1273 quotes found
"The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress. (2014 interview)"
"The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. (New York Review of Books, 2011)"
"It has been generally believed that only the complex numbers could legitimately be used as the ground field in discussing quantum-mechanical operators. Over the complex field, Frobenius' theorem is of course not valid; the only division algebra over the complex field is formed by the complex numbers themselves. However, Frobenius' theorem is relevant precisely because the appropriate ground field for much of quantum mechanics is real rather than complex."
"I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce."
"Thirty-one years ago [1948], Dick Feynman told me about his "sum over histories" version of quantum mechanics. "The electron does anything it likes," he said. "It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function." I said to him, "You're crazy." But he wasn't."
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles — this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."
"As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming."
"The bottom line for mathematicians is that the architecture has to be right. In all the mathematics that I did, the essential point was to find the right architecture. It's like building a bridge. Once the main lines of the structure are right, then the details miraculously fit. The problem is the overall design."
"Anyone who compares the bibliography with the reprinted papers will notice that mathematics and physics have not been given equal treatment. There is a strong bias in favor of mathematics. The bias arises from the fact that mathematical papers, provided that are correct and not trivial, have permanent value, whereas most papers in physics journals are ephemeral. For this reason, it is customary to publish complete collected works of mathematicians but only selected works of physicists."
"The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible."
"In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over."
"The biggest breakthrough in the next 50 years will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. We have been searching for it for 50 years and found nothing. That proves life is rarer than we hoped, but does not prove that the universe is lifeless. We are only now developing the tools to make our searches efficient and far-reaching, as optical and radio detection and data processing move forward."
"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models."
"I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems."
"All the books that I have seen about the science and the economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. … Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion."
"There’s very good news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought they were just big rocks … It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars, because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20 years, I would put my money on the asteroids."
"There is an enormous variety of things that we never dreamed of, like... black holes, s, quasars, all these unbelievably active goings-on in the universe... [I]n Aristotle's time the universe... was supposed to be quiescent, it was supposed to be perfect and peaceful, and nothing ever happened in the ; and that remained true... throughout all of the revolutions... It remained the general view of astronomers... through Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and everybody else... until just the last 30 years, and now we know it's not like that at all. In fact the universe is full of violent events, and fantastic strong gravitational fields, and collapsed objects, and huge outpourings of energy. ...The things we understand least are the quasars... the most violent and... energetic objects in the universe, and they're totally... mysterious... and... they're rather frequent; and nobody ever dreamed that they existed... [E]ven after they were found it took a long time before people took them seriously. Nature's imagination is always richer than ours."
"... the most important questions and insights and goals are unpredictable."
"There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use."
"If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives."
"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment."
"A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad."
"A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering."
"Science and religion are two human enterprises sharing many features. They share these features also with other enterprises such as art, literature and music. The most salient features of all these enterprises are discipline and diversity. Discipline to submerge the individual fantasy in a greater whole. Diversity to give scope to the infinite variety of human souls and temperaments. Without discipline there can be no greatness. Without diversity there can be no freedom. Greatness for the enterprise, freedom for the individual — these are the two themes, contrasting but not incompatible, that make up the history of science and the history of religion."
"An awareness of our smallness may help to redeem us from the arrogance which is the besetting sin of the scientists."
"Science is not a monolithic body of doctrine. Science is a culture, constantly growing and changing. The science of today has broken out of the molds of classical nineteenth-century science, just as the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock broke out of the molds of nineteenth century art. Science has as many competing styles as painting or poetry. The diversity of science also finds a parallel in the diversity of religion."
"There is no easy solution to the conflict between fundamentalist Christian dogma and the facts of biological evolution. I am not saying that the conflict could have been altogether avoided. I am saying only that the conflict was made more bitter and more damaging, both to religion and to science, by the dogmatic and self-righteousness of scientists. What was needed was a little more human charity, a little more willingness to listen rather than to lay down the law, a little more humility. Scientists stand in need of these Christian virtues just as much as preachers do."
"Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious."
"Euclid... gave his famous definition of a point: "A point is that which has no parts, or which has no magnitude." …A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry of Euclid. This is what one means when one says that a point is a mathematical abstraction. The question, What is a point? has no satisfactory answer. Euclid's definition certainly does not answer it. The right way to ask the question is: How does the concept of a point fit into the logical structure of Euclid's geometry? ...It cannot be answered by a definition."
"Imagine, if you can, four things that have very different sizes. First, the entire universe. Second, the planet Earth. Third, the nucleus of an atom. Fourth, a superstring. The step in size from each of these things to the next is roughly the same... twenty powers of ten...."
"What philosophical conclusions should we draw from the abstract style of the superstring theory? We might conclude, as Sir James Jeans concluded long ago, that the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a Pure Mathematician, and that if we work hard enough at mathematics we shall be able to read his mind. Or we might conclude that our pursuit of abstractions is leading us far away from those parts of the creation which are most interesting from a human point of view. It is too early yet to come to conclusions."
"Fifty years ago Kurt Gödel... proved that the world of pure mathematics is inexhaustible. … I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as the notion of a formal decision process for all mathematics. If it should turn out that the whole of physical reality can be described by a finite set of equations, I would be disappointed, I would feel that the Creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination."
"We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations."
"... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...If I remember correctly what Hartshorne said, the main tenant ...is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I merely find ...[this doctrine] congenial, and consistent with common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond our comprehension. ...either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at... present... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. If... left behind, it is an end. If we keep growing, it is a beginning."
"The expansion of life, moving out from Earth into its inheritance, is an even greater theme than the expansion of England across the Atlantic. As Hakluyt wrote that there is under our noses the great and ample country of Virginia, I am saying that there is under our noses the territory of nine planets, forty moons, ten thousand asteroids and a trillion comets."
"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
"Human beings are so constituted that we take for granted the fact that a direct awareness of our past selves is preserved... We take for granted the durability of the individual self. ...But ...the preservation of memories ...is as great an exercise in magic as the transfer of memories from the dead to the living. ...How the magic works ...is still a dark mystery. ...When once the technology exists to read and write memories from one mind to another, the age of mental exploration will begin in earnest. ...[W]e will look at nature directly through the eyes of the elephant, the eagle and the whale. We will... feel in our own minds the pride of the peacock and the wrath of the lion. That magic is no greater than the magic that enables me to see the rocking horse through the eyes of the child who rode it sixty years ago."
"I am neither a saint nor a theologian. To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs. We have seen terrible wars and terrible persecutions conducted in the name of religion. We have also seen large numbers of people inspired by religion to lives of heroic virtue, bringing education and medical care to the poor, helping to abolish slavery and spread peace among nations. Religion amplifies the good and evil tendencies of individual souls. Religion will always remain a powerful force in the history of our species. To me, the meaning of progress in religion is simply this, that as we move from the past to the future the good works inspired by religion should more and more prevail over the evil."
"One of the great but less famous heroes of World War Two was Andre Trocme, the Protestant pastor of the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in France, which sheltered and saved the lives of five thousand Jews under the noses of the Gestapo. Forty years later Pierre Sauvage, one of the Jews who was saved, recorded the story of the village in a magnificent documentary film with the title, "Weapons of the Spirit". The villagers proved that civil disobedience and passive resistance could be effective weapons, even against Hitler. Their religion gave them the courage and the discipline to stand firm. Progress in religion means that, as time goes on, religion more and more takes the side of the victims against the oppressors."
"Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too."
"I am content to be one of the multitude of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty. Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe."
"My personal theology is described in the Gifford lectures that I gave at Aberdeen in Scotland in 1985, published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence."
"I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity."
"The principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth. This is the confession of faith of a scientific heretic. Perhaps I may claim as evidence for progress in religion the fact that we no longer burn heretics."
"All through our history, we have been changing the world with our technology. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and grey. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Grey technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers. Civilization began with green technology, with agriculture and animal-breeding, ten thousand years ago. Then, beginning about three thousand years ago, grey technology became dominant, with mining and metallurgy and machinery. For the last five hundred years, grey technology has been racing ahead and has given birth to the modern world of cities and factories and supermarkets. The dominance of grey technology is now coming to an end."
"Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job."
"The gospel of St. Matthew told of the angry Jesus driving the merchants and money-changers out of the temple, knocking over the tables of the money-changers and spilling their coins on the floor. Jesus was not opposed to capitalism and the profit motive, so long as economic activities were carried on outside the temple. In the parable of the talents, he praises the servant who used his master's money to make a profitable investment, and condemns the servant who was too timid to invest. But he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop."
"In the time of Jesus and for many centuries afterwards, there was a free market in human bodies. The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God's temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes. Let us hope that we can reach a consensus on this question without fighting another civil war."
"Like all the new technologies that have arisen from scientific knowledge, biotechnology is a tool that can be used either for good or for evil purposes. The role of ethics is to strengthen the good and avoid the evil."
"Unfortunately a large number of people in many countries are strongly opposed to green technology, for reasons having little to do with the real dangers. It is important to treat the opponents with respect, to pay attention to their fears, to go gently into the new world of green technology so that neither human dignity nor religious conviction is violated. If we can go gently, we have a good chance of achieving within a hundred years the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice that green technology brings within our reach."
"I have five minutes left to give you a message to take home. The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of modern science, almost four hundred years ago. Bacon was the smartest man of his time, with the possible exception of William Shakespeare."
"I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature."
"To talk about the end of science is just as foolish as to talk about the end of religion. Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight. Science and religion are both destined to grow and change in the millennia that lie ahead of us, perhaps solving some old mysteries, certainly discovering new mysteries of which we yet have no inkling."
"After sketching his program for the scientific revolution that he foresaw, Bacon ends his account with a prayer: "Humbly we pray that this mind may be steadfast in us, and that through these our hands, and the hands of others to whom thou shalt give the same spirit, thou wilt vouchsafe to endow the human family with new mercies". That is still a good prayer for all of us as we begin the twenty-first century."
"Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect."
"Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions."
"In the little town of Princeton where I live, we have more than twenty churches and at least one synagogue, providing different forms of worship and belief for different kinds of people. They do more than any other organizations in the town to hold the community together. Within this community of people, held together by religious traditions of human brotherhood and sharing of burdens, a smaller community of professional scientists also flourishes."
"The great question for our time is, how to make sure that the continuing scientific revolution brings benefits to everybody rather than widening the gap between rich and poor. To lift up poor countries, and poor people in rich countries, from poverty, to give them a chance of a decent life, technology is not enough. Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich."
"Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmental and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world. That is my vision, and it is the same vision that inspired Francis Bacon four hundred years ago, when he prayed that through science God would "endow the human family with new mercies"."
"There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it. And what is true of science is true of poetry. ... Poetry and science are gifts given to all of humanity."
"The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science."
"I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life."
"Over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over a time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried-up ponds onto the alien and hostile land."
"Progress in science is often built on wrong theories that are later corrected. It is better to be wrong than to be vague."
"Science as subversion has a long history. ... Davis and Sakharov belong to an old tradition in science that goes all the way back to the rebels Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century, to Galileo and Giordano Bruno in the seventeenth and sixteenth. If science ceases to be a rebellion against authority, then it does not deserve the talents of our brightest children. ... We should try to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice."
"Gödel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas."
"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."
"Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions... that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. ... In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein ... was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. ... Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although... they were his most important contribution to science. ... Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way."
"The two great conceptual revolutions of twentieth-century science, the overturning of classical physics by Werner Heisenberg and the overturning of the foundations of mathematics by Kurt Gödel, occurred within six years of each other within the narrow boundaries of German-speaking Europe. ... A study of the historical background of German intellectual life in the 1920s reveals strong links between them. Physicists and mathematicians were exposed simultaneously to external influences that pushed them along parallel paths. ... Two people who came early and strongly under the influence of Spengler's philosophy were the mathematician Hermann Weyl and the physicist Erwin Schrödinger. ... Weyl and Schrödinger agreed with Spengler that the coming revolution would sweep away the principle of physical causality. The erstwhile revolutionaries David Hilbert and Albert Einstein found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defenders of the status quo, Hilbert defending the primacy of formal logic in the foundations of mathematics, Einstein defending the primacy of causality in physics. In the short run, Hilbert and Einstein were defeated and the Spenglerian ideology of revolution triumphed, both in physics and in mathematics. Heisenberg discovered the true limits of causality in atomic processes, and Gödel discovered the limits of formal deduction and proof in mathematics. And, as often happens in the history of intellectual revolutions, the achievement of revolutionary goals destroyed the revolutionary ideology that gave them birth. The visions of Spengler, having served their purpose, rapidly became irrelevant."
"Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode."
"Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. ... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium ... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay ... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. ... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics."
"Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies ... would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929 ... [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator."
"Astronomers have so far escaped the extreme specialization that has overtaken physicists. Telescopes are big, but they are not as complicated as accelerators. Observations with a big telescope can be carried out in hours rather than years."
"Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery waiting to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than the stuff that we can see."
"When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. ... Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision."
"It is a curious accident of history that the Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract qualities and relationships of gods and humans. ... The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian."
"It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions."
"It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like Polkinghorne, than to be a serious Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicisit Abdus Salam. Salam happily proclaimed his Muslim faith but did not feel any need to write books about it. For Salam, the idea of a conflict between his faith and his science was ludicrous. Muslim faith has nothing to do with science. But Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously.."
"The common root of modern science and Christian theology was Greek philosophy. The historical accident that caused the Christian religion to become heavily theological was the fact that Jesus was born in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire at the time when the prevailing culture was profoundly Greek."
"I had the good luck a few years ago to visit the archeological site of Zippori in Israel ... I could see here displayed the Greek culture that Jesus decisively rejected, the same Greek culture that infiltrated the Christian religion soon after his death and has dominated Christianity ever since."
"Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. ... Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. ... As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. ... The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton ... I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working."
"Mr Dyson is absolutely unusual in his ability and accomplishments. I can say without reservation that he is the best I have ever had or observed."
"When Freeman Dyson, the physicist, greeted John Forbes Nash, Jr. at the Institute for Advanced Study one day in the early 1990s, he hardly expected a response. A mathematics legend in his twenties, Nash had suffered for decades from a devastating mental illness. A mute, ghost-like figure who scrawled mysterious messages on blackboards and occupied himself with numerological calculations, he was known around Princeton only as “the Phantom.” To Dyson’s astonishment, Nash replied. He’d seen Dyson’s daughter, an authority on computers, on the news, he said. “It was beautiful,” recalled Dyson. “Slowly, he just somehow woke up.”"
"Freeman Dyson’s winning the took many people by surprise, including Dyson... the Templeton Foundation gave its... prize for "progress in religion"... In receiving a million dollars, Dyson may have lost his amateur status as a theologian. ...In Dyson's acceptance speech he sounded the themes... that good works... are better than volumes of theology; that both science and religion... grapple with mysteries; that God and mind... are one and actively present simultaneously at the microscopic level of atoms, at the macroscopic level of human beings, and at the cosmic level of the universe... that green technology... is reexerting its primacy over gray technology... machines and fossil fuels; that the marketing of high-tech and the capitalist system... must be tempered by ethics; that this attention to social justice will... help alleviate human misery and enlarge the global economy; and that we must utilize both... science and religion... Dyson should probably be placed somewhere between a pantheist and a deist whose God is a kind of meta-scientific, ."
"Many people know of the mathematician but not the engineer. Some had read of Dyson the physicist but not Dyson the diplomat. They had read Disturbing the Universe but not '. They might have known about Orion and but not about Socinus. ...Dyson had not won the... Nobel for... explaining way the infinities... when you get closer and closer to the electron... relying on an artful redefinition of the mass and charge... But he had won ...[the Templeton prize] for explaining the disparities that arise when you use science to explain the whole universe, physical and moral. Dyson's attempt at smoothing over potential conflicts between science and religion had swept the apparent incompatibility not under the carpet but out beyond the edge of the universe."
"You'll have received an application from Mr Freeman Dyson to come to work with you as a graduate student. I hope that you will accept him. Although he is only 23 he is in my view the best mathematician in England."
"Freeman’s gift? … It’s cosmic. He is able to see more interconnections between more things than almost anybody. He sees the interrelationships, whether it’s in some microscopic physical process or in a big complicated machine like Orion. He has been, from the time he was in his teens, capable of understanding essentially anything that he’s interested in. He’s the most intelligent person I know."
"Man occupies a special place in the Cartesian scheme. He alone is endowed with mind. Descartes believed that animals did not possess one, that they were simply extremely complicated automatons. Other thinkers have rejected this point of view and proposed to endow all matter in the universe — living or inanimate — with consciousness. This "panpsychism" has been promoted by, among others, Teilhard de Chardin and, more recently by the British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, who holds that mind is present in every particle of matter."
"Generally speaking, the significance of the indirect results may very often be of more importance than the significance of direct ones. And since we are able to trace how the energy of love transforms itself into instincts, ideas, creative forces on different planes of life; into symbols of art, song, music, poetry; so can we easily imagine how the same energy may transform itself into a higher order of intuition, into a higher consciousness which will reveal to us a marvelous and mysterious world. In all living nature (and perhaps also in that which we consider as dead) love is the motive force which drives the creative activity in the most diverse directions."
"Two things can get people to make efforts: if people want to get something, or if they want to get rid of something. Only, in ordinary conditions, without knowledge, people do not know what they can get rid of or what they can gain."
"It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning."
"I Saw the Man. His figure reached from earth to heaven and was clad in a purple mantle. He stood deep in foliage and flowers and his head, on which was the head-band of an initiate, seemed to disappear mysteriously in infinity. Before him on a cube-shaped altar were four symbols of magic — the sceptre, the cup, the sword and the pentacle. His right hand pointed to heaven, his left to earth. Under his mantle he wore a white tunic girded with a serpent swallowing its tail. His face was luminous and serene, and, when his eyes met mine, I felt that he saw most intimate recesses of my soul. I saw myself reflected in him as in a mirror and in his eyes I seemed to look upon myself. And I heard a voice saying: —"Look, this is the Great Magician!"
"With his hands he unites heaven and earth, and the four elements that form the world are controlled by him. The four symbols before him are the four letters of the name of God, the signs of the four elements, fire, water, air, earth." I trembled before the depth of the mysteries A touched... The words I heard seemed to be littered by the Great Magician himself, and it was as though he spoke in me. I was in deep trepidation and at moment I felt there was nothing, before me except the blue sky; but within me a window opened through which I could see unearthly things. and hear unearthly words."
