perhaps, all things considered, greater power than you. But it need not disturb you in the least, for we give you our most positive assurance that that power will be used purely for defense. And by defense we mean this: that when we get into a dispute with you as to our respective rights, when, that is, the question is whether you are right or we are right, what we mean by defense is that we shall always be in a position to be sole judge of the question. And so much stronger than you, that you will have to accept our verdict without any possibility of appeal. Could anything be fairer?"”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Question

“Lately I have been asking for landscape [paintings] with animals, so I have devoted a lot of time this year sketching cows. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) In den laatsten tijd vraagt men mij steeds landschap met beesten zoodat ik mij van dit jaar veel op studie van koeijen heb toegelegd.
In a letter of Roelofs to P. verLoren van Themaat, 3 Sept, 1882; Haagsch Gemeente-archief / Municipal Archive of The Hague
1880's

Time, Animals, Painting

“We were a tiny redoubt of culture holding our own against the neighboring Huns of organized sports. I pretended to join the group disdain, but I knew in my heart it was already too late. After the two innings I had watched before leaving the house, baseball had reclaimed me. …Forty years is a long time to hold your breath, but I was back.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

" Forty Years http://www.slowtrains.com/vol7issue3/lewisvol7issue3.html" Slow Trains Vol.7, Issue 3 (2008) 2000-09

Sport, Time, Heart, Housing

“The significance of the Falklands War was enormous, both for Britain's self-confidence and for our standing in the world…We had come to be seen by both friends and enemies as a nation which lacked the will and the capability to defend its interests in peace, let alone in war. Victory in the Falklands changed that. Everywhere I went after the war, Britain's name meant something more than it had. The war also had real importance in relations between East and West: years later I was told by a Russian general that the Soviets had been firmly convinced that we would not fight for the Falklands, and that if we did fight we would lose. We proved them wrong on both counts, and they did not forget the fact.”

Margaret Thatcher book The Downing Street Years

The Downing Street Years (1993)

War, World, Peace, Confidence

“When Time who steals our years away
Shall steal our pleasures too,
The mem'ry of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Song, from Juvenile Poems.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pleasure, Time, Past, Joy

“…a reluctance to recognise that today's safety and comfort were bought fifty years ago by means which today's intelligentsia find unacceptable, and from which they wish to distance themselves.”

George MacDonald Fraser book Quartered Safe Out Here

Source: Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), p. xxiii-xxiv.

“The "Terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990)

“In all these years of recuperaion, I over-used one half of my body. So, when I did a short sprint on the beach, I just fell and couldn't get back on my feet again. In the bad time following I was helped by my two wonderful brothers, who got me into a hospital and assisted me in many ways, God bless them. As it turned out, the hip bones of the side of my body which had been overly stressed were severely damaged, and so I had a very hard time after that.”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

God, Way, Time, Help

“For to those who have not the means within themselves of a virtuous and happy life every age is burdensome; and, on the other hand, to those who seek all good from themselves nothing can seem evil that the laws of nature inevitably impose. To this class old age especially belongs, which all men wish to attain and yet reproach when attained; such is the inconsistency and perversity of Folly! They say that it stole upon them faster than they had expected. In the first place, who has forced them to form a mistaken judgement? For how much more rapidly does old age steal upon youth than youth upon childhood? And again, how much less burdensome would old age be to them if they were in their eight hundredth rather than in their eightieth year? In fact, no lapse of time, however long, once it had slipped away, could solace or soothe a foolish old age.”
Quibus enim nihil est in ipsis opis ad bene beateque vivendum, eis omnis aetas gravis est; qui autem omnia bona a se ipsi petunt, eis nihil potest malum videri quod naturae necessitas afferat. quo in genere est in primis senectus, quam ut adipiscantur omnes optant, eandem accusant adeptam; tanta est stultitiae inconstantia atque perversitas. obrepere aiunt eam citius quam putassent. primum quis coegit eos falsum putare? qui enim citius adulescentiae senectus quam pueritiae adulescentia obrepit? deinde qui minus gravis esset eis senectus, si octingentesimum annum agerent, quam si octogesimum? praeterita enim aetas quamvis longa, cum effluxisset, nulla consolatione permulcere posset stultam senectutem.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 4 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D4 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Life, Men, Youth, Age

“I was elected to be independent. I was elected because I owed no political debts. I was elected to “do the job,” and not to spend my first four years in office campaigning. I’ve kept that promise -- and that’s why we face the future with renewed optimism.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.gothamgazette.com/searchlight/2004.state.of.city.bloomberg.shtml
Why He Was Elected Mayor

Optimism, Future

“What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong.””