"And I saw another man. Tired and lame he dragged himself along the dusty road, across the deserted plain under the scorching rays of the sun. He glanced sidelong with foolish, staring eyes, a half smile, half leer on his face; he knew not where he went, but was absorbed in his chimerical dreams which ran constantly in the same circle. His fool's cap was put on wrong side front, his garments were torn in the back; a wild lynx with glowing eyes sprang upon him from behind a rock and buried her teeth in his flesh. He stumbled, nearly fell, but continued to drag himself along, all the time holding on his shoulder a bag containing useless things, which he, in his stupidity, carried wherever he went. Before him a crevice crossed the road and a deep precipice awaited the foolish wanderer. Then a huge crocodile with open mouth crawled out of the precipice. And I heard the voice say:-- "Look! This is the same man." I felt my head whirl."
""What has he in the bag?" I inquired, not knowing why I asked. And after a long silence the voice replied: "The four magic symbols, the sceptre, the cup, the sword and the pentacle. The fool always carries them, although he has long since forgotten what they mean. Nevertheless they belong to him, even though he does not know their use. The symbols have not lost their power, they retain it in themselves."
"When I lifted the first veil and entered the outer court of the Temple of Initiation, I saw in half darkness the figure of a woman sitting on a high throne between two pillars of the temple, one white, and one black. Mystery emanated from her and was about her. Sacred symbols shone on her green dress; on her head was a golden tiara surmounted by a two-horned moon; on her knees she held two crossed keys and an open book. Between the two pillars behind the woman hung another veil all embroidered with green leaves and fruit of pomegranate. And a voice said: "To enter the Temple one must lift the second veil and pass between the two pillars. And to pass thus, one must obtain possession of the keys, read the book and understand the symbols. Are you able to do this?" "I would like to be able," I said."
"Then the woman turned her face to me and looked into my eyes without speaking. And through me passed a thrill, mysterious and penetrating like a golden wave; tones vibrated in my brain, a flame was in my heart, and I understood that she spoke to me, saying without words: "This is the Hall of Wisdom. No one can reveal it, no one can hide it. Like a flower it must grow and bloom in thy soul. If thou wouldst plant the seed of this flower in thy soul — learn to discern the real from the false. Listen only to the Voice that is soundless... Look only on that which is invisible, and remember that in thee thyself, is the Temple and the gate to it, and the mystery, and the initiation.""
"An unexpected vision appeared to me. A circle not unlike a wreath woven from rainbow and lightnings, whirled from heaven to earth with a stupendous, velocity, blinding me by its brilliance. And amidst this light and fire I heard music and soft singing, thunderclaps and the roar of a tempest, the rumble of falling mountains and earthquakes. The circle whirled with a terrifying noise, touching the sun and the earth, and, in the centre of it I saw the naked, dancing figure of a beautiful young woman, enveloped by a light, transparent scarf, in her hand she held a magic wand. Presently the four apocalyptical beasts began to appear on the edges of the circle; one with the face of a lion, another with the face of a man, the third, of an eagle and the fourth, of a bull."
"The vision disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. A weird silence fell on me. "What does it mean?" I asked in wonder. "It is the image of the world," the voice said, "but it can be understood only after the Temple has been entered. This is a vision of the world in the circle of Time, amidst the four principles. But thou seest differently because thou seest the world outside thyself. Learn to see it in thyself and thou wilt understand the infinite essence, hidden in all illusory forms. Understand that the world which thou knowest is only one of the aspects of the infinite world, and things and phenomena are merely hierolgyphics of deeper ideas.""
"When I possessed the keys, read the book and understood the symbols, I was permitted to lift the curtain of the Temple and enter. its inner sanctum. And there I beheld a Woman with a crown of gold and a purple mantle. She held a sword in one hand and scales in the other. I trembled with awe at her appearance, which was deep and mysterious, and drew me like an abyss. "You see Truth," said the voice. "On these scales everything is weighed. This sword is always raised to guard justice, and nothing can escape it." "But why do you avert your eyes from the scales and the sword? They will remove the last illusions. How could you live on earth without these illusions? "You wished to see Truth and now you behold it! But remember what happens to the mortal who beholds a Goddess!""
"And then I saw a man in terrible suffering, hung by one leg, head downward, to a high tree. And I heard the voice: — "Look! This is a man who saw Truth. Suffering awaits the man on earth, who finds the way to eternity and to the understanding of the Endless. "He is still a man, but he already knows much of what is inaccessible even to Gods. And the incommensurableness of the small and the great in his soul constitutes his pain and his golgotha. "In his own soul appears the gallows on which he hangs in suffering, feeling that he is indeed inverted. "He chose this way himself. "For this he went over a long road from trial to trial, from initiation to initiation, through failures and falls. "And now he has found Truth and knows himself. "He knows that it is he who stands before an altar with magic symbols, and reaches from earth to heaven; that he also walks on a dusty road under a scorching sun to a precipice where a crocodile awaits him; that he dwells with his mate in paradise under the shadow of a blessing genius; that he is chained to a black cube under the shadow of deceit; that he stands as a victor for a moment in an illusionary chariot drawn by sphinxes; and that with a lantern in bright sunshine, he seeks for Truth in a desert. "Now he has found Her.""
"The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know. Therefore, desiring to know anything, we shall before all else determine WHAT we accept as given, and WHAT as demanding definition and proof; that is, determine WHAT we know already, and WHAT we wish to know. In relation to the knowledge of the world and of ourselves, the conditions would be ideal could we venture to accept nothing as given, and count all as demanding definition and proof. In other words, it would be best to assume that we know nothing, and make this our point of departure. But unfortunately such conditions are impossible to create. Knowledge must start from some foundation, something must be recognized as known; otherwise we shall be obliged always to define one unknown by means of another."
"We know that with the very first awakening of knowledge, man is confronted with two obvious facts: The existence of the world in which he lives; and the existence of psychic life in himself. Neither of these can he prove or disprove, but they are facts: they constitute reality for him. It is possible to meditate upon the mutual correlation of these two facts. It is possible to try to reduce them to one; that is, to regard the psychic or inner world as a part, reflection, or function of the world, or the world as a part, reflection, or function of that inner world. But such a procedure constitutes a departure from facts, and all such considerations of the world and of the self, to the ordinary non-philosophical mind, will not have the character of obviousness. On the contrary the sole obvious fact remains the antithesis of I and Not-I — our inner psychic life and the outer world."
"The most precise and complete formulation of the law of higher logic I find in the writing of Plotinus, in his On Intelligible Beauty. I shall quote this passage in the succeeding chapter. I have called this system of higher logic Tertium Organum because for us it is the third canon — third instrument — of thought after those of Aristotle and Bacon. The first was Organon, the second, Novum Organum. But the third existed earlier than the first. Man, master of this instrument, of this key, may open the door of the world of causes without fear."
"The axioms which Tertium Organum embraces cannot be formulated in our language. If we attempt to formulate them in spite of this, they will produce the impression of absurdities. Taking the axioms of Aristotle as a model, we may express the principal axiom of the new logic in our poor earthly language in the following manner:"
"The logical formula: A is both A and Not-A, corresponds to the mathematical formula: A magnitude can be greater or less than itself. The absurdity of both these propositions shows that they cannot refer to our world. Of course absurdity, as such, is indeed not an index of the attributes of noumena, but the attributes of noumena will certainly be expressed in what are absurdities to us. To hope to find in the world of causes anything logical from our standpoint is just as useless as to think that the world of things can exist in accordance with the laws of a world of shadows or stereometry according to the laws of planimetry. To master the fundamental principles of higher logic means to master the fundamentals of the understanding of a space of higher dimensions, or of the world of the wondrous. In order to approach to a clear understanding of the relations of the multi-dimensional world, we must free ourselves from all the "idols" of our world, as Bacon calls them, i.e., from all obstacles to correct receptivity and reasoning. Then we shall have taken the most important step toward an inner affinity with the world of the wondrous."
"Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely "critical literature" or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals."
"Existing criminology is insufficient to isolate barbarism. It is insufficient because the idea of "crime" in existing criminology is artificial, for what is called crime is really an infringement of "existing laws", whereas "laws" are very often a manifestation of barbarism and violence. Such are the prohibiting laws of different kinds which abound in modern life. The number of these laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. On the other hand, unquestionable crimes escape the field of vision of criminology, either because they have not recognized the form of crime or because they surpass a certain scale. In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity. This limitation of the field of vision of criminology together with the absence of an exact and permanent definition of the concept of crime is one of the chief characteristics of our culture."
"Possibly the most interesting first impression of my life came from the world of dreams."
"There exist moments in life, separated by long intervals of time, but linked together by their inner content and by a certain singular sensation peculiar to them. Several such moments always recur to my mind together, and I feel then that it is these that have determined the chief trend of my life."
"Humanity in the face of the idea of hidden knowledge reminds one of the people in fairy-tales who are promised by some goddess, fairy or magician that they will be given whatever they want on condition that they say exactly what they want."
"Our ancestors were very rich and eminent people, and they left us an enormous inheritance, which we have completely forgotten, especially since the time when we began to consider ourselves the descendants of a monkey."
"The problem of Eternity, of which the face of the Sphinx speaks, takes us into the realm of the impossible. Even the problem of Time is simple in comparison with the problem of Eternity."
"Hints towards the solution of the problem of Eternity can be found in the various symbols and allegories of ancient religions and in some of the modern as well as ancient philosophies."
"I felt that on a basis of a "search for the miraculous" it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying."
"When a man begins to know himself a little he will see in himself many things that are bound to horrify him. So long as a man is not horrified at himself he knows nothing about himself."
"If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no 'friction,' no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole."
"The greatest barrier to consciousness is the belief that one is already conscious."
"I've found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard new things: that is things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new."
"People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has."
"Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words "conscious" or "consciousness" in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means "consciousness" in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness."
"In naming his book Tertium Organum Ouspensky reveals at a stroke that astounding audacity which characterizes his thought throughout — an audacity which we are accustomed to associate with the Russian mind in all its phases. Such a title says, in effect: "Here is a book which will reorganize all knowledge. The Organon of Aristotle formulated the laws under which the subject thinks; the Novum Organum of Bacon, the laws under which the object may be known; but The Third Canon of Thought existed before these two, and ignorance of its laws does not justify their violation. Tertium Organum shall guide and govern human thought henceforth." How passing strange, in this era of negative thinking, of timid philosophizing, does such a challenge sound!"
"No man can certainly know, or ought to conclude, concerning himself or others, as long as they live, that the season of grace is quite over with them. As we can conceive no rule God hath set to Himself to proceed by, in ordinary cases of this nature; so nor is there any He hath set unto us to judge by, in this case. It were to no purpose, and could be of no use to men to know so much; therefore it were unreasonable to expect God should have settled and declared any rule, by which they might come to the knowledge of it."
"Tho none ought to conclude that their day or season of grace is quite expired, yet they ought to deeply apprehend the danger, lest it should expire before their necessary work be done and their peace made. For tho it can be of no use for them to know the former, and therefore they have no means appointed them by which to know it, 'tis of great use to apprehend the latter; and they have sufficient ground for the apprehension."
"Omnium gentium unus homo, uarium nomen est, una anima, uaria uox, unus spiritus, uarius sonus, propria cuique genti loquella, sed loquellae materia communis."
"Veritas autem docendo persuadet non suadendo docet."
"Nihil veritas erubescit"
"Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est."
"Certum est, quia impossibile."
"De calcaria in carbonarium."
"Omnia periclitabuntur aliter accipi quam sunt, et amittere quod sunt dum aliter accipiuntur, si aliter quam sunt cognominantur. Fides nominum salus est proprietatum."
"Why lean upon a blind guide, if you have eyes of your own? Why be clothed by one who is naked, if you have put on Christ? Why use the shield of another, when the apostle gives you armour of your own? It would be better for him to learn from you to acknowledge the resurrection of the flesh, than for you from him to deny it; because if Christians must needs deny it, it would be sufficient if they did so from their own knowledge, without any instruction from the ignorant multitude."
"Qui fugiebat, rursus sibi proeliabitur."
"Nec alii obest aut prodest alterius religio."
"Nec religionis est cogere religionem"
"The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare to marriage."
"But the Christian verity has distinctly declared this principle, “God is not, if He is not one;” because we more properly believe that that has no existence which is not as it ought to be."
"But this argument you will try to shake with an objection from the name of God, by alleging that that name is a vague one, and applied to other beings also; as it is written, “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; He judgeth among the gods.” And again, “I have said, Ye are gods.”"
"In the first place, how arrogantly do the Marcionites build up their stupid system, bringing forward a new god, as if we were ashamed of the old one! So schoolboys are proud of their new shoes, but their old master beats their strutting vanity out of them."
"What indeed tended so greatly to the knowledge of himself, as his appearing in the humiliation of the flesh,—a degradation all the lower indeed if the flesh were only illusory? For it was all the more shameful if he, who brought on himself the Creator’s curse by hanging on a tree, only pretended the assumption of a bodily substance."
"Finally, take a circuit round your own self; survey man within and without. Even this handiwork of our God will be pleasing to you, inasmuch as your own lord, that better god, loved it so well, and for your sake was at the pains of descending from the third heaven to these poverty-stricken elements, and for the same reason was actually crucified in this sorry apartment of the Creator."
"Then, inasmuch as He too has fabricated a world out of some underlying material which is unbegotten, and unmade, and contemporaneous with God, just as Marcion holds of the Creator, you reduce this likewise to the dignity of that local space which has enclosed two gods, both God and matter."
"Digna enim deo probabunt deum. Nos definimus deum primo natura cognoscendum, deinde doctrina recognoscendum, natura ex operibus, doctrina ex praedicationibus."
"Infirma commendatio est quae de alterius destructione fulcitur."
"Itaque et ego vanitatem vanitate depellam."
"Cum ergo spiritus Dei descendit, indiuidua patientia comitatur eum."
"Quippe res dei ratio quia deus omnium conditor nihil non ratione providit disposuit ordinavit, nihil [enim] non ratione tractari intellegique voluit. [3] Igitur ignorantes quique deum rem quoque eius ignorent necesse est quia nullius omnino thesaurus extraneis patet. Itaque universam vitae conversationem sine gubernaculo rationis transfretantes inminentem saeculo procellam evitare non norunt."
"This power and disposition of the Divine Intelligence is set forth also in the Scriptures under the name of Σοφία, Wisdom; for what can be better entitled to the name of Wisdom than the Reason or the Word of God? Listen therefore to Wisdom herself, constituted in the character of a Second Person: “At the first the Lord created me as the beginning of His ways, with a view to His own works, before He made the earth, before the mountains were settled; moreover, before all the hills did He beget me;” that is to say, He created and generated me in His own intelligence. Then, again, observe the distinction between them implied in the companionship of Wisdom with the Lord. “When He prepared the heaven,” says Wisdom, “I was present with Him; and when He made His strong places upon the winds, which are the clouds above; and when He secured the fountains, (and all things) which are beneath the sky, I was by, arranging all things with Him; I was by, in whom He delighted; and daily, too, did I rejoice in His presence.” Now, as soon as it pleased God to put forth into their respective substances and forms the things which He had planned and ordered within Himself, in conjunction with His Wisdom’s Reason and Word, He first put forth the Word Himself, having within Him His own inseparable Reason and Wisdom, in order that all things might be made through Him through whom they had been planned and disposed, yea, and already made, so far forth as (they were) in the mind and intelligence of God. This, however, was still wanting to them, that they should also be openly known, and kept permanently in their proper forms and substances."
"Qui si ipse deus est secundum Ioannem - Deus erat sermo - habes duos, alium dicentem ut fiat, alium facientem. Alium autem quomodo accipere debeas iam professus sum, personae non substantiae nomine, ad distinctionem non ad divisionem."
"Ergo, inquis, si deus dixit et deus fecit, si alius deus dixit et alius fecit, duo dii praedicantur. Si tam durus es, puta interim. Et ut adhuc amplius hoc putes, accipe et in psalmo duos deos dictos: Thronus tuus, deus, in aevum, virga regni tui; dilexisti iustitiam et odisti iniquitatem, propterea unxit te deus, deus tuus."
"But I find in Scripture the name Lord also applied to them Both: “The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit Thou on my right hand.” And Isaiah says this: “Lord, who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” Now he would most certainly have said Thine Arm, if he had not wished us to understand that the Father is Lord, and the Son also is Lord. A much more ancient testimony we have also in Genesis: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” Now, either deny that this is Scripture; or else (let me ask) what sort of man you are, that you do not think words ought to be taken and understood in the sense in which they are written, especially when they are not expressed in allegories and parables, but in determinate and simple declarations?"
"Igitur unus deus pater, et absque eo alius non est: quod ipse inferens non filium negat sed alium deum: ceterum alius a patre filius non est."
"Si filium nolunt secundum a patre reputari ne secundus duos faciat deos dici, ostendimus etiam duos deos in scriptura relatos et duos dominos: et tamen ne de isto scandalizentur, rationem reddimus qua dei non duo dicantur nec domini sed qua pater et filius duo, et hoc non ex separatione substantiae sed ex dispositione, cum individuum et inseparatum filium a patre pronuntiamus, nec statu sed gradu alium, qui etsi deus dicatur quando nominatur singularis, non ideo duos deos faciat sed unum, hoc ipso quod et deus ex unitate patris vocari habeat."
"Igitur benedicti, quos gratia dei expectat, cum de illo sanctissimo lavacro novi natalis ascenditis et primas manus apud matrem cum fratribus aperitis, petite de patre, petite de domino, peculia gratiae, distributiones charismatum subiacere. Petite et accipietis, inquit. Quaesistis enim et invenistis, pulsastis et apertum est vobis. Tantum oro, ut cum petitis etiam Tertulliani peccatoris memineritis."
"Notorious, too, are the dealings of heretics with swarms of magicians and charlatans and astrologers and philosophers — all, of course, devotees of speculation. You can judge the quality of their faith from the way they behave. Discipline is an index to doctrine."
"What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? (Quid ergo Athenae Hierosolymis?)"
"[S]ome men are very bad, and some very good; but yet the souls of all form but one genus: even in the worst there is something good, and in the best there is something bad. ... Just as no soul is without sin, so neither is any soul without seeds of good."