Philip Plait (1964) astronomer, skeptic

No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that. Skepticality http://www.skepticality.com/index.php ep. 52 http://www.skepticality.com/notes/sn_Ep52.php (15 May 2007) 23:11 - 24:46 Interviews

People, Religion, Boy, Study

“This commitment to end world hunger, and my music and story songs, are ways of dealing with the world as I see it. I'm playing 200 concerts per year-- half of them benefits-- all of them attempts at getting across the footlights to people I would enjoy spending time with in non-concert situations. And over the past 4 years of musical fun, millions of dollars have been raised for things I believe in. Telling stories of our time, building a lasting body of work, new songs, new records, new audiences, new challenges, and still that painfully exciting process of growth that can make one's life into a richly woven tapestry.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

All My Life's a Circle, Autobiographical statement on a concert program, circa 1980 http://harrychapin.com/articles/bio.shtml

Life, Hunger, People, World

“[T]he Islamic world is a source of danger and destruction is all too conceivable. Indeed, it’s been on display, in plain sight, for years… The jihadist threat is real, and it must, obviously, be fought and defeated. But that raises another problem—not a problem with Islam, but a problem with the West. We have lost our nerve. In recent years, the attitude of Barack Obama has prevailed over the spirit of Charlie Hebdo. The claims of sensitivity have trumped the attachment to freedom. Appeasement of jihad has supplanted the war on terror. Most fundamentally—let’s be honest—fear has overwhelmed courage. And so the American president has been happy to proclaim, as he did at the United Nations in September 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” He has been less willing to say that the future must not belong to those who kill in the name of the prophet of Islam… We face a crisis of Islam. We need to be clear-eyed about that. But we also face a crisis of the West. Only if we come to grips with that second crisis will this period of consequences turn out to be an occasion for renewal rather than another marker on the path to decadence.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, The Two Crises (2017)

War, World, Fear, Courage

“For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lily outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlow's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I will not seek
For names…”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Source: To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare (1618), Lines 27 - 33

Sport

“Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat's conquest of power.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“Right now I'm in Hollywood—I don't like Hollywood, it's not really my style. But I've found my own little niche here where it's not bad. It's one of those things where I've been on an extended work trip here for 2 years. I still technically live in Chicago and I'm dying to get back. That's one of the big things for me, I go back to Chicago when I want to hang out. I'm weirdly very proud of my city, and I hope, God willing, I die there.”

Patrick Stump (1984) American musician

AbsolutePunk.net, Patrick Stump, Part 2 - 10.13.08

God, Hope

“You hear people in restaurants competing with each other "I love you". "No, I love you". "Yeah, but I REALLY love you. I love pencils that you have sucked and thrown away ten years ago. I love your eyebrows and your ancestry and EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU! Just eat your food and let me love you, don't speak!" But what they don’t know, of course, at the time is that that dialogue is actually from a really bad science fiction film written by nature - really, what they're saying to one another is: "The race must continue, the race must continue! My vadudium is pointing at your phenungulator, the race must continue!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Like, Totally (2006)

Love, People, Food, Nature

“Vegan Bodybuilding is not only possible, it’s optimal. Within three years from first lifting weights properly and walking on a Bodybuilding stage as a novice, I had won Mr. Universe and become a Pro Bodybuilder. Steroids? Meat? Not a chance.”

Billy Simmonds (1980)

Interview with Living Vegan magazine (Autumn 2012); quoted in "Billy Simmonds" https://web.archive.org/web/20120708224928/http://www.treehugger.uproar.org.au/billy-simmonds/, Not Your Typical TreeHugger.

Universe, Chance

“June 1, 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president's attention. It's a national holiday, it's broadcast across the country, and I showed up at the stadium. My friends did not show up. I found myself alone, and I didn't know what to do. I was scared, but I knew very well that that particular day, I had to make a decision. Was I able to live as a coward, like everyone else, or was I going to make a stand? And when the president stood up to speak, I found myself on my feet shouting at the president, telling him to remember the post-election violence victims, to stop the corruption. And suddenly, out of nowhere, the police pounced on me like hungry lions. They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium, where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail. I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail, and that got me thinking. What was making me feel this way? My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did, and the images that I took were disturbing my life. The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans. Most Kenyans did not see the violence. It was a story to them. … That day in the stadium, I stood up as a smart coward. By that one action, I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward.”

Boniface Mwangi (1983) Kenyan photojournalist

The day I stood up alone

Life, Family, Way, Feeling

“In the years to come, I also hope that both sides (Taiwan and Mainland China) can work to facilitate policy communications, reinforce their economic cooperation, push ahead with cross-strait negotiations, accomplish more achievements beneficial to the public, expand their scope of amicable interactions, cement the ‘family bond’ between the people on both sides and jointly build a better home for Chinese.”

Zhang Zhijun (1953) Chinese politician

Zhang Zhijun (2014) cited in " Jiang says no ‘three noes’ set for Wang-Zhang talks http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/01/28/2003582310/2" on Taipei Times, 28 January 2014.