"I now inquire into your opinion, (to see) from what source you usurp this right to “the Church.”If, because the Lord has said to Peter, “Upon this rock will I build My Church,” “to thee have I given the keys of the heavenly kingdom;” or, “Whatsoever thou shalt have bound or loosed in earth, shall be bound or loosed in the heavens,” you therefore presume that the power of binding and loosing has derived to you, that is, to every Church akin to Peter, what sort of man are you, subverting and wholly changing the manifest intention of the Lord, conferring (as that intention did) this (gift) personally upon Peter? “On thee,” He says, “will I build My Church;” and, “I will give to thee the keys,” not to the Church; and, “Whatsoever thou shalt have loosed or bound,” not what they shall have loosed or bound."
"For the very Church itself is, properly and principally, the Spirit Himself, in whom is the Trinity of the One Divinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (The Spirit) combines that Church which the Lord has made to consist in “three.” And thus, from that time forward, every number (of persons) who may have combined together into this faith is accounted “a Church,” from the Author and Consecrator (of the Church). And accordingly “the Church,” it is true, will forgive sins: but (it will be) the Church of the Spirit, by means of a spiritual man; not the Church which consists of a number of bishops. For the right and arbitrament is the Lord’s, not the servant’s; God’s Himself, not the priest’s."
"O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae"
"Fiunt non nascuntur Christiani"
"Even when the ray is shot from the sun, it is still part of the parent mass; the sun will still be in the ray, because it is a ray of the sun—there is no division of substance, but merely an extension. Thus Christ is Spirit of Spirit, and God of God, as light of light is kindled."
"Esterni sumus, & vestra omnia implevimus, Vrbes, Insulas, Castella, Municipia, Conciliabula, Castra ipsa, Tribus, Decurias, palatium, Senatum, Forum, sola vobis relinquimus Templa."
"In pursuit of gain, men have begun to consider their violence an article to be bought and sold."
"We [Christians] have no pressing inducement to take part in your public meetings; nor is there anything more entirely foreign to us than affairs of state. We acknowledge one all-embracing commonwealth—the world."
"We renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground."
"Vide, inquiunt, ut invicem se diligant; ipsi enim invicem oderunt: et ut pro alterutro mori sint parati; ipsi enim ad occidendum alterutrum paratiores erunt."
"Neque enim Brachmanae aut Indorum gymnosophistae sumus, silvicolae et exules vitae. Meminimus gratiam debere nos deo domino creatori; nullum fructum operum eius repudiamus, plane temperamus, ne[c] ultra modum aut perperam utamur. Itaque non sine foro, non sine macello, non sine balneis tabernis officinis stabulis nundinis vestris ceterisque commerciis cohabitamus in hoc saeculo."
"Plures efficimur, quoties metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis christianorum."
"For this fact—that Gentiles are admissible to God’s Law—is enough to prevent Israel from priding himself on the notion that “the Gentiles are accounted as a little drop of a bucket,” or else as “dust out of a threshing-floor:” although we have God Himself as an adequate engager and faithful promiser, in that He promised to Abraham that “in his seed should be blest all nations of the earth;” and that out of the womb of Rebecca “two peoples and two nations were about to proceed,”—of course those of the Jews, that is, of Israel; and of the Gentiles, that is ours. Each, then, was called a people and a nation; lest, from the nuncupative appellation, any should dare to claim for himself the privilege of grace. For God ordained “two peoples and two nations” as about to proceed out of the womb of one woman: nor did grace make distinction in the nuncupative appellation, but in the order of birth; to the effect that, which ever was to be prior in proceeding from the womb, should be subjected to “the less,” that is, the posterior. For thus unto Rebecca did God speak: “Two nations are in thy womb, and two peoples shall be divided from thy bowels; and people shall overcome people, and the greater shall serve the less.” Accordingly, since the people or nation of the Jews is anterior in time, and “greater” through the grace of primary favour in the Law, whereas ours is understood to be “less” in the age of times, as having in the last era of the world attained the knowledge of divine mercy: beyond doubt, through the edict of the divine utterance, the prior and “greater” people—that is, the Jewish—must necessarily serve the “less;” and the “less” people—that is, the Christian—overcome the “greater.” For, withal, according to the memorial records of the divine Scriptures, the people of the Jews—that is, the more ancient—quite forsook God, and did degrading service to idols, and, abandoning the Divinity, was surrendered to images; while “the people” said to Aaron, “Make us gods to go before us.”"
"For in the beginning of the world He gave to Adam himself and Eve a law, that they were not to eat of the fruit of the tree planted in the midst of paradise; but that, if they did contrariwise, by death they were to die. Which law had continued enough for them, had it been kept. For in this law given to Adam we recognise in embryo all the precepts which afterwards sprouted forth when given through Moses; that is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God from thy whole heart and out of thy whole soul; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself; Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not commit adultery; Thou shalt not steal; False witness thou shalt not utter; Honour thy father and mother; and, That which is another’s, shalt thou not covet. For the primordial law was given to Adam and Eve in paradise, as the womb of all the precepts of God. In short, if they had loved the Lord their God, they would not have contravened His precept; if they had habitually loved their neighbour—that is, themselves—they would not have believed the persuasion of the serpent, and thus would not have committed murder upon themselves, by falling from immortality, by contravening God’s precept; from theft also they would have abstained, if they had not stealthily tasted of the fruit of the tree, nor had been anxious to skulk beneath a tree to escape the view of the Lord their God; nor would they have been made partners with the falsehood-asseverating devil, by believing him that they would be “like God;” and thus they would not have offended God either, as their Father, who had fashioned them from clay of the earth, as out of the womb of a mother; if they had not coveted another’s, they would not have tasted of the unlawful fruit."
"And thus to the present moment they affirm that their Christ is not come, because He is not come in majesty; while they are ignorant of the fact that He was first to come in humility."
"And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die."
"But our Lord Christ has surnamed Himself Truth, not Custom. If Christ is always, and prior to all, equally truth is a thing sempiternal and ancient. Let those therefore look to themselves, to whom that is new which is intrinsically old. It is not so much novelty as truth which convicts heresies. Whatever savours of opposition to truth, this will be heresy, even (if it be an) ancient custom."
"The principal crime of the human race, the highest guilt charged upon the world, the whole procuring cause of judgment, is idolatry."
"If no law of God had prohibited idols to be made by us; if no voice of the Holy Spirit uttered general menace no less against the makers than the worshippers of idols; from our sacrament itself we would draw our interpretation that arts of that kind are opposed to the faith. For how have we renounced the devil and his angels, if we make them? What divorce have we declared from them, I say not with whom, but dependent on whom, we live? What discord have we entered into with those to whom we are under obligation for the sake of our maintenance? Can you have denied with the tongue what with the hand you confess? unmake by word what by deed you make? preach one God, you who make so many? preach the true God, you who make false ones? "I make," says one, "but I worship not;" as if there were some cause for which he dare not worship, besides that for which he ought not also to make,--the offence done to God, namely, in either case. Nay, you who make, that they may be able to be worshipped, do worship; and you worship, not with the spirit of some worthless perfume, but with your own; nor at the expense of a beast's soul, but of your own. To them you immolate your ingenuity; to them you make your sweat a libation; to them you kindle the torch of your forethought. More are you to them than a priest, since it is by your means they have a priest; your diligence is their divinity. Do you affirm that you worship not what you make? Ah! but they affirm not so, to whom you slay this fatter, more precious and greater victim, your salvation."
"If we rejoice with the world, there is reason to fear that with the world we shall grieve too. But when the world rejoices, let us grieve; and when the world afterward grieves, we shall rejoice."
"Ceterum purpura uel cetera insignia dignitatum et potestatum insertae dignitati et potestatibus idololatriae ab initio dicata habent profanationis suae maculam, cum praeterea ipsis etiam idolis induantur praetextae et trabeae et laticlaui, fasces quoque et uirgae praeferantur, et merito. Nam daemonia magistratus sunt saeculi huius ; unius collegii insignia fasces et purpuras gestant."
"If, also, He exercised no right of power even over His own followers, to whom He discharged menial ministry; if, in short, though conscious of His own kingdom, He shrank back from being made a king, He in the fullest manner gave His own an example for turning coldly from all the pride and garb, as well of dignity as of power. For if they were to be used, who would rather have used them than the Son of God? What kind and what number of fasces would escort Him? what kind of purple would bloom from His shoulders? what kind of gold would beam from His head, had He not judged the glory of the world to be alien both to Himself and to His? Therefore what He was unwilling to accept, He has rejected; what He rejected, He has condemned; what He condemned, He has counted as part of the devil’s pomp. For He would not have condemned things, except such as were not His; but things which are not God’s, can be no other’s but the devil’s. If you have forsworn “the devil’s pomp,” know that whatever there you touch is idolatry. Let even this fact help to remind you that all the powers and dignities of this world are not only alien to, but enemies of, God; that through them punishments have been determined against God’s servants; through them, too, penalties prepared for the impious are ignored. But “both your birth and your substance are troublesome to you in resisting idolatry.” For avoiding it, remedies cannot be lacking; since, even if they be lacking, there remains that one by which you will be made a happier magistrate, not in the earth, but in the heavens."
"Non conuenit sacramento diuino et humano, signo Christi et signo diaboli, castris lucis et castris tenebrarum ; non potest una anima duobus deberi, deo et Caesari. Et uirgam portauit Moyses, fibulam et Aaron, cingitur loro et Iohannes, agmen agit et Iesus Naue, bellauit et populus, si placet ludere. Quomodo autem bellabit, immo quomodo etiam in pace militabit sine gladio, quem dominus abstulit ? Nam etsi adierant milites ad Iohannem et formam obseruationis acceperant, si etiam centurio crediderat, omnem postea militem dominus in Petro exarmando discinxit. Nullus habitus licitus est apud nos illicito actui adscriptus."
"The argument for Christian practices becomes all the stronger, when also nature, which is the first rule of all, supports them. Well, she is the first who lays it down that a crown does not become the head."
"But everything which is against nature deserves to be branded as monstrous among all men; but with us it is to be condemned also as sacrilege against God, the Lord and Creator of nature."
"Do we believe it lawful for a human oath to be superadded to one divine, for a man to come under promise to another master after Christ, and to abjure father, mother, and all nearest kinsfolk, whom even the law has commanded us to honour and love next to God Himself, to whom the gospel, too, holding them only of less account than Christ, has in like manner rendered honour? Shall it be held lawful to make an occupation of the sword, when the Lord proclaims that he who uses the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace take part in the battle when it does not become him even to sue at law? And shall he apply the chain, and the prison, and the torture, and the punishment, who is not the avenger even of his own wrongs? Shall he, forsooth, either keep watch-service for others more than for Christ, or shall he do it on the Lord’s day, when he does not even do it for Christ Himself? And shall he keep guard before the temples which he has renounced? And shall he take a meal where the apostle has forbidden him? And shall he diligently protect by night those whom in the day-time he has put to flight by his exorcisms, leaning and resting on the spear the while with which Christ’s side was pierced? Shall he carry a flag, too, hostile to Christ? And shall he ask a watchword from the emperor who has already received one from God? Shall he be disturbed in death by the trumpet of the trumpeter, who expects to be aroused by the angel’s trump? And shall the Christian be burned according to camp rule, when he was not permitted to burn incense to an idol, when to him Christ remitted the punishment of fire?"
"Heretics do away with marriages; Psychics accumulate them. The former marry not even once; the latter not only once. What dost thou, Law of the Creator? Between alien eunuchs and thine own grooms, thou complainest as much of the over-obedience of thine own household as of the contempt of strangers."
"And so they upbraid the discipline of monogamy with being a heresy; nor is there any other cause whence they find themselves compelled to deny the Paraclete more than the fact that they esteem Him to be the institutor of a novel discipline, and a discipline which they find most harsh: so that this is already the first ground on which we must join issue in a general handling (of the subject), whether there is room for maintaining that the Paraclete has taught any such thing as can either be charged with novelty, in opposition to catholic tradition, or with burdensomeness, in opposition to the “light burden” of the Lord."
"This (even) broader assertion we make: that even if the Paraclete had in this our day definitely prescribed a virginity or continence total and absolute, so as not to permit the heat of the flesh to foam itself down even in single marriage, even thus He would seem to be introducing nothing of “novelty;” seeing that the Lord Himself opens “the kingdoms of the heavens” to “eunuchs,” as being Himself, withal, a virgin; to whom looking, the apostle also—himself too for this reason abstinent—gives the preference to continence."
"Herein also you ought to recognise the Paraclete in His character of Comforter, in that He excuses your infirmity from (the stringency of) an absolute continence."
"For it makes no difference whether a man have had two wives singly, or whether individuals (taken) at the same time have made two. The number of (the individuals) conjoined and separate is the same."
"But, presenting to your weakness the gift of the example of His own flesh, the more perfect Adam—that is, Christ, more perfect on this account as well (as on others), that He was more entirely pure—stands before you, if you are willing (to copy Him), as a voluntary celibate in the flesh. If, however, you are unequal (to that perfection), He stands before you a monogamist in spirit, having one Church as His spouse, according to the figure of Adam and of Eve, which (figure) the apostle interprets of that great sacrament of Christ and the Church, (teaching that), through the spiritual, it was analogous to the carnal monogamy."
"Else, if it be the later Abraham whom you follow as your father—that is, the digamist (Abraham)—receive him withal in his circumcision. If you reject his circumcision, it follows that you will refuse his digamy too."
"And if I glance around at their examples—(examples) of some David's heaping up marriages for himself even through sanguinary means, of some Solomon rich in wives as well as in other riches—you are bidden to “follow the better things;” and you have withal Joseph but once wedded, and on this score I venture to say better than his father; you have Moses, the intimate eye-witness of God; you have Aaron the chief priest. The second Moses, also, of the second People, who led our representatives into the (possession of) the promise of God, in whom the Name (of Jesus) was first inaugurated, was no digamist."
"So true, moreover, is it that divorce “was not from the beginning,” that among the Romans it is not till after the six hundredth year from the building of the city that this kind of “hard-heartedness” is set down as having been committed. But they indulge in promiscuous adulteries, even without divorcing (their partners): to us, even if we do divorce them, even marriage will not be lawful."
"For whence is it that the bishops and clergy come? Is it not from all? If all are not bound to monogamy, whence are monogamists (to be taken) into the clerical rank? Will some separate order of monogamists have to be instituted, from which to make selection for the clerical body? (No); but when we are extolling and inflating ourselves in opposition to the clergy, then “we are all one:” then “we are all priests, because He hath made us priests to (His) God and Father.”"
"To speak plainly, if they who reproach us with harshness, or esteem heresy (to exist) in this (our) cause, foster the “infirmity of the flesh” to such a degree as to think it must have support accorded to it in frequency of marriage; why do they in another case neither accord it support nor foster it with indulgence—when, (namely), torments have reduced it to a denial (of the faith)? For, of course, that (infirmity) is more capable of excuse which has fallen in battle, than (that) which (has fallen) in the bed-chamber; (that) which has succumbed on the rack, than (that) which (has succumbed) on the bridal bed; (that) which has yielded to cruelty, than (that) which (has yielded) to appetite; that which has been overcome groaning, than (that) which (has been overcome) in heat. But the former they excommunicate, because it has not “endured unto the end:” the latter they prop up, as if withal it has “endured unto the end.”"
"The virgin may possibly be held the happier, but the widow the more hardly tasked; the former in that she has always kept “the good,” the latter in that she has found “the good for herself.” In the former it is grace, in the latter virtue, that is crowned."
"Both (are) brethren, both fellow servants, no difference of spirit or of flesh; nay, (they are) truly “two in one flesh.” Where the flesh is one, one is the spirit too. Together they pray, together prostrate themselves, together perform their fasts; mutually teaching, mutually exhorting, mutually sustaining. Equally (are they) both (found) in the Church of God; equally at the banquet of God; equally in straits, in persecutions, in refreshments. Neither hides (ought) from the other; neither shuns the other; neither is troublesome to the other. The sick is visited, the indigent relieved, with freedom. Alms (are given) without (danger of ensuing) torment; sacrifices (attended) without scruple; daily diligence (discharged) without impediment: (there is) no stealthy signing, no trembling greeting, no mute benediction. Between the two echo psalms and hymns; and they mutually challenge each other which shall better chant to their Lord. Such things when Christ sees and hears, He joys. To these He sends His own peace. Where two (are), there withal (is) He Himself. Where He (is), there the Evil One is not."
"The Jews formed the breeding ground of all anti-Christian actions."
"We worship unity in trinity, and trinity in unity; neither confounding the person nor dividing the substance. There is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal."
"This is said with more spirit than truth."
"Galileo ... quoted by way of orthodox support Tertullian's dictum that we know God first by nature, then by revelation."
"In the case of Tertullian we praise his great talent, but we condemn his heresy."
"To me he is the born arguer, who talks himself, rather than thinks himself, into extreme positions, and is too dazzled by his own eloquence to recede from them."
"Tertullian is racy; alone, perhaps, among the Fathers, he has the makings of a journalist."
"Every word almost was a sentence; every sentence a victory."
"Destruction perfects that which is good; for the good cannot appear on account of that which conceals it. The good is least good whilst it is thus concealed. The concealment must be removed so that the good may be able freely to appear in its own brightness. For example, the mountain, the sand, the earth, or the stone in which a metal has grown is such a concealment. Each one of the visible metals is a concealment of the other six metals."
"All is interrelated. Heaven and earth, air and water. All are but one thing; not four, not two and not three, but one. Where they are not together, there is only an incomplete piece."
"As you talk, so is your heart."
"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it clear that a thing is not a poison."
"Belief and work, knowledge and action are one and the same thing."
"Consider that we shouldn’t call our brother a fool, since we don’t know ourselves what we are."
"God has given to all things their course and decided how high and how far they may go, not higher, not lower."
"God, our Father, has given us the life and the art of healing to protect and maintain it."
"He who conquers his enemy with meekness, wins fame."
"He who wants to govern must have insight into the hearts of men and act accordingly."
"If you have been given a talent, exercise it freely and happily like the sun: give everyone from your splendour."
"In us there is the Light of Nature, and that Light is God."
"Nothing is hidden so much that it wouldn’t be revealed through its fruit."
"Practice humility at first with man and only then before God. He who despises man, has also no respect for God."
"The art of medicine has its roots in the heart. If your heart is false, then also the doctor in you is false. If it is fair, then also the doctor is fair."
"We have Divine Wisdom in the mortal body.Whatever does harm to the body, ruins the House of the Eternal."
"We should become angels and not devils, that’s why we have been created and born into the world. Therefore be and stick to what God has chosen you for."
"What else is the help of medicine than love?"
"What maintains the marriage and what is it? Only the knowledge of the hearts, that is its beginning and end."
"What we should be after death, we have to attain in life, i.e. holiness and bliss. Here on earth the Kingdom of God begins."
"Who else is the enemy of Nature but he who mistakes himself for more intelligent than Nature, though it is the highest school for all of us?"
"Let us not link ourselves with the vilifiers of Plato and the persecutors of Confucius. They were oppressed by citizens who were considered the pride of the country. Thus has the world raised its hand against the great Servitors. Be assured that the Brotherhood formed by Pythagoras appeared dangerous in the eyes of the city guard. Paracelsus was a target for mockery and malignance. Thomas Vaughan seemed to be an outcast, and few wished to meet with him. Thus was the reign of darkness manifested."
"Paracelsus. The symbolical name adopted by the greatest Occultist of the middle ages—Philip Bombastes Aureolus Theophrastus von Hohenheim—born in the canton of Zurich in 1493. He was the cleverest physician of his age, and the most renowned for curing almost any illness by the power of talismans prepared by himself. He never had a friend, but was surrounded by enemies, the most bitter of whom were the Churchmen and their party. That he was accused of being in league with the devil stands to reason, nor is it to be wondered at that finally he was murdered by some unknown foe, at the early age of forty-eight. He died at Salzburg, leaving a number of works behind him, which are to this day greatly valued by the Kabbalists and Occultists. Many of his utterances have proved prophetic. He was a clairvoyant of great powers, one of the most learned and erudite philosophers and mystics, and a distinguished Alchemist. Physics is indebted to him for the discovery of nitrogen gas, or Azote."
"Few men have elicited from critics, biographers, and historians more conflicting judgments than Paracelsus. By some, perhaps by most, he is denounced as a quack of the first order; by others, he is regarded as a genius, as a great reformer of medicine; and between the extremes of good and bad are to be found the intermediate estimates of less enthusiastic critics."
"New diseases like syphilis seemed to call for new and "stronger" medicines; and this became one of the stock arguments for resort to the Paracelsian chemical pharmacopeia and mystical medical philosophy. With every fundamental of medicine thus called into question, the only logical recourse was to observe results of cures administered in accordance with the old Galenic as against the new Paracelsian theories, and then to choose whichever worked better. The swift development of European medical practice to levels of skill exceeding all other civilized traditions resulted."
"Paracelsus, as much as he magnified himself for his great store of Arcana, and despised others for want of the same Pretensions, yet if we state things a little calmly, we shall find, that he did not so really promote the Honour and Glory of Chymistry, as he vainly boasted, or would have had the World believe... He set upon Reforming Physick, with all the Malice, and Ill-will, with all the hatred and Contempt, that a Beast and a Sot could possibly conceive against Sober men, whose Seriousness and Sobriety was the greatest Reproach, and declaration of Enmity to his dissolute and profligate Life. ...But know bold Wretch [i.e., Paracelsus], their Names [i.e., Galen's, Avicenna's, Rhasis', Montagnana's, Mesue's, &c.] will be Consecrated to after-ages, and had in good Reputation by Wise, and Sober men, when thy Bombastick Names shall perish and be despised, when thy frantick folly, and miserable vanity, and ill-nature, shall with thy Dust be trampled upon by all men."
"The vagaries of Paracelsus are notorious, and yet he was far more than a mere quack."
"More than one pathologist, chemist, homeopathist, and magnetist has quenched his thirst for knowledge in the books of Paracelsus. Frederick Hufeland got his theoretical doctrines on infection from this mediaeval “quack,” as Sprengel delights in calling one who was immeasurably higher than himself. Hemman, who endeavors to vindicate this great philosopher, and nobly tries to redress his slandered memory, speaks of him as the “greatest chemist of his time." So do Professor Molitor, J and Dr. Ennernoser, the eminent German psychologist. According to their criticisms on the labors of this Hermetist, Paracelsus is the most wondrous intellect of his age,” a “ noble genius.” But our modern lights assume to know better, and the ideas of the Rosicrucians about the elementary spirits, the goblins and the elves, have sunk into the “limbo of magic” and fairy tales for early childhood. (p. 52)"
"Kemshead says in his “ Inorganic Chemistry” that “the element hydrogen was first mentioned in the sixteenth century by Paracelsus, but very little was known of it in any way.” (P. 66.) And why not be fair and confess at once that Paracelsus was the re-discoverer of hydrogen as he was the re-discoverer of the hidden properties of the magnet and animal magnetism ? It is easy to show that according to the strict vows of secrecy taken and faithfully observed by every Rosicrucian (and especially by the alchemist) he kept his knowledge secret. Perhaps it would not prove a very difficult task for Any chemist well versed in the works of Paracelsus to demonstrate that oxygent the discovery of which is credited to Priestley, was known to the Rosicrucian alchemists as well as hydrogen. (footnote p. 52)"
"Theophrastus Paracelsus rediscovered the occult properties of the magnet—“the bone of Horus” which, twelve centuries before his time, had played such an important part in the theurgic mysteries—and he very naturally became the founder of the school of magnetism and of mediaeval magico-theurgy. But Mesmer, who lived nearly three hundred years after him, and as a disciple of his school brought the magnetic wonders before the public, reaped the glory that was due to the fire-philosopher, while the great master died in a hospital! So goes the world : new discoveries, evolving from old sciences ; new men—the same old nature! (pp. 71-72)"
"The church of Rome has never been either credulous or cowardly, as is abundantly proved by the Machiavellism which marks her policy. Moreover, she has never troubled herself much about the clever prestidigitateurs whom she knew to be simply adepts in juggling. Robert Houdin, Comte, Hamilton and Bosco, slept secure in their beds, while she persecuted such men as Paracelsus, Cagliostro, and Mesmer, the Hermetic philosophers and mystics—and effectually stopped every genuine manifestation of an occult nature by killing the mediums. (p. 100)"
"Electro-magnetism, the so-called discovery of Professor Oersted, had been used by Paracelsus three centuries before. This may be demonstrated by examining critically his mode of curing disease. Upon his achievements in chemistry there is no need to enlarge, for it is admitted by fair and unprejudiced writers that he was one of the greatest chemists of his time. (Hemmann: "Medico-Surgical Essays," Berl, 1778) Brierre de Boifcmont terms him a "genius" and agrees with Deleuze that he created a new epoch in the history of medicine. The secret of his successful and, as they were called, magic cures lies in his sovereign contempt for the so-called learned “ authorities ” of his age. "Seeking for truth," says Paracelsus, "I considered with myself that if there were no teachers of medicine in this world, how would I set to learn the art? No otherwise than in the great open book of nature, written with the finger of God. ... I am accused and denounced for not having entered in at the right door of art. But which is the right one? Galen, Avicenna, Mesue, Rhasis, or honest nature ? I believe, the last! Through this door I entered, and the light of nature, and no apothecary’s lamp directed me on my way." (p. 164)"
"This utter scorn for established laws and scientific formulas, this aspiration of mortal clay to commingle with the spirit of nature, and look to it alone for health, and help, and the light of truth, was the cause of the inveterate hatred shown by the contemporary pigmies to the fire-philosopher and alchemist. No wonder that he was accused of charlatanry and even drunkenness. Of the latter charge, Hemmann boldly and fearlessly exonerates him, and proves that the foul accusation proceeded from "Oporinus, who lived with him some time in order to learn his secrets, but his object was defeated; hence, the evil reports of his disciples and apothecaries." (Hemmann: “Medico-Surgical Essays,” Berl, 1778) He was the founder of the School of Animal Magnetism and the discoverer of the occult properties of the magnet. (p. 164)"
"He was branded by his age as a sorcerer, because the cures he made were marvellous. Three centuries later, Baron Du Potet was also accused of sorcery and demonolatry by the Church of Rome, and of charlatanry by the academicians of Europe. As the fire-philosophers say, it is not the chemist who will condescend to look upon the “living fire" otherwise than his colleagues do. "Thou hast forgotten what thy fathers taught thee about it—or rather, thou hast never known... it is too loud for thee!" (Robert Fludd: "Treatise III.") A work upon magico-spiritual philosophy and occult science would be incomplete without a particular notice of the history of animal magnetism, as it stands since Paracelsus staggered with it the schoolmen of the latter half of the sixteenth century. (p. 165)"
"Anyone listening to this show that believes homosexuality is a normal lifestyle has been brainwashed. It's very dangerous if we start accepting lower and lower forms of behavior as the normal."
"Is it that you hate this president or that you hate America?"
"It doesn't say anywhere in the Constitution this idea of the separation of church and state."
"The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth."
"The tape is astonishing. And here's what's frustrating to me. And you asked specific questions, for example, about what people knew about Bill Ayers, you know, and who they voted for, the coal power plant comments. And these were really significant issues. And it seems that Obama voters, if you don't listen to talk radio, if you don't watch the FOX News Channel, you are not anywhere nearly as informed as people that are just hearing the bumper stickers, the slogans, the snippets of the commercials of the media so, journalism died in 2008, and it influenced a lot of people on the way out."
"Here you are, you're a liberal, probably define peace as the absence of conflict. I define peace as the ability to defend yourself and blow your enemies into smithereens."
"If you ask the question, "All right, well, why not just show us the certificate?" "You're a birther! You're a birther! That's what you are!" And uh, it's not been my number one issue, but I've been following it and I've been saying, "Why are all these people who just asked to see it, why are they, why are they crucified and beaten up and smeared and besmirched the way they are?""
"What do you think about this birth certificate issue? I mean, it has not been my main issue, but it kind of does get a little odd here after a while. Can't they just produce it and we move on?"
";Jerry Springer"
":Because isn't this interesting? Of all our 43 presidents, of the 43 presidents —"
";Sean Hannity"
":Don't bring up race. Do not bring up race. Do not bring up race. It is a constitutional requirement."
"Donald Trump brought up the issue of the birth certificate and it's getting huge buzz around the country. Even Chris Matthews has called for, you know, the birth certificate to be released. Why can't they just release the birth certificate, you know, and just move on?"
"If I was in Congress, I would not vote to raise the debt ceiling."
"I have watched these Republicans be more harsh towards Donald Trump than they've ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda, they did nothing, nothing – all these phony votes to repeal and replace , show votes so they can go back and keep their power and get reelected."
"Sorry, you created Donald Trump, all of you because of your ineffectiveness, because of your weakness, your spinelessness, your lack of vision, your inability to fight Obama, I'm getting a little sick and tired of all of you. Honestly, I am tempted to just say I don't support any of you people ever."
"To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President."
"Mister President, thank you."
"I don’t vet the information on this program that I give out. We have always been independent, follow our own path on this show. That’s not going to change for me, ever."
"Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity."
"He ain't never going to let white supremacy go, and he genuinely believes what he's doing. Bill O'Reilly and others are just trying to get ratings, but Hannity really believes that whites got special white rights. He's not just being anti-black; it's anti-anything other than white. He won't let that issue die."
"Hannity's fantasy was so ridiculous that even his Fox colleague couldn't get on board. "You know she's thinking, 'Dude, you couldn't even protect women from getting sexually harassed in your own building and now you're Batman? Calm down. Calm down, man."
"The bronze to Sean Hannity of Fixed News. On the Rupert Murdoch Network talking about those carbon off-sets you purchase to off-set your carbon footprint, "those off-sets, that is the biggest hoax in the world. You know what it's like. You go cheat on your wife and then say, 'Honey, don't worry, I bought an off-set.' Good luck." This is the second time Hannity has dismissed off-sets and going green and climate change, apparently utterly unaware that his boss pledged to make News Corp carbon neutral by 2010: "While we reduce our own carbon footprints, some emissions will be unavoidable. As a last resort, we will off-set these emissions. The carbon off-set is a financial tool to support projects that prevent carbon from being released in the atmosphere. Done right, they will widen the implementation of carbon saving technologies and give an incentive to create new solutions." Murdoch has also boasted that the telecast of the most recent Emmys was carbon neutral..."
"I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played."
"Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers--in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning. The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, and I must search for unity. What is it, this one thing, and how do I find my way to it? Traces of this perfect thing appear in many guises--and everything that is unimportant falls away."
"A need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower."
"The most sensitive musical instrument is the human soul. The next is the human voice. One must purify the soul until it begins to sound. A composer is a musical instrument and at the same time, a performer on that instrument. The instrument has to be in order to produce sound. One must start with that, not with the music. Through the music the composer can check whether his instrument is tuned and to what key it is tuned."
"Pärt's cryptic remarks on his compositions orbit around the words 'silent' and 'beautiful'--minimal, by now almost imperiled associative notions, but ones which reverberate his musical creations."
"What a dreary world we live in, gentlemen."
"I am very fond of the modest manner of life of those solitary owners of remote villages, who in Little Russia are commonly called "old-fashioned," who are like tumbledown picturesque little houses, delightful in their simplicity and complete unlikeness to the new smooth buildings whose walls have not yet been discolored by the rain, whose roofs are not yet covered with green lichen, and whose porch does not display its bricks through the peeling stucco."
""Turn around, son! What a funny figure you are! Are those priests' cassocks you are wearing? And do they all go about like that at the academy?" With these words old Bulba greeted his two sons who had been studying at the Kiev college and had come home to their father."
"And ruined is the Cossack! He is lost for all the chivalry of the Cossacks! He will see Zaporozhye no more; nor his father's farms, nor the church of God. Ukraine will see no more the bravest of the sons who undertook to defend her. Old Taras will tear the gray hair from his head and curse the day and hour when he begot such a son to shame him."
"When the priest went in, he stopped short at the sight of this defamation of God's holy place, and dared not serve the requiem on such a spot. And so the church was left forever, with monsters stuck in the doors and windows, was overgrown with forest trees, roots, rough grass and wild thorns, and no one can now find the way to it."
"In the course of reading he became more and more melancholy and finally became completely gloomy. When the reading was over he uttered in a voice full of sorrow: "Goodness, how sad is our Russia!""
"I shall laugh my bitter laugh."
"...it's not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life."
"Dogs are clever fellows; they know all about politics [...]"
"The year 2000: April 43rd.—To-day is a day of splendid triumph. Spain has a king; he has been found, and I am he."
"Marchember 86. Between day and night."
"No date. The day had no date."
"[P]eople think that the human brain is in the head. Nothing of the sort; it is carried by the wind from the Caspian Sea."
"To tell the truth, I often felt uneasy when I thought of the excessive brittleness and fragility of the moon. The moon is generally repaired in Hamburg, and very imperfectly. It is done by a lame cooper, an obvious blockhead who has no idea how to do it. He took waxed thread and olive-oil—hence that pungent smell over all the earth which compels people to hold their noses. And this makes the moon so fragile that no men can live on it, but only noses. Therefore we cannot see our noses, because they are on the moon."
"All the world knows that France sneezes when England takes a pinch of snuff."
"[Final lines] mother, mother, save your unhappy son! Let a tear fall on his aching head! See how they torture him! Press the poor orphan to your bosom! He has no rest in this world; they hunt him from place to place. Mother, mother, have pity on your sick child! And do you know that the Bey of Algiers has a wart under his nose?"
"It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry."
"Of course, Alexander the Great was a hero, but why smash the chairs?"
"The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities."
"I tell everyone very plainly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Why, greyhound puppies. That's a totally different matter."
"The sergeant's widow told you a lie when she said I flogged her. I never flogged her. She flogged herself."
"What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves!"
"The gentleman lolling back in the chaise was neither dashingly handsome nor yet unbearably ugly, neither too stout nor yet too thin; it could not be claimed he was old but he was no stripling, either. His arrival in the town created no stir and was not marked by anything out of the ordinary."
"[Women's] boarding schools, as we know, hold the three principal subjects which constitute the basis of human virtue to be the French language (a thing indispensable to the happiness of married life), piano-playing (a thing wherewith to beguile a husband’s leisure moments), and that particular department of housewifery which is comprised in the knitting of purses and other “surprises.” Nevertheless changes and improvements have begun to take place, since things now are governed more by the personal inclinations and idiosyncracies of the keepers of such establishments. For instance, in some seminaries the regimen places piano-playing first, and the French language second, and then the above department of housewifery; while in other seminaries the knitting of “surprises” heads the list, and then the French language, and then the playing of pianos—so diverse are the systems in force!"
"As it is so strangely ordained in this world, what is amusing will turn into being gloomy, if you stand too long before it, and then God knows what ideas may not stray into the mind... Why is it that even in moments of unthinking, careless gaiety a different and strange mood comes upon one?"
"There are people who exist in this world not like entities but like the speckles or spots on something."
"And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone."
"Oh troika, winged troika, tell me who invented you? Surely, nowhere but among a nimble nation could you have been born in a country which has taken itself in earnest and has evenly spread far and wide over half of the globe, so that once you start counting the milestones you may count on till a speckled haze dances before your eyes... Rus, are you not similar in your headlong motion to one of those nimble troikas that none can overtake? The flying road turns into smoke under you, bridges thunder and pass, all fall back and is left behind!... And what does this awesome motion mean? What is the passing strange steeds! Has the whirlwind a home in your manes?... Rus, whither are you speeding to? Answer me. No answer. The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way."
"Rus! Rus! I see you, from my lovely enchanted remoteness I see you: a country of dinginess, and bleakness and dispersal; no arrogant wonders of nature crowned by the arrogant wonders of art appear within you to delight or terrify the eyes... So what is the incomprehensible secret force driving me towards you? Why do I constantly hear the echo of your mournful song as it is carried from the sea through your entire expanse?... And since you are without end yourself, is it not within you that a boundless thought will be born?"
"Why are you being so stingy?", Sobakevich demanded. "It's cheap at the price. A rogue would cheat you, sell you some worthless rubbish instead of souls, but mine are as juicy as ripe nuts, all picked—they are all either craftsmen or sturdy peasants."
"there is no word so perk and quick, which bursts from the heart with such spontaneity, which seethes and bubbles with such vitality, as the aptly spoken Russian word"
"The reason why Proshka wore such large boots can be explained at once: Plyushkin kept only one pair of boots for all of his servants, however numerous they were, and they always stood in the hall."