People, Family, Hope, Home

“For three years, nay for fifteen years, I have been preparing for this last year of football…I anticipate becoming the roughest, toughest all-around back yet to hit this conference.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to his parents before his senior season (January 9, 1939)

Football

“In the first two years this is a man [Clinton] who tried his best to balance the budget, to reform health care, to fight for gay rights, to support personal freedoms. Couldn’t those be considered doing the right things, evidence of true character?”

Bryant Gumbel (1948) American sportscaster

To David Maraniss, MSNBC’s InterNight, October 10, 1996. Real Video http://www.mediaresearch.org/rm/projects/99/gumbel8/segment1.ram

Health, Support, Freedom, Fight

“In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication, Decision

“It is time to employ fractal geometry and its associated subjects of chaos and nonlinear dynamics to study systems engineering methodology (SEM). Systematic codification of the former is barely 15 years old, while codification of the latter began 45 years ago… Fractal geometry and chaos theory can convey a new level of understanding to systems engineering and make it more effective”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

A.D. Hall III (1989) "The fractal architecture of the systems engineering method", in: Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on Volume 28, Issue 4, Nov 1998 Page(s):565 - 572

Understanding, Study, Time

“Manuel Mercado Acosta is an indio from the mountains of Durango. His father operated a mescal distillery before the revolutionaries drove him out. He met my mother while riding a motorcycle in El Paso. Juana Fierro Acosta is my mother. She could have been a singer in a Juarez cantina but instead decided to be Manuel’s wife because he had a slick mustache, a fast bike and promised to take her out of the slums across from the Rio Grande. She had only one demand in return for the two sons and three daughters she would bear him: “No handouts. No relief. I never want to be on welfare.” I doubt he really promised her anything in a very loud, clear voice. My father was a horsetrader even though he got rid of both the mustache and the bike when FDR drafted him, a wetback, into the U. S. Navy on June 22, 1943. He tried to get into the Marines, but when they found out he was a good swimmer and a non-citizen they put him in a sailor suit and made him drive a barge in Okinawa. We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in 100-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at 5:00 A. M. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 72.

Mountain, Business, Water, Reading

“I have to report that this motion picture is arguably the worst piece of cinematic crap I have ever experienced theatrically. Hyperbole, you wonder? I looked through my list of zero-star movies and couldn't find one entry (except the immortal Zombie vs. Mardi Gras, which was a straight-to-video release) that ranked as more difficult to endure. Words like abomination and travesty don't do this movie justice. Sitting through Freddy Got Fingered was one of the most depressing experiences in my 10 years of reviewing films. It's not even enjoyable on a campy level. It's just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad - Directed By Tom Green.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1485 of Freddy Got Fingered (2001). Zero star reviews

Justice, Star

“I have served the Government of China for many years, first the Emperor, and after that the Republican Government at Nanking. I have always tried to do my best; but I must have committed errors--- though I do not know what they were---or this misfortune would not have befallen me. I have lost face.”

Ma Shaowu (1874–1937) Chinese general

News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir, Peter Fleming, 1999, Northwestern University Press, Evanston Illinois, 0810160714, 327, 384, 2010-06-28 http://books.google.com/books?id=6C2aaB3f9P4C&pg=RA1-PA326&dq=ma+shao-wu+flemings&hl=en&ei=ufgXTPKWCIrMMtvMnaUL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=%20I%20have%20served%20the%20government%20of%20china%20for%20many%20years%2C%20first%20the%20Emperor%2C%20and%20after%20that%20the%20Republican%20Government%20at%20Nanking.&f=false,

Error

“We marched him to the turfy shack where he lived with his parents and while the youth sulked Petronius Longus put the whole moral issue in succinct terms to them: Ollia’s father was a legionary veteran who had served in Egypt and Syria for over twenty years until he left with double pay, three medals, and a diploma that made Ollia legitimate; he now ran a boxers’ training school where he was famous for his high-minded attitude and his fighters were notorious for their loyalty to him… The old fisherman was a toothless, hapless, faithless cove you would not trust too near you with a filleting knife, but whether from fear or simple cunning he co-operated eagerly. The lad agreed to marry the girl and since Silvia would never abandon Ollia here, we decided that the fisherboy had to come back with us to Rome. His relations looked impressed by this result. We accepted it as the best we could achieve.”

Lindsey Davis book Shadows in Bronze

Shadows in Bronze

Youth, Fear, School, Girl

“I have taught – until 10 years ago – for nearly 40 years, that is almost half of my life. And when I think that over – now afterwards -, I come to a surprising conclusion, namely that I did not teach arts as such, but philosophy and psychology of art.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Source: Homage to the square' (1964), A conversation with Josef Albers' (1970), p. 459

Life, Art, Thinking