"They insist that an author should write in the strictest, purest and noblest language: in short, they expect the Russian language to drop from the clouds, already refined, and that it should come naturally to the lips, so that all they have to do is to open their mouth and stick out their tongue. It goes without saying, of course, that the feminine half of the human species is very wise; but it must be confessed that our respected readers are even wiser."
"Apparently that does sometimes happen. Apparently even men like Chichikov are transformed into poets for a few moments in their lives: though the word "poet" would be an exaggeration here."
"Among a number of intelligent suggestions there was finally this one too, strange as it may seem, that Chichikov might be Napoleon in disguise..."
"However, nothing turned out as Tchitchikoff had intended."
"Russia! Russia! I see you now, from my wondrous, beautiful past I behold you! How wretched, dispersed, and uncomfortable everything is about you..."
"Russia, are you not speeding along like a fiery and matchless troika?"
"Homeland, tenderer than first caresses,/you have taught me to protect and guard/golden language in all Pushkin's treasures,/Gogol's magic, captivating word."
"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers...Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov."
"It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art."
"Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced."
"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea."
"Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy. To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
"What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions."
"Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass."
"Rousseau … asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement."
"A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value."
"To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people."
"We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine-work which is so large a part of life."
"Pater is a neglected author to-day. One can understand why. His mind is a little languid, his style a little mannered, and himself a little over-serious. There is something ludicrous in expounding the art of enjoyment in so hushed and solemn a tone. All the same, it is a great pity to neglect Pater. To a degree unparalleled among English writers, he combined the two qualities essential for critical appreciation—common sense and uncommon sensibility."
"Acceptance is right. Kindness is right. Love is right. I pray, right now, that we're moving into a kinder time when prejudice is overcome by understanding; when narrow-mindedness, and narrow-minded bigotry is overwhelmed by open-hearted empathy; when the pain of judgmentalism is replaced by the purity of love."
"Her father’s white."
"You ought to be thankful for the little things But little things are all you seem to give You're always putting off what we can do today Soap opera says you've got one life to live Who's right, who's wrong?"
"I'm not a prude, I just want some respect (that's right) So close the door if you want me to respond Cause privacy is my middle name My last name is control No, my first name ain't baby It's Janet — Ms. Jackson, if you're nasty"
"Seeing that your love's true. Never I'll doubt you. My heart belongs to you. That's alright with me. Worlds could end around me. So in love that I can't see. You and me were meant to be. That's alright with me."
"Like a moth to a flame Burned by the fire. My love is blind Can't you see my desire?"
"I feel asleep late last night Crying like a newborn child Holding myself close Pretending my arms are yours I want no one but you."
"My love for you is unconditional love too Gotta get up, get out, get up, get out, get up And show you that it"
"Relax... it's just sex."
"I don't know if I've ever felt like this before But I'm sure that the way I feel, I don't want it to go 'Cuz I've cried my share of tears And I've sang my share of blues But to keep you over here, I'll do what I got to do"
"So here's my demonstration A peep show Tonight my body's an exhibition baby Though it's on display don't be scared to Touch It, It said so So come and get it babe"
"They (the Greens) are a home for people who in the 1950s would have joined the Communist Party. They are watermelons many of them - green on the outside and very, very, very red on the inside."
"I notice(d) a little letter in the paper the other day saying that 'Come on John that (watermelon) stuff goes back a few years ago, the modern terminology is avacados'. Hard green casing on the outside, soft and mushy on the inside, with a great big brown nut in the middle."
"Good evening. We begin tonight..."
"There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe. I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially — sorry it's a cliche — a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive."
"There's a whole industry of conservatives saying, "Ah, it's those damn liberals," and a whole group of liberals saying, "It's all those damn conservatives"... If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong."
"I'm a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective," Jennings said. Jennings said that everyone — even journalists — have points of view through which they filter their perception of the news. It could be race, sex or income. But, he said, reporters are ideally trained to be as objective as possible. "And when we don't think we can be fully objective, to be fair."
"There will be good days and bad, which means that some days I may be cranky and some days really cranky!"
"I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something, and if there is a born-again quality to me, that's it."
"I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization."
"We have been criticized, a little bit to my surprise, by people who think I was not enough pro-war. That is simply not the way I think of this role. This role is designed to question the behavior of government officials on behalf of the public. I think people who have done this and all jobs in journalism have believed that."
"Are we out of step with the administration because we do not comport completely to their political point of view?... So they criticize us for it. It goes with the territory, and if we get a groundswell we begin to look at ourselves."
"I don't think the public realizes how much soul-searching goes on in news organizations about what is the right thing to do."
"Seems like yesterday; seems like forever—all at the same time. It's sort of, how do you measure it? Do you measure the fact that I'm 20 years older? No. I think I measure it by the events. You know, I came just as the Cold War was coming to an end. When you think about the events that we've been through, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to, I guess you'd say, 9/11 being the culmination at the end of that — of that scope — what extraordinary changes there have been."
"When I came to the states in the mid 1960s — 1964, 1964 — I didn't think I'd be here maybe a couple years, going to have a great experience in the United States and then go back to Canada. Well, here we are 40 years later."
"On 9/11, those of us who do the jobs that I do, flew without a net for hour and hour and hour after end. And then you hope and pray that you've had the experience to be up to it. Because then you're editor, analyst, reporter, correspondent, ringmaster, the whole thing."
"The truth of the matter is — and I'm always a bit reluctant to say this because people think you're a bit unfeeling. The truth of this, on 9/11, people who — myself and others — were so unbelievably focused on what was happening that we were, for many, many hours, I think, spared the agony of loss."
"I was so focused on all of that, that it took me many hours, until my kids called, ironically. My kids both called and just left a little message that they were OK. And I turned around and went — Oh, man that really hit me like a ton of bricks — But most of the time we were spared that agony for the time being."
"I think no matter what we cover, people tend to see what we cover through their own particular political or personal prisms. I always ask people to be specific what they're talking about. You can't cover the Middle East — you can't cover American politics — you can't cover America these days without finding people in one place or another taking exception to what we do. I think it goes with the territory. Keeps me, at least I hope, mindful, always that there's at least one other opinion and sometimes a dozen other opinions. And they all bear accounting for. But not everybody is right you know because somebody says, "well you did X", and you say "well, maybe X is right in some cases"."
"My dad was part of the pioneers of public broadcasting in Canada. And he always told me the most important thing you can be in your career is fair. So we all start to see a box and hope that we see the box in the same way. But you recognize in time that people see the box or they see traffic accidents in entirely different ways. So you train yourself over the years to try and give accounting to the variety... and come to some decent place in the middle. But I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people."
"I think sometimes in the establishment that there are a lot of people in America who resent the establishment, who resent the elite universities, who resent the large corporations and with some good reason this year — as we discovered — and who feel and who have felt prior to the advent of this sort of a great involvement of talk radio that they haven't had place to debate or even vent. And so, is Rush a deeply serious analyst and commentator? In some respects. Is he a showman as well? I think the answer is yes. But I'd never argue that he doesn't have place on the menu."
"Finally this evening, a brief note about change: Some of you have noticed in the last several days that I was not covering the Pope. While my colleagues at ABC did a superb job, I did think a few times I was missing out. However, as some of you now know, I have learned in the last couple of days that I have lung cancer. Yes, I was a smoker until about 20 years ago, and I was weak and I smoked over 9/11. But whatever the reason, the news does slow you down a bit. I have been reminding my colleagues today, who've all been incredibly supportive, that almost 10,000,000 Americans are already living with cancer, and I have a lot to learn from them...and "living" is the key word. The National Cancer Institute says that we are survivors from the moment of diagnosis. I will continue to do the broadcast, on good days; my voice [laughs] will not always be like this! Certainly, it's been a long time, and I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesn't value deeply the audience's loyalty should be in another line of work. To be perfectly honest I'm a little surprised at the kindness today from so many people; that's not intended as false modesty, but even I was taken aback by how far and how fast news travels. Finally, I wonder if other men and women ask their doctors right away, "Okay, Doc, when does the hair go?" At any rate, that's it for now on World News Tonight. Have a good evening; I'm Peter Jennings. Thanks, and good night."
"[President Bush should] quit hiding behind the Secret Service, come out and face the nation and explain his failure to protect the country."
"The man who realizes his ignorance has taken the first step toward knowledge."
"Christ said, "The Truth shall make you free," but Truth is not found once and forever. Truth is eternal, and the quest for Truth must also be eternal."
"We venture to make the assertion that there is but one sin: IGNORANCE, and but one salvation: APPLIED KNOWLEDGE."
"Peace is a matter of education, and impossible of achievement until we have learned to deal charitably, justly, and openly with one another, as nations as well as individuals. As long as we manufacture arms, peace will not become established. It should become our aim and object to do all we can toward the abolition of militarism in all countries and the establishment of the principle of arbitration of difficulties."
"... looking at woman suffrage from the larger standpoint, it would be to the advantage of the men of the present day to grant women that which is really their right--a full and complete equality in every particular. The double social standard which obtains at the present time, whereby a man may commit the social sin without being ostracized, should be done away with. Woman's work should be paid as much as man's work, ... It would be of an enormous benefit to the race if she were given an equal right with man in every particular. For not until then can we hope to see reforms brought about that will really unite humanity. ... While laws are only makeshifts to bring humanity to a higher plane where each one will be a law unto himself, doing right without coercion, it is nevertheless necessary that such reforms should be brought about at the present time by legislation."
"But there are vegetarians and vegetarians: In Europe conditions cause people now to abstain from flesh eating to a very large extent. They are not true vegetarians for they are lusting for flesh every moment of their lives, and they feel the want of it as a great hardship and sacrifice. In time they would of course grow used to is, and in many generations it would make them gentle and docile, but obviously that is not the kind of vegetarianism we need now. There are others who abstain from flesh foods for the sake of health; their motive is selfish, and many among them probably also lust after the "flesh pots of Egypt". Their attitude of mind is not such either that it would abolish ferocity very quickly. But there is a third class which realizes that all life is God's life and that to cause suffering to any sentient being is wrong, so out of pure compassion they abstain from the use of flesh foods. They are the true vegetarians, and it is obvious that a world war could never be fought by people of this turn of mind. All true Christians will also be abstainers from flesh foods for similar motives. Then peace on earth and good will among men will be an assured fact; the nations will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks that they may cease to deal death, sorrow, and suffering, and become instruments to foster life, love, and happiness."
"No man loves God who hates his kind,"
"On whistling stormcloud; on Zephyrus wing,"
"I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper.' The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face. And you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry, I just didn't write this. It's there already.' That's why I hate to take credit for the songs I've written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it's been done and I'm just a courier bringing it into the world. I really believe that. I love what I do. I'm happy at what I do. It's escapism."
"Why not just tell people I'm an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They'll believe anything you say, because you're a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, "I'm an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight," people would say, "Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He's cracked up. You can't believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.""
"I am not prejudiced, it's just time for the first Black King now."
"Like the old Indian proverb says, do not judge a man until you've walked 2 moons in his moccasins. Most people don't know me, that is why they write such things in which most is not true. I cry very very often because it hurts and I worry about the children, all my children all over the world, I live for them. If a man could say nothing against a character but what he could prove, history could not be written. Animals strike not from malice but because they want to live, it is the same with those who criticize, they desire our blood not our pain. But still I must achieve I must seek truth in all things. I must endure for the power I was sent forth, for the world for the children. But have mercy, for I've been bleeding a long time now. MJ."
"Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the Creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists. I become the stars and the moon. I become the lover and the beloved. I become the victor and the vanquished. I become the master and the slave. I become the singer and the song. I become the knower and the known. I keep on dancing and then, it is the eternal dance of creation. The Creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy. I keep on dancing — until there is only … the dance."
"I feel fortunate for being that instrument through which music flows. I'm just the source through which it comes. I can't take credit for it because it's God's work. He's just using me as the messenger."
"If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with."
"Do not judge a person, Do not pass a judgement on anyone unless you've talked to them one-on-one. I don't care what the story is... OK, number one. There, as I know of, there is no such thing as skin bleaching... I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin, it's something that I cannot help, OK? But, when people make up stories that I don't want to be who I am, it hurts me. It's a problem for me, I can't control it. .. Yeah, I think James Brown is a genius you know, when he's with the Famous Flames, unbelievable. I used to watch him on television and I used to get angry at the cameraman because whenever he would really start to dance they would be on a close-up so I couldn't see his feet. I'd shout "show him show him," so I could watch and learn."
"Michael Jackson: There's a time for this, and this you should not do. You should not go out and say, 'Oh he's Jacko'. I'm not a "Jacko". I'm "Jackson". Walters: How do you feel when people call you... Jackson: Yeah, "Wacko Jacko". Where'd that come from? Some English tabloid. I have a heart and I have feelings, I feel that, when you do that to me. It's not nice. Don't do it. I'm not a wacko."
"I have no problem with them imitating [me]. It's a compliment. Everybody has to start out looking up to someone. For me it was James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Wilson, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly."
"I have begun to see that even my father's harshness was a kind of love. An imperfect love, to be sure, but love nonetheless. He pushed me because he loved me, because he wanted no man to ever look down at his offspring. Now with time, rather than bitterness I feel blessing.… My initial fury has slowly given way to forgiveness."
"The record companies really do conspire against the artists. They steal. They cheat. They do whatever they can, especially the black artists.… Sony's Tommy Mottola is the president of the record division. He is mean. He is a racist, and he's very, very, very devilish."
"I know my race. I just look in the mirror. I know I'm black."
"...so much joy to the world...and the system, meaning the record companies, totally took advantage of me. This is very important, what we're fighting for, because I'm tired, I'm really REALLY tired of manipulation. I'm tired of the how the press is manipulating everything that's been happening to this situation. They do not tell the truth, they lie. They manipulate, they manipulate our history books. The history books are not true: it's a lie. The history books are lying. You need to know that, you must know that. All the forms of popular music: from jazz to hip-hop to be-bop to .. to SOUL. To um, uh, dances, from the cake-walk. to the jitter-bug, to the Charleston, to uh, breakdancing. All of these are forms of black dancing."
"The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales... I broke Elvis's records, I broke Beatles records... The minute it became the all-time best-selling album in the history of the Guinness Book of World Records... OVERNIGHT they called me a freak. They called me a homosexual. They called me a child molester. They said I bleached my skin. They made everything to turn the public against me. This is all complete, complete conspiracy: you have to know that. You know, it's time for (unintelligible) It's time for a change. Let's not leave this building and forget what has been said. Put it into your heart. Put it into your subconscious mind, and let's do something about it. We have to, we have to. Because it's been a long LONG time coming, and a change has got to come. So let's, let's hold our torches high, and get the RESPECT that we deserve. I love you, I ~love~ you. Please don't put this in your heart today and forget it tomorrow. Or we will not accomplish our purpose. We will not have accomplished our purpose if that happens. This has got to stop."
"Not only were we practicing, we were nervous rehearsing, because he would sit in a chair with a belt in his hand, and if you didn't do it the right way, he would tear you up. Really get you...We were terrified of him. So terrified, I can't tell you. I don't think he realized how scared...scared...I mean SCARED. So scared that I would regurgitate. (with emphasis) Mmm-hmm. (reporter asks Michael what caused the reaction) His presence, just seeing him...And I was so fast, he wouldn't catch me half the time, but when he did, oh my God, it was bad."
"I put a lot of mannequins in my room in the past, and I still have mannequins in my room, because I used to be very lonely, painfully lonely. You have no idea. I used to walk the streets looking for people to talk to. I'm talking about the height of one's career…. I would walk up to them, strangers, and say, "will you be my friend?" They'd go, "my god, Michael Jackson!" and that's not what I wanted."
"I'm just like anyone. I cut and I bleed. And I embarrass easily. I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail. Here in America we create new opportunities out of adversity, not punitive laws, and we should look to new technologies like Apple's new Music Store for solutions. This way, innovation continues to be the hallmark of America. It is the fans that drive the success of the music business."
"Lies run sprints but the truth runs marathons."
"In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe."
"I always wanted to do music that influences and inspires each generation. Lets face it, who wants mortality?"
"Ever since I was a little boy, I would study composition. And it was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that influenced me the most. If you take an album like Nutcracker Suite, every song is killer, every one. So I said to myself, 'Why can't there be a pop album where every...' — People used to do an album where you'd get one good song, and the rest were like B-sides, they'd call them "album songs" — and I'd say to myself 'Why can't every one be like a hit song? Why can't every song be so great that people would want to buy it if you could release it as a single?. So I always tried to strive for that. That was the purpose for the next album."
"The industry, It's at a crossroad, There's a transformation going on. People are confused, what's going on, how to distribute and sell music. The internet kinda threw everybody for a real loop. 'Cause it's so powerful, kids love it so much. The whole world is at their fingertips, on their lap. Anything they want to know, anyone they want to communicate with, any music, any movies... The thing is it just took everybody for a loop. Right now, all these Starbucks deals and Wal-Mart deals, direct to artists, I don't know if that's the answer. I think the answer is just phenomenal, great music. Just reaching the masses. I think people are still searching. There's not a real music revolution going on right now, either. But when it's there, people will break down a wall to get to it. I mean, 'cause before Thriller, it was the same kind of thing. People were not buying music. It helped to bring everybody back into the stores, so when it happens, it happens."
"What I do when I write is that I'll do a raggedy, rough version just to hear the chorus, just to see how much I like the chorus. If it works for me that way when it's raggedy, then I'll know it will just work... Listen to that, that's at home. Janet, Randy, Me... Janet and I are going "Whoo, Whoo... Whoo, Whoo..." I do that same process with every song. It's the melody, it's the melody that's most important, If the melody can sell me, then I'll go to the next step. The idea is to transcribe from what's in your mentality onto tape. If you take a song like "Billie Jean," Where the bass line is the prominent, dominant piece, the protagonist of the song, the main driving riff that you hear, getting the character of the riff to be just the way you want it to be, that takes a lot of time. Listen, you're hearing four basses on there, doing four different personalities, and that's what gives it character, but it takes a lot of work."
"It's all for love... With the love, L.O.V.E."
"Love lives forever."
"I respect the secrets and magic of nature. That's why it makes me so angry when I see these things that are happening, that every second, I hear, the size of a football field is torn down in the Amazon. I mean, that kind of stuff really bothers me. That's why I write these kinds of songs, you know. It gives some sense of awareness and awakening and hope to people. I love the Planet, I love the trees. I have this thing for trees - the colors and changing of leaves. I love it. I respect those kind of things. I really feel that nature is trying so hard to compensate for man's mismanagement of the planet. Because the planet is sick, like a fever. If we don't fix it now, it's at the point of no return. This is our last chance to fix this problem that we have, where it's like a runway train. And the times has come, This Is It. People are always saying,'They'll take care of it. The government'll--Don't worry, they'll--' 'They' who? It starts with us. It's us. Or else it'll never be done... We have four years to get it right. After that it would be irreversible. Let's take care of the planet."
"I love you. That'll be the ending of this under the words."
"When I was a kid, I was denied not only a childhood, but I was denied love. When I reached out to hug my father, he didn't hug me back. When I was scared on an airplane, he didn't put his arm around me and say, "Michael, don't worry. It's going to be OK." When I was scared to go on stage, he said, "get your ass on that stage." … I will never deny a child love. If it means that I have to be crucified or put in jail for it, then that's just what they're going to have to do."
"Don't be afraid to be different."
"People all over the world Are the same everywhere I go, I give in to this, I give in to that, Every day it bothers me so, Am I in a bad situation? People taking me to the extreme, Am I being used? I just need a clue, I don't know which way to go."
"I don't know what's gonna happen to you, baby, But I do know that I love you, You walk around this town with your head all up in the sky, And I do know that I want you."
"Let's dance, let's shout! Shake your body down to the ground."
"I try to do what's right for me, But no-one sees the way I see, And then I try to please them so, But how far can this pleasing go?"
"Sometimes I cry cause I'm confused, Is this a fact of being used? There is no life for me at all, 'Cause I give myself at beck and call."
"Lovely is the feeling now, Fever, temperature's rising now, Power is the force, the vow, That makes it happen, It asks no questions how."
"So let love take us through the hours, I won't be complainin' 'Cause this is love power."
"Keep on with the force, don't stop Don't stop 'til you get enough."
"She got me workin' day and night, And I've been workin' From sun-up to midnight."
"You say that workin is what a man's supposed to do. But I say you ain't right if I can't give sweet love to you."
"How could you leave, girl? 'Cause love for us was meant to be, Then you must be seein' Some other guy instead of me."
"Get on the floor and dance with me, I love the way you shake your thing especially."
"All the colors of the world should be Loving each other wholeheartedly, Yes, it's alright, Take my message to your brother and tell him twice, Spread the word and try to teach the man Who's hating his brother when hate won't do, When we're all the same, 'Cause the blood inside me is inside of you."
"As we walked into the room There were faces staring, glaring, tearing through me, Someone said, 'Welcome to your doom,' Then they smiled with eyes that looked as if they knew me, This is scaring me."
"I said, you wanna be startin' somethin', You got to be startin' somethin', I said, you wanna be startin' somethin', You got to be startin' somethin', It's too high to get over, It's too low to get under, You're stuck in the middle, And the pain is thunder."
"You're a vegetable, you're a vegetable, Still they hate you, you're a vegetable, You're just a buffet, you're a vegetable, They eat off you, you're a vegetable."
"Mama se, Mama sa, Mama coo sa."
"Night creatures call. The dead start to walk in their masquerade. There's no escapin' the jaws of the alien this time (they're open wide). This is the end of your life. lyrics"
"Beat it, beat it, No-one wants to be defeated, Showin' how funky and strong is your fight, It doesn't matter who's wrong or right. Just beat it."
"You wanna show them that you're really not scared, You're playing with your life, this ain't no truth or dare, They'll kick you then they'll beat you then they'll tell you it's fair, So beat it."
"She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene, I said, 'Don't mind, but what do you mean I am the one, Who will dance, on the floor, in the round?'"
"People always told me, 'Be careful what you do, Don't go around breaking young girls' hearts,' And momma always told me, 'Be careful who you love, Be careful what you do, 'cause a lie becomes the truth.'"
"Billie Jean is not my lover, She's just a girl who claims that I am the one, But the kid is not my son."
"Your butt is mine Gonna tell you right Just show your face In broad daylight"
"I'm telling you On what I feel Gonna catch your mind Dont shoot to kill Well, they say the sky's the limit, And to me that's really true, But, my friend you have seen nothing, Just wait 'til I get through."
"Im giving you On a count three Just show your stuff Or let it be Im telling you Just watch your mouth I know your game What you're about! Well, they say the sky's the limit, And to me that's really true, But, my friend you have seen nothing, Just wait 'til I get through."
"We can change the world tomorrow. This could be a better place. If you don't like what I'm sayin', Then won't you slap my face."
"Well, they say the sky's the limit, And to me that's really true, But, my friend you have seen nothing, Just wait 'til I get through."
"And the whole world has to answer right now, Just to tell you once again, 'Who's bad!'"
"The way you make me feel, You really turn me on, You knock me off my feet, My lonely days are gone."
"I just can't stop loving you, I just can't stop loving you, And if I stop, then tell me just what will I do? 'Cause I just can't stop loving you."
"Each Time The Wind Blows I Hear Your Voice So I Call Your Name. Whispers At Morning Our Love Is Dawning Heaven's Glad You Came."
"You'll never make me stay So take your weight off of me. I know your every move So won't you just let me be. I've been here times before But I was too blind to see That you seduce every man. This time you won't seduce me."
"As he came into the window It was the sound of a crescendo He came in her apartment He left the blood stains on the carpet She ran underneath the table He could see she was unable So she ran into the bedroom She was struck down, it was her doom"
"Annie, are you OK? Annie, are you OK? Are you OK, Annie? You've been hit by, you've been struck by A smooth criminal."
"I don't care what you talkin' 'bout baby. I don't care what you say. Don't you come walkin' beggin' back mama. I don't care anyway. Time after time I gave you all of my money. No excuses to make. Ain't no mountain that I can't climb baby. All is going my way."
"'Cause there's a time when you're right And you know you must fight, Who's laughing, baby? Don't you know? And there's a choice that we make, And a choice you must take, Who's laughing, baby?"
"So, just leave me alone, Leave me alone, Leave me alone, Leave me alone, stop it, Just stop doggin' me around."
"Susie got your number And Susie ain't your friend Look who took you under With seven inches in Blood is on the dance floor Blood is on the knife Susie's got your number And Susie says it's right."
"I have to find my peace 'cause no-one seems to let me be, False prophets cry of doom, what are the possibilities? I told my brothers 'There'll be problem times and tears for fears, We must live each day like it's the last, Go with it, go with it, jam!"
"It ain't too much stuff, Jam, it ain't too much, It ain't too much for me to jam!"
"Just promise me, whatever we say Or do to each other, From now, we make a vow to just Keep it in the closet."
"Heal the world, make it a better place, For you and for me and the entire human race, There are people dying, but if you care enough for the living, Make a better place for you and for me."
"I took my baby on a Saturday bang, Boy, is that girl with you? Yes, we're one and the same. Well, I believe in miracles, And a miracle has happened tonight, But if you're thinking about my baby, It don't matter if you're black or white."
"They print my message in the Saturday Sun, I had to tell them I ain't second to none, And I told about equality, And its true, either you're wrong or you're right."
"And it doesn't seem to matter, and it doesn't seem right, 'Cause the will has brought no fortune, still I cry alone at night, Don't you judge of my composure, 'cause I'm bothered every day, And she didn't leave a letter, she just up and ran away."
"Love is a feeling, Give it when I want it, 'Cause I'm on fire, Quench my desire, Love is a woman, I don't want to give in, Give in to me, give in to me."
"In our darkest hour, in my deepest despair, Will you still care? Will you be there? In my trials and my tribulations, Through our doubts and frustrations, In my violence and my turbulence, Through my fear and my confessions, And my anguish and my pain, Through my joy and my sorrow, In the promise of another tomorrow, I'll never let you part, For you're always in my heart."
"With such confusions, don't it make you wanna scream? Your bash abusing victimize within the scheme, You try to cope with every lie they scrutinize, Oh, brother, please have mercy, 'Cause I just can't take it!"
"Stop pressuring me, just stop pressuring me, Stop pressuring me, Make me wanna scream."
"All I wanna say is that they don't really care about us."
"Skin head Dead head, Everybody gone bad, Situation, Aggravation , Everybody allegation, In the suite, On the news, Everybody dogfood, Bang Bang, Shot dead, Everybody gone mad ,"
"Beat me, hate me You can never break me Will me, thrill me You can never kill me."
"You know I really do hate to say it, The government don't wanna see, But if Roosevelt was livin' He wouldn't let this be, no, no."
"Some things in life they just don't wanna see But if Martin Luther was livin' He wouldn't let this be."
"How does it feel, When you're alone and you're cold inside?"
"What about sunrise, what about rain? What about all the things that you said we were to gain? What about flowering fields, is there a time? What about all the dreams that you said was yours and mine?"
"Did you ever stop to notice All the children dead from war? Did you ever stop to notice This crying earth, these weeping shores?"
"Before you judge me, try hard to love me, Look within your heart then ask, Have you seen my childhood?"
"People say I'm strange that way, 'Cause I love such elementary things, It's been my fate to compensate For the childhood I've never known."
"Just because you read it in a magazine, Or see it on a TV screen Don't make it factual."
"You can't believe it, you can't conceive it, And you can't touch me, 'cause I'm untouchable, And I know you hate it, and you can't take it, You'll never break me, 'cause I'm unbreakable."
"Speechless, speechless, That's how you make me feel, When I'm with you I am far away, And nothing is for real."
"You are the sun, you make me shine, or more like the stars, that twinkle at night. You are the moon that glows in my heart. You're my daytime, my night-time, my world...you are my life."
"Though the allegations of sexual assault surrounding Jackson are serious, can you really cancel someone whose influence runs so deep and who is so omnipresent? Jenna Wortham, a culture writer for the New York Times, contemplated this question on the podcast "Still Processing." She says she's managed to cut out such entertainers as Allen, Louis CK and Chris Brown -- but Jackson is still everywhere. His songs influenced generations of musicians. It simply isn't possible to totally cancel him."
"My wish is to meet him in heaven when I pass on"
"And if he is not credited for composing the music, it's because he was not happy with the result sound coming out of the console. At the time, game consoles did not allow an optimal sound reproduction, and Michael found it frustrating. He did not want to be associated with a product that devalued his music..."
"He will always be the King of Pop. He has not abdicated, nor has he been usurped."
"One important difference between Jackson's career and those of many others is that he was a child star who became an adult star – a very difficult transition to pull off."
"We're close, he's a good friend of mine, we definitely have a connection that most people don't have..."
"What Michael Jackson did, almost pre-hip hop, is profound. What he does for black music in the beginning is mind-boggling"
"He's my biggest influence so that's why I'm very defensive. I'm ready to fight about Michael Jackson"
"He was adamantly against drugs and alcohol, he was extremely straight-laced; I couldn’t even swear around him. Being with Michael brought me back to my innocence."
"In some ways Michael reminds me of the walking wounded. He's an extremely fragile person. I think that just getting on with life, making contact with people, is hard enough, much less to be worried about whither goest the world."
"I don't think MJ knew just how much his music shaped a whole generation of Arabs — just how many fans he had here and just how devoted they remained throughout his ordeals. We might not have heard of The Beatles or Elvis Presley, but we sure knew Michael Jackson."
"Michael Jackson gave us pride. He gave us pride in our blackness, gave us pride that we can look good and be cool and be worldwide. Michael Jackson is a fucking icon. And I believe they took Michael Jackson down because he had too much power."
"Michael Jackson is literally walking in the shoes that no Black person has ever walked in before. If he ever writes an autobiography, it will be one of the most interesting ever. A Black man with no real formal education becomes the most powerful man in the industry, despite hatred, racism, enemies in his own camps and a media willing to be bought to the highest bidder."
"He was so energetic that at five years old, he was like a leader. We saw that. So we said, 'Hey, Michael, you be the lead guy.' The audience ate it up. He was into those James Brown things at the time, you know. The speed was the thing. He would see somebody do something, and he could do it right away."
"It was sort of frightening. He was so young. He didn't go out and play much. So if you want me to tell you the truth, I don't know where he got it. He just knew."
"He is a very smart cookie, Michael. He knows what he wants, he knows what he is doing. I have nothing but admiration. Also, he is a very kind person."
"Just as Mozart could hear whole symphonies in his head, Jackson fully realized his songs before they were put down on paper. Jackson created some of the greatest pop anthems of all time, that only adds to the sense that what MJ had was a special, special gift."
"A thousand years from now, when the history of popular music is examined, no single performer will be as remembered and as celebrated as Michael Jackson."
"Go to any village, any corner in India and you'll find everyone is familiar with the name Michael Jackson. There is no musician who can replace MJ."
"I think Michael Jackson has influenced every performer on the face of the earth. What he really inspired me to do and influenced me to do is my best, and I feel like what he represented is quality and craftsmanship with his performance. He was one of the best performers of all time and it was because he put in work, he put in time, he was creative, and he wanted to be the best."
"I'm upset at the way he's being treated in the media. I think they're really trying to slander his name, and I really think that's unfair for the way that he's contributed to the American culture since the day he was born. I think he deserves much more than that."
"What I'm asking is whether this is still a country where a peculiar person such as Michael Jackson can get a fair shake and be considered innocent until proven guilty … or is this just a 21st-century American barnyard where we all feel free to turn on the moonwalking rooster … and peck it to death?"
"This came down to a prosecutor either so sure Jackson was bad or so offended by Jackson's combination of celebrity and wackiness that he rushed into a case that looked shaky from hello. It looked worse as Tom Sneddon went along, and had become nearly ludicrous by the time Jackson's ex-wife left the stand. No matter how pure Sneddon's motives may have been (and I'm not saying they were, believe me), he began to look like a man pursuing a vendetta, one whose chief hope of securing a conviction lay in the obvious fact that the trial was a sideshow and the accused was … well, a freak."
"The media first turned the trial into a freak-show by emphasizing Jackson's peculiarities rather than his humanity, and stoked the ratings with constant, trivializing coverage while other, far more important stories went under-reported or completely ignored in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Washington, D.C. The press might respond by saying, We gave the people what they wanted. My response would be, My job is to give them what they want. When he steps into a recording studio, it's Michael Jackson's job to give them what they want. Your job is to give the people what they need."
"I was and remain very fond of Michael. I liked him a lot. He was a sad character in that he was an abused child. And “Thriller” I guess was his peak in terms of his powers, by the time I did “Black Or White” he was mad. [Laughs.] The guy that I worked on “Thriller” was a genius and he was 20 years old, but it was like working with a gifted 10-year-old. The guy who I worked on with “Black Or White” was crazy. Michael had gone mad. [Laughs.] I just feel he’s a tragic figure. I liked him a lot and you won’t hear me say bad things about Mike. I mean, I don’t believe he was a child molester. I really do not. I think he was damn weird, no doubt about it, but in terms of sexually molesting a kid, I don’t think so. When he was on trial, I tried to go to show support, and his father wouldn’t let me in the court. His father hates me. I mean, he was surrounded by bad people, and he also created a lot of his misfortune, but he was an incredible performer. Seeing him live in a stadium—and I’ve worked with a lot of people—I’ve never seen anyone who had that kind of power onstage. But in real life he was just a skinny little guy who wasn’t there. He had no presence."
"I always looked up to him--and my dad--since I was a little boy."
"I would go on YouTube and obsessively watch videos of the best performers: Michael Jackson, Usher, Chris Brown, Justin Timberlake, all those guys. And I would study everything: their moves, their facial expressions, the way they carry themselves onstage, everything. There's always so much to learn. Take Michael- he has so much power, and not just in the way he moves, either. I've always felt like his facial expressions are everything. I was watching a Michael video, and I put a piece of paper over his body so just his head was visible, and he was still killing it. Even just with his face, he was able to connect with the audience a hundred percent. Amazing. I was taking mental notes that whole time, and I still work on that."
"He dances with the breathtaking verve of his predecessor James Brown, the beguiling wispiness of Diana Ross, the ungainly pathos of Charlie Chaplin, the edgy joy of a man startled to be alive."
"That's how much we love Michael. We love Michael so much, we let the first kid slide."
"Michael Jackson was the one when there was no one before."
"We stand up and the judge leaves, and Michael turns to me and says, "Bob, the jury system is much older than 200 years, isn't it?" I said, 'Well, yeah, it goes back to the Greeks." He says, "Oh yeah, Socrates had a jury trial, didn't he?" I said, "Yeah, well, you know how it turned out for him." Michael says, "Yeah, he had to drink the hemlock." That's just one little tidbit. We talked about psychology, Freud and Jung, Hawthorne, sociology, black history and sociology dealing with race issues. But he was very well read in the classics of psychology and history and literature."
"The nearest thing we have to royalty in America is Michael Jackson."
"He's sort of a fawn in a burning forest. It's a nice place where Michael comes from. I wish we could all spend some time in his world."
"I just love Michael Jackson. He is loved by people of all ages all over the world and is an eternal presence."
"Whether or not he has ever touched a boy inappropriately, Michael Jackson seems too emotionally stunted to act in any grown-up way, including a deviant sexual one. Naive, juvenile, and terribly damaged, he seems pathetically incapable not just of criminal intent, but of adult consciousness."
"Everyone's thinking they're the new W. Axl Rose, just running their mouths and living in this world where nothing is real. Like, it's really easy to write a couple of songs, but that doesn't mean you get to run your mouth. The only guy who can do that is Michael Jackson. He wrote Thriller, so he can say whatever the fuck he wants."
"What is the definition of cool? Michael Jackson made “Heal the World.” He could do that because he was golden. He was himself. He didn’t have to try to be cool. Think about a lot of your favorite bands and groups. Would they make a song called “Heal the World”? No, because they are too concerned about their leather jackets. Ironically, they are probably wearing leather jackets because of Michael Jackson. Once you’re put in power, you have to take advantage of the position you’re in to make the world better. There were times when I thought I was making the world better, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking at all."
"You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a prince house? for me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him. I don´t care what people say about him now because he´s a f... genius. That´s it — The end! He was robbed of his childhood, which is why he surrounds himself with children. When you´re around kids you can be a little kid yourself and pretend that life is magic and you don´t have to be one of those sweaty people going to work every day. I completely see what he´s doing"
"First of all, we’d like to thank God for watching over us over these past seven months, and our Grandma and Grandpa for their love and support. We would also like to thank the fans. Our father loved you so much because you were always there for him. Our father was always concerned about the planet and humanity. Through all his hard work and dedication, he has helped many charities and donated to all of them. Through all his songs, his message was simple: Love. We will continue to spread his message and help the world. Thank you. We love you, Daddy."
"Daddy was supposed to be here. Daddy was going to perform this year but he couldn't perform last year … Thank you. We love you, Daddy."
"Everyone's all 'a cook?!' like they're surprised to hear it...He was just a normal Dad. Except, I'd say he was the best dad ever."
"(In response to: What do you miss the most?) Everything."
"(In response to 'Did you know at the time why you were putting on the mask?' Jackson often had his children wear scarves, veils or masks to disguise their identities when they left home) Because that when we did go out without our dad, then nobody would really recognise us."
"(Favourite memory of his father) When we were all in Bahrain we used to wake up early and walk to the beach with Coca-Cola and Skittles."
"(In response to: What kind of a dad was he? Was he a strict disciplinarian or could you get away with anything with him?) He (Prince Michael I) could get away with anything (He could get away with it, you couldn't get away with it?) No."
"My heart…my mind… are broken. I loved Michael with all my soul and I can't imagine life without him. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together. I still can't believe it. I don't want to believe it. It can't be so. He will live in my heart forever but it’s not enough. My life feels so empty. I don't think anyone knew how much we loved each other. The purest most giving love I've ever known. Oh God! I'm going to miss him. I can’t yet imagine life without him. But I guess with God’s help... I'll learn. I keep looking at the photo he gave me of himself, which says, 'To my true love Elizabeth, I love you forever.' And, I will love HIM forever."
"To you, Michael is an icon. To us, Michael is family and he will forever live in our hearts. On behalf of my family and myself, thank you for all of your love, thank you for all of your support. We miss him so much. Thank you so much."
"The world has lost an amazing man. A man that cared, and loved and gave everything he had for others."
"Michael Jackson is the reason why I do music and why I am an entertainer. I am devastated by this great loss, and I will continue to be humbled and inspired by his legacy. My prayers are with his family. Michael will be deeply missed, but never forgotten. He’s the greatest … the best ever. No one will ever be better."
"Remember his unparalleled contribution to the world of music, his generosity of spirit in his quest to heal the world, and the joy he brought to his millions of devoted fans throughout the world. No artist will ever take his place. His star will shine forever."
"Words can't begin to describe my sadness for the loss of Michael Jackson. I was honored and humbled to have the opportunity to perform with him several times and he had a profound influence on my career. Michael forever changed the world of music and entertainment and I will always remember him for his kind and sweet spirit."
"I'm having a million different reactions I didn't expect I would feel. He was a great singer — God gives you certain gifts and this child was just an extraordinary child touched by this ability. He could sing like nobody else and he was able to connect with people. His genius can only be compared to Ray Charles's or Stevie Wonder's."
"He really did carve in the stratosphere of American popular culture, in American music, a unique niche, so to speak, because he was capable of joining so much of the vernacular traditions of African-American music with the most up-to-date technology to project into the world the forceful ambition and the edifying inspiration of African-American culture and music."
"When we first met, around 1988, I was struck by the combination of charisma and woundedness that surrounded Michael. He would be swarmed by crowds at an airport, perform an exhausting show for three hours, and then sit backstage afterward, as we did one night in Bucharest, drinking bottled water, glancing over some Sufi poetry as I walked into the room, and wanting to meditate. That person, whom I considered (at the risk of ridicule) very pure, still survived -- he was reading the poems of Rabindranath Tagore when we talked the last time, two weeks ago. Michael exemplified the paradox of many famous performers, being essentially shy, an introvert who would come to my house and spend most of the evening sitting by himself in a corner with his small children."
"Michael had read some of the details regarding Laura and Euna’s predicament. As was often the case with him and global events he read about – from famine in Africa to victims of natural disasters in far off countries, to orphans created by wars – he felt a deep sense of empathy for Laura and Euna. When I shared with him that Euna had a four-year-old daughter, he was even more anguished. He asked me whether I had had any contact with Laura. I told him I had written her a few letters and had been assured they were getting through. Outside of that, her own family had only heard from her twice – brief monitored phonecalls – in the over three months they had been imprisoned. When I told him that, Michael paused. “Do you think,” he said hesitantly, “that the leader of North Korea could be a fan of mine?” I didn’t really know how to respond. Not much is known about the reclusive Kim Jong Il or “Dear leader” as he is called in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Over the years it’s been alleged he has a thing for Hollywood, certain NBA stars, Elvis, and specific liqueurs. Still, I’d never heard about any connection between Michael Jackson and Kim Jong Il. … "I don’t really know,” I answered Michael. “But I can try and find out.” “Please,” Michael responded without hesitantly, “because maybe if he was a fan, I could help get those girls home.” I explained to Michael that there were larger geo-politics involved, nuclear programs, a new administration trying to assert its foreign policy strategy (Obama), and another one in NK possibly going through some sort of transference of power. “Yeah,” Michael said wistfully, “but if someone wants to do something good, they just can. They don’t really need to worry about all that other stuff.”"
"Michael and I shared an absolute love for children, and his heart cried about the pain children around the world faced. One day, while chatting with him about his upcoming Super Bowl performance, Michael was brainstorming how he could use the worldwide exposure for a greater cause, and the Heal The World Foundation was born. … I was so proud of the work we did in that short time, only to find that our good intentions came to a halt when Michael was accused the first time of child molestation. Over night, understandably so, non-profits backed away from our efforts and we quietly closed shop. My family always maintained our belief that Michael was innocent in both cases – for those that were close to Michael, all would admit he was quirky and had bad judgment at times. But to think Michael could abuse a child was unfathomable in my mind. Over the last decade, my relationship with Michael continued to be focused on kids, but now our own. … It was amazing for me to witness in those early years how enamored Michael was with his children. He changed their diapers through the night, sang and played with them, rocked them to sleep, bathed them and had to change his own outfits when they threw up on him – the same routine that all parents know and love. In the few times we spoke, he would always reflect on the miracle of being a parent. He also protected them in a way that reflected his own lost childhood, and his paranoia about being taken advantage of. Paris, Prince and Blanket are three beautiful children. With Michael gone, I truly pray that they will find some peace and be spared the heart wrenching pain that their father faced time and time again in his life."
"Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana, and our hearts are heavy, heavy here. Michael Jackson was the world's greatest entertainer but more than that he was great humanitarian and a great, humble individual. The people of Gary, our hearts are full of tears because of the loss of Michael Jackson."
"While you guys are talking and laughing, you’re not hearing his words. You’re not listening to his words. I need you to hear what he’s saying! Listen to the message that he is telling us."
"From the beginning of my career, he was my idol in show business. He was a genius and an incredible artist!"
"I come to you today with great sadness, acknowledging the loss of the greatest entertainer in the history of mankind. For me he was more than that, he was my idol, he was a role model, he was someone to cry to when my childhood was unbearable, he was a brother, he was a dear friend."
"I'm hurt. But I'm celebrating his life and his music. Dancing and crying and dancing in public. Holding heart-to-heart conversations with complete strangers about one of the things, if not the only thing, we share in common, That Is The Legendary MoonWalker Himself. A white guy in a pickup truck pulled alongside me on the expressway and shouted to me, had I heard about Mike?!? It's surreal and it's everywhere!!! Every time I feel like getting sad, one of his songs comes on, and I'm just filled with happiness and start singing and smiling. He was the best to ever do it. Salaams, Peace & Blessings. May Allah have mercy on his soul. We Love You MJ!!!"
"Michael's death was devastating for me, regardless of whether or not I was supposed to go on tour with him. He was such an inspiration and a remarkable human being."
"I feel so thankful for him sharing his brilliance"
"As a kid Michael was always beyond his years, he was an innovator, he was a genius at what he did. He had a knowingness about him. At 9 years old, when I first started working with him, he seemed to me like he had been here before. He was just so knowledgeable about life."
"Michael Jackson was not only loved by the people of the world, for his incomparable talent, he was loved by the magnificent wild animals for which he provided the most beautiful home at his Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara, CA. We were thrilled to have Michael's beloved tigers, Thriller and Sabu, join our pride here at Shambala when Michael needed a good home for them. Thriller and Sabu will always remind us of Michael."
"It almost sounds crazy to say that the show wasn't about him, but … he'd put it in perspective all the time, saying, "This is what we're here for, to spread a message of love and taking care of the planet, that we want people to understand it's very, very dear and not to take it for granted.""
"The first album I ever bought with my own money was Thriller. His performance at the Grammys is a milestone in the history of American music. I watched it on TV and spent the next two weeks in my kitchen trying to learn how to moonwalk."
"Michael grew to understand why the world is in the state it is. He would ask “Why?” but not get trapped in trying to find reasons for each and every problem. His aim was finding solutions. His message was about solutions. Michael’s day-to-day thought process was: “How do I make the world a better place?” He dedicated his existence to responding to this question, and to giving a voice to those who can’t speak out for themselves. Man in the Mirror, We are the World, Will You Be There – all these songs put forward a simple but powerful message: If someone is hungry, give them food, but also help them become self-sufficient. Michael taught us that when you do good, you start with the individual, then move onto a family, a neighborhood, a village, a nation."
"Michael always looked for the good in people, but he also wanted people to understand him, and what he was here for. This made the ridicule he endured so much harder to bear. How can someone who gave so much, be the subject of so much hate? Why is it, the more blessed we are, the tougher our times are destined to be? My brother wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was at peace, and his peaceful state was a blessing from God. Michael was given the rare talent to entertain, sing and perform. But the true blessing God gave him was the ability to use his talents to do good for others. Michael’s songs inspired us to do better. That was his true gift. We still feel Michael’s loss. But what will happen as time passes? What will happen to Michael’s real purpose for being? Who can carry on Michael’s work selflessly, without ulterior motive? Nations and governments are capable of good deeds, but those good deeds are too often done to exert control over others. Michael never wanted to control anybody, he only wanted to spread happiness and joy."
"Michael didn’t care if we knew everything he did for people, because God knows. God knows his intentions, and knows the results. I know my brother is in a very secure, serene, peaceful place. When we live on earth, we are judged not only by who we are, but also by what we do for others. When we leave, we take the good and bad deeds with us. Michael took nothing but good deeds with him. Michael and I were raised to believe there is a Supreme Being. Having success told us God had a plan for us. Michael used his success in a positive way. He knew that it’s not what you get from others, it’s what you do for others. We all achieve things in life, but the greatest achievement is doing God’s work. Michael was a man of God because he was doing His work. Eternal life is the ultimate reward from God – and Michael has eternal life."
"I had just come back from Nigeria and he asked what I went to do in Nigeria because he had never visited Nigeria and I told him about the historical Badagry project that we are doing in Nigeria and he felt the same way I felt; he felt that the project must be done because it is imperative that we understand what our forefathers and fore mothers went through. He looked forward to the finishing of the project because he wanted to come and see it and I assured him that we would get the project done. The only thing is that when we do finish this project he will not be there physically, but he will be there in spirit.""
"I hurt! (comforted by Jackie and Janet) I stand here trying to find words of comfort and solace, trying to understand why the Lord has taken our brother to return home from such a short visit here on Earth. Michael, when you left us, a part of me went with you and a part of you will live forever within me but also a part of you will live forever within all of us. Michael, I will treasure the good times, the fun we had singing, dancing, and laughing. I can remember when we used to come home from school and we would grab a quick bite to eat and we’d try to watch "The Three Stooges" as much of it as possible before mother will come in and say it’s time to go to the recording studio. I also Michael remember a time when I went in the record store and there was this man purchasing a lot of CD’s. And he would go and grab another batch of CD’s. He was an older gentleman, he had short afro, buck crooked teeth, and his clothes were rumpled. I walked up behind him and said: "Michael, what are you doing in this store?" He turned to me and said: "Marlon, how did you know it was me?" I told him: "You’re my brother. I can spot you anywhere regardless of your make-up. I know your walk, I know your body language and no, shoes did not help" (Michael wore the same shoes wherever we went). But I guess that was his way of trying to experience what we take for granted. We would never, never understand what he endured. Not being able to walk across a street without a crowd gathering around him; being judged, ridiculed, how much pain can one take? Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone. Michael was the voice of our angelic trumpets, and he would continue to be the voice, that angelic voice, in Heaven, nearest to our Creator, and waiting us when our day comes to pass. Michael, I love you; I will miss when we said our good-bye’s. I would hug you and I’d say: "I love you" and your response was: "I love you more". You know, the Lord has a purpose for everything, and sometime we just can’t see it or understand it. But it will be made clear to us when we reach that ultimate, ultimate reward of being in His presence. And Michael, you're There. You’re right There. You have finished your work here on Earth, and the Lord has called you to come home with Him. So I thank you, Michael, for all the smiles that you’ve placed in many people’s hearts. And I thank you for everything that you’ve done for others across this globe, in the Lord’s name. And I have one request, Michael, one request: I would like for you to give our brother, my twin brother, Brandon, (voice breaking) a hug from me! I love you, Michael, and I’ll miss you!"
"I am absolutely devastated at this tragic and unexpected news. He was the consummate entertainer and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him."
"Music will never be the same."
"He was a thoughtful and selfless man, full of the unconditional love of God and good works, that touched and changed lives. He was indeed a shining light."
"This is such a tragic loss and a terrible day. The incomparable Michael Jackson has made a bigger impact on music than any other artist in the history of music. He was magic. He was what we all strive to be. He will always be the king of pop! Life is not about how many breaths you take, but about how many moments in life that take your breath away. For anyone who has ever seen, felt, or heard his art, we are all honored to have been alive in this generation to experience the magic of Michael Jackson. I love you Michael."
"My fifth birthday party was M.J. themed, I insisted. My mother found a lookalike to come sing happy birthday and I KNEW he wasn't MY Michael. Thank you Michael Jackson for being my FIRST of many! My mother took me to my FIRST concert, I was only two years old. I fell in love."
"I just found him a very giving and loving person."
"I personally can’t believe it. But it’s more unfortunate for the world of music. My love goes out to his family. … A sad day in history, not [just] music."
"If it were not for Micheal Jackson I would not be where or who I am today."
"Yes, yes, Michael Jackson was a human being, but dammit, he was a king. Long live the King"
"No one will be able to replace him. But I know that the light that he emanated from the stage will live on with all of us who saw him for what he was and always will be — a great teacher, pure musical inspiration. His death can only be compared to John Lennon's and Elvis'."
"Michael was filled with humility, sensitivity, reverence and respect for anyone and everyone. And most of all, the love that he had for his kids equalled the love that he had for his fans. He just was a guy that was beyond amazing, and it’s just sad to hear all the spurious stories that have been created about him."
"I can't believe. The most amazing entertainer of all Time just left. I just can't understand. We Will always love you Michael."
"A major strand of our cultural DNA has left us."
"He was a massively talented boy man with a gentle soul."
"I will be mourning my friend, brother, mentor and inspiration.. He gave me and my family hope. I would never have been me without him."
"MICHAEL JACKSON the first 2 english words i eva spoke. The future sucx!"
"I am so sadened by MJs death. I clung to those records throughout my childhood. A complete musical hero of mine. May he rest in peace."
"I wish I got to tell him how much his music existence changed my life. He was my biggest inspiration and will forever live on in my heart."
"I did not find Michael weird, messed up, or anything you’ve ever heard about him. I want to say that I feel all of the allegations ever charged against Michael were false, and that in my discernment, he did not have the capacity to ever do anything except love children and let them know he would do anything to stand up for them, and help them. Just look at the magnificent work he did on their behalf in writing and co-producing “We Are The World,” and the 39 charities for children he gave to generously. That was Michael. I believe that during his trials he related to the suffering of Christ, and prayed for intervention, because he was being accused over what he loved most—children. This caused him perhaps more pain than anything in his life.""
"Rarely has the world received a gift with the magnitude of artistry, talent, and vision as Michael Jackson. He was a true musical icon."
"When you were with him, you really felt like God was within him. He was an amazing, superhuman kind of person, but he always treated you as an equal. He would be your friend and he never asked for anything in return. … I know that people looked at Michael and thought he was strange, but to me, he was fascinating. … He was the most inspirational person in my life. His one dream was to cure all the sick children in the world. And when I'd say, "Isn't that impossible?" Michael would just start to cry. He was very emotional about things that moved him. I guess you'd have to say he was a pure innocent in a world that wasn't so innocent anymore."
"He read them a book every day. When we were in Virginia during the Invincible [sessions], there was not one day missed reading the children something. So that showed me right there that he was an incredible father. … He was like, 'I would never have them go through the same things ever (the similar childhood/upbringing) in their lives,' Riley said. "He was like, 'I think the best scolding for children was a time-out.' The best scolding for children was, 'Let's read a book.'""
"I don’t really think the music industry has taken a deep enough look at what Michael Jackson meant to everybody, all of us artists, producers, actors, actresses, all of us, entertainment as a whole. I don’t think that they took a deep enough look because everyone is too busy with their head up their own butt. When Michael was on trial, nobody…nobody stopped to go and support him at the trial. … The guy is acquitted on ten counts of child molestation. No one said, "Sorry Michael.’ No one said, "Michael, we knew you were innocent." No one did a BET tribute to him then. Nobody played his music and did a marathon then. Nobody rallied up and did a concert. Why should Michael have to go on tour to raise money? How come all of the artists didn't band together and say, "Hey! You know what? Let's do a tour like Michael did the We Are The World Tour and let's raise some money. Let's get this thing going." No one did that. Tookie Williams is the founder of the Crips gang. … They were trying to get him pardoned from the death penalty and half of Hollywood showed up for this man. What I can't understand is like, OK people didn't want to go near Michael Jackson when he was in trouble … But they show up for a guy who executed families. A little girl begged for her life and he executed her. They said because he wrote in his time in prison he wrote children's books that he tried to turn his life around. He was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Well, how about the millions of children Michael Jackson has helped over the span of his career? Yet two children come with some false allegations and those two children become the two children that destroy him. It’s crazy. It makes me look at the entertainment business and just say I’m surrounded by a bunch of hypocrites. When you ask me how would it affect them? I don’t even think they realize what this is. Everyone’s gonna do their tributes, but the tributes now if you look at it, it’s all because now everyone is going to get some spotlight, they’re gonna get some shine. Now all of the sudden everyone wants to say something good about him."
"No one talks about when he did the Victory tour, I remember as a kid Michael being on tour with the Victory tour right? And every night on the news they would announce that Michael Jackson donated his money from every city that he did, he donated it to a new charity. He donated his money from the Victory tour to charities. I thought that was amazing. I'm like, wow! This guy's donating millions of dollars every night to a new charity. Then he would stop in every city and every city he would stop at a hospital and visit kids that were burned, ill or whatever. He took the time to do all that."
"Michael Jackson was extraordinary. When we worked together on Bad, I was in awe of his absolute mastery of movement on the one hand, and of the music on the other. Every step he took was absolutely precise and fluid at the same time. It was like watching quicksilver in motion. He was wonderful to work with, an absolute professional at all times, and - it really goes without saying - a true artist. It will be a while before I can get used to the idea that he's no longer with us."
"We maintained our relationship for so long because it was never not real. People expect anything in entertainment or Hollywood to be transient, and it's not as interesting a story for us to have been lifelong friends. People want sordid details or they want big blowups, and the truth of the matter is, from the time we met when I was 13, we understood each other and became very good friends, and that was it, we didn't need to make it into anything else. … I was just out of college, and wanting to fall in love and have a fairy tale, I was holding on to that. He just felt so bad that there were so many little children in Romania in these orphanages, and he wanted to try to give them homes, and I really wanted to be able to do that with him, but it would have divided my life too much. I hope when you write this, it doesn't sound freakish. What it was was a young man who kept reaching to try to find happiness. I think he wanted to take his resources and make a difference to other people in their lives, and he knew that I wanted to do that in the world, too, so he would reach out to someone like me and say, "How can we make a difference, it's easier to adopt a child if you're two people." He never said, formally, "Will you marry me," it was never that for me, he never was that definitive, but I think he was a guy who kept searching for happiness. The problem is when you try to bring that out and in this society, it turns into a tabloid sentence, which is, "He wanted Brooke Shields to live with him and adopt babies," and it sounds ridiculous. And it never was that clear-cut. He found people he loved in his life and he didn't want to let go of them and he wanted them all to live together because he didn't want to go out into the outside world, which was so cruel and too much to handle, and it makes sense."
"Michael Jackson was one of the most talented and dynamic performer/singer/songwriters I ever had the pleasure of working with, he was amazing. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding his personal life in recent years overshadowed his unparalleled contributions to the music world, which is a tragedy in and of itself. But his music will live on forever no matter what and his memory will be adored and admired for years to come."
"I was so excited to see his show in London. We were going to be on tour in Europe at the same time and I was going to fly in to see him. He has been an inspiration throughout my entire life and I'm devastated he's gone!"
"We have lost a genius and a true ambassador of not only Pop music but of all music. He has been an inspiration to multiple generations, and I will always cherish the moments I shared with him on stage and all of the things I learned about music from him and the time we spent together. My heart goes out to his family and loved ones."
"I saw how kind he was and what a wonderful human being. I saw him with his children and I had never seen a better father. … He always said to me, "I want people to really know who I am after I'm gone."… He wanted to be remembered as a great human being and he wanted to create as many happy places for the children of the world as he could."
"I would not be the artist, performer, and philanthropist I am today without the influence of Michael. I have great admiration and respect for Him and I’m so thankful I had the opportunity to meet and perform with such a great entertainer In so many ways he transcended culture. He broke barriers, he changed radio formats! With music, he made it possible for people like Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama to impact the mainstream world. His legacy is unparalleled Michael Jackson will never be forgotten."
"Michael Jackson was the first African American to sing to a crossover audience. I do feel like without Michael Jackson, MTV would not be on the map. It would not be what it is today. This is bigger than the loss of Elvis."
"I have never felt this before in my life. I could measure my childhood 2 now on an mj growth chart. if this is true.The last legend."
"If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book … that's no fun at all."
"It really sucks when music is so perfect you just don't need to hear it anymore."
"I'm ready to take the heat."
"My inspirations don't come from outer space, they just come to me. I have no idea why they come when they do."
"Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song."
"I write the songs first and in most cases teach myself the technique second."
"My first [guitar] lessons lasted two weeks and it was "Jingle Bells." It didn't make any sense at all. I wanted to know how to play like Hendrix..."
"I've always spent a lot of time on my records with what I think were unique rhythmic approaches … but no one ever writes about your rhythm playing"
"When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong."
"I can embarrass myself very easily on guitar. It's funny because people say to me I can play anything; I'm God on the guitar. But I could make a big list of everything I can't play... I'm grateful that people don't notice that."
"Eee-nee-mee-nee-my-nee-moe"
"18th September, 1970; Jimi Hendrix dies. I'm still on the football team when I get the news. So I take my helmet off and confront the coach to tell him I'm quitting the team. In a moment of brilliance he gives me one look and says "OK"."
"I think it's quite painfully obvious when someone's practicing through an amp, as opposed to someone who's really laying down some stuff that just happens to be fast."
"The Squares [his former band] never really fit in. We weren't rock enough. We weren't alternative enough. We weren't new wave enough and we weren't punk enough. Maybe we just weren't the right people for the band."
"Mozart was a freaky kind of shredder."
"I assume most guitar players are like me. They're playing, having fun; then they get a magazine in the mail that says "Shred Is Dead" and they say, "What the Hell?" They throw it away and keep on playing."
"When you think about where guitar playing is going today...: it's going everywhere at the same time."
"I'll tell you one thing: I will always play the sh** out of my guitar."
"Sounds cool. Looks cool. Feels cool."
"Relax. Be yourself. Play a lot."
"When these guitar mags bring up that stuff up and say such and such came up with this and that which is pushing the boundaries, I just say, "let's step back for a minute and admit something: nothing has happened for the last 100 years." And it's okay. It's not a bad thing … We're all working with "tools" that have been in existence for the last 100 years and there hadn't been a new "tool" for a long long time."
"Basic anatomy. That has got to be the ongoing frustration: Why can't my fingers do what I want them to do? Not being able to play what I hear in my head — that is the ultimate source of frustration."
"When you hear something you don't like, don't ever play it again."
"...Is the greatest guitar player in the world."
"Satriani's Law: There's at least a 30% chance that someone will print the name Satriani incorrectly"
"Guitars are fun. There are plenty of different kinds to play. They look cool. They sound cool. Don't *you* want to play guitar?"
"There's a fine line between giving the sense of freedom and being too free."
"Solos I kind of [couldn't] care less about. I know most people probably think that's what I care most about, but it's really the melody playing that is the cornerstone of what I'm working on."
"I've always done "the wrong thing" and had a pretty wonderful time doing it."
"I pride myself on being incorrigible. I have a very hard time being told what to do."
"When I want to play music, you've got to get me on tape or else it goes."
"First of all, paleontologists don't believe one another on their own discoveries—how can I believe in people who don't even believe in it themselves? And biblically, there's no mention of dinosaurs. According to the word of the Bible, Adam had dominion over all animals; according to man, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. So either God's a liar, or…well, I don't believe that God's a liar."
"If a girl is drunk is it OK to have sex with her? Yahoo Post on Phil McGraw's tweet, August 21, 2013."
"The people change, the common denominator is you."
"Dr. Phil's Ten Life Laws"
"# You either get it, or you don't."
"# You create your own experience."
"# People do what works."
"# You cannot change what you do not acknowledge."
"# Life rewards action."
"# There is no reality, only perception."
"# Life is managed; it is not cured."
"# We teach people how to treat us."
"# There is power in forgiveness."
"# You have to name it before you can claim it."
"Mr. Manners he's not. [...] Dr. Phil issues counsel as marching orders, and despite fiery disapproval from the chattering classes and many in the mental health community, his readers, viewers and even chagrined on-air guests love him for it."
"Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion… And whether Canada ends up with one national government or two governments or ten governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be."
"Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy…These achievements are due in part to the Reform Party…"
"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, I don't feel particularly bad for many of these people."
"These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.”"
"Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society…It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."
"[Y]our country, and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."
"It may not be true, but it's legendary that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians."
"[S]ome basic facts about Canada that are relevant to my talk... Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it."
"In terms of the unemployed... don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."
"While [Montreal] it is a French-speaking city – largely – it has an enormous English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics: they who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and culturally tend to identify with the English community."
"[W]e have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process."
"[T]he NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men."
"[The Liberal party is a] moderate Democrat, a type of Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in fairly liberal social values."
"In the last Parliament, [the Liberal Party] enacted comprehensive gun control..."
"There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal party gets the votes of most Catholics in the country, including many practising Catholics."
"Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron."
"But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy matters."
"In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s, early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the largest deficits in Canadian history."
"They were in favour of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand... This explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power."
"The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican."
"Let me say a little bit about the Reform party because I want you to be very clear on what the Reform party is and is not... The Reform party is very much a leader-driven party."
"[The Reform Party] also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are some anti-market elements in the Reform Party."
"The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things."
"[The Reform Party is] also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues."
"Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that."
"The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United States... [T]he dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably similar."
"The Bloc Québécois is equivalent to your Southern secessionists, Southern Democrats, states rights activists. The Bloc Québécois, its 44 seats, come entirely from the province of Quebec. But even more strikingly, they come from ridings, or election districts, almost entirely populated by the descendants of the original European French settlers."
"If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at almost any cost."
"The Liberal party is very much your northern Democrat, or mainstream Democratic party, a party that is less concessionary to the secessionists than the PCs, but still somewhat concessionary. And they still occupy the mainstream of public opinion in Ontario, which is the big and powerful province, politically and economically, alongside Quebec."
"The Reform party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican movement in Western Canada; the U.S. Republicans started in the western United States."
"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status."
"If Ottawa giveth, then Ottawa can taketh away… This is one more reason why Westerners, but Albertans in particular, need to think hard about their future in this country. After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada. …Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become "maitres chez nous"."
"You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."
"It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction."
"After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn’t mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It’s a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question.…Make no mistake. Canada is not a bilingual country. In fact it is less bilingual today than it has ever been...As a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions."
"There is a continental culture. There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders."
"I don't know all the facts on Iraq, but I think we should work closely with the Americans."
"I think in Atlantic Canada, because of what happened in the decades following Confederation, there is a culture of defeat that we have to overcome. …Atlantic Canada's culture of defeat will be hard to overcome as long as Atlantic Canada is actually physically trailing the rest of the country."
"I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it."
"Mr. Speaker, I am sure the picture of the hon. member of the NDP [Svend Robinson] is posted in much more wonderful places than just police stations."
"This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of public opinion… In my judgment Canada will eventually join with the allied coalition if war on Iraq comes to pass. The government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to contribute. In the end it will join out of the necessity created by a pattern of uncertainty and indecision. It will not join as a leader but unnoticed at the back of the parade."
"We support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary to win"
"We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing again with national and global security matters."
""It [referring to calling a Minister "Idiot"] was probably not an appropriate term, but we support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary to win."
"The world is now unipolar and contains only one superpower. Canada shares a continent with that superpower. In this context, given our common values and the political, economic and security interests that we share with the United States, there is now no more important foreign policy interest for Canada than maintaining the ability to exercise effective influence in Washington so as to advance unique Canadian policy objectives."
"On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction. In our judgment, it was much more fundamental. It was the removing of a regime that was hostile, that clearly had the intention of constructing weapons systems. … I think, frankly, that everybody knew the post-war situation was probably going to be more difficult than the war itself. Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took."
"But I'm very libertarian in the sense that I believe in small government and, as a general rule, I don't believe in imposing values upon people."
"We must aim to make Canada a lower tax jurisdiction than the United States."
"Same sex marriage is not a human right. … [U]ndermining the traditional definition of marriage is an assault on multiculturalism and the practices in those communities."
"Corruption is not a Canadian value!"
"I believe that all taxes are bad."
"Canada is a vast and empty country."
"Those of different faiths and no faith should seek areas of common agreement based on their different perspectives."
"Gar nar dai doe heem."
"I think people should elect a cat person. If you elect a dog person, you elect someone who wants to be loved. If you elect a cat person, you elect someone who wants to serve."
"Now I know it’s unfashionable to refer to colonialism in anything other than negative terms. And certainly, no part of the world is unscarred by the excesses of empires. But in the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant...This genius for governance shown by the mother country at the time no doubt explains in part why Canada’s path to independence was so long, patient and peaceful."
"When Ralph Goodale tried to tax Income Trusts they showed us where they stood, they showed us their attitude towards raiding Seniors hard earned assets and a Conservative government will never allow either of these parties to get away with that."
"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations."
"The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history… Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture."
"In exercising our sovereignty over these waters, we are not only fulfilling our duty to the people who called this northern frontier home, and to the generations that will follow; we are also being faithful to all who came before us, who through great hardship and sacrifice made a quest for knowledge of the North."
"It [the Iraq invasion] was absolutely an error. It's obviously clear the evaluation of weapons of mass destruction proved not to be correct. That's absolutely true and that's why we're not sending anybody to Iraq."
"Faith teaches that there is a right and wrong beyond mere opinion or desire. Most importantly, it teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, that how freedom is exercised matters as much as freedom itself,"
"We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them."
"We're very concerned about CRTC's decision on usage-based billing and its impact on consumers. I've asked for a review of the decision./Nous sommes très préoccupés par la décision du CRTC sur la facturation selon l'usage. J'ai demandé qu'on examine cette décision. (From post made on http://www.facebook.com/#!/pmharper on 02/01/2011)."
"A transition is taking place in Egypt. In my judgement, there is no going back. I think the old expression, “They’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one.”"
"I think I have been perfectly clear in saying that I hope Canadians do elect a majority government. I think this cycle of election after election, minority after minority is beginning to put some of the country's interests in serious jeopardy."
"When people think of Islamic terrorism, they think of Afghanistan, or maybe they think of some place in the Middle East, but the truth is that threat exists all over the world ... There are a number of threats on a number of levels, but if you are talking about terrorism it is Islamicism ... There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats ... homegrown [Islamic] terrorism is something we keep an eye on."
"Out security agencies work with each other and with others around the globe to track people who are threats to Canada and to watch threats that may evolve. I think though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression. It’s time to treat this- these things are serious threats. Global terrorist attacks, people who have agendas of violence—deep and abiding threats to all the values that our society stands for."
"a light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness will always have Canada as a friend"
"Israel is the Middle East’s only legitimate democracy, surrounded by cadres, warlords and villains that do not respect democracy or human rights. These bellicose nations jealously regard Israel, envying its success, stability, and might. Israel faces an impossible calculus between defending itself and facing angry outcries or risking its own destruction."
"we do not offer them a better health-care plan than the ordinary Canadian can receive. I think that’s something that new and old stock Canadians can agree with"
"I think he's just out to get the Jewish vote. But that's not the way to do it. That's so insincere. I know that Jews seem to think Stephen Harper is so pro-Israel. I think he's capitalizing on that."
"When I recently re-read the definition of the term, "malignant narcissism", I felt like I was sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons, watching Harper tell outrageous lies about his opponents (like how they support the Taliban or their family is a terrorist) under the libel protection afforded to him in the House, makeup running in its customary stream down the right side of his face, eyes flashing in that rare emotional occurrence mentioned above, lips pulled back against his teeth in an expression that more resembles a rabid dog about to attack than an actual, human smile..."
"Harper is a nerd who aspires to bullydom. He keeps his caucus on a short leash. He speaks to the public via ads. The press and the people - the ingrates! - cannot be trusted to stay on message."
"You are too calculating. Don't tell me you are young. Youth gives all it can: it gives itself without reserve."
"First, prayer; then, atonement; in the third place, very much 'in the third place', action."
"True virtue is not sad or disagreeable, but pleasantly cheerful."
"All the things of this world are no more than earth. Place them in a heap under your feet and you will be so much the nearer to heaven."
"Gold, silver, jewels: dust, heaps of manure. Gratification, sensual pleasures, satisfaction of the appetites: like a beast, like a mule, like a cock, like a pig, like a bull. Honours, distinctions, titles: things of air, puffs of pride, lies, nothingness."
"I am every day more convinced that happiness in Heaven is for those who know how to be happy on earth."
"With God's grace, you have to tackle and carry out the impossible, because anybody can do what is possible."
"Even in our times, despite those who deny God, earth is very close to Heaven."
"The pedant interprets the simplicity and the humility of the wise man as ignorance."
"People who are stupid, unscrupulous, or hypocritical, think that others are just the same. And — this is the real pity — they treat them as if they were."
"The understanding that so many people demand of others is that everyone should join their party."
"It is easier to bustle about than to study, but it is also less effective."
"The higher a statue is raised, the harder and more dangerous the impact when it falls."
"For everyone, whatever his state — single, married, widowed or priest — chastity is a triumphant affirmation of love."
"Never say of anybody under you: he is no good. It is you who are no good, for you cannot find a place where he will be of use."
"Those in love do not know how to say good-bye: they are with one another all the time."
"The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link."
"Work is man's original vocation. It is a blessing from God, and those who consider it a punishment are sadly mistaken."
"You are ready to give your life for your honour ... Be ready to give up your honour for your soul."
"There was no emotion in my blood. There was no anger. There was nothing. It was dead silence in my brain."
"Dead, cold quiet, until he walked up. He looked at me... he walked past me and then I heard in my head. It said, 'Do it, do it, do it,' over and over again."
"I aimed at his back and pulled the trigger five times and all hell broke loose in my mind."
"I don't know how easy that would be but I'd try just to lead an ordinary life again. Stay out of the papers."
"There are not many places to go once you've killed someone like John Lennon."
"I just sought a way to be someone I wasn't. To be loved."
"Though movies (Taxi Driver for John Hinckley Jr., would-be assassin of Ronald Reagan), books (The Catcher in the Rye for Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s murderer) and songs (Helter Skelter” for Tate-LaBianca murders mastermind Charles Manson) may articulate specific criminals acts, they don’t inspire the person’s desire for violence. Science has proven that in numerous studies. It’s tempting to blame movies, video games and rap music because they often express humanity’s worst impulses, but impulses are not actions for most of us. And for the mentally ill seeking violence, anything can set them off. Alek Minassian, the self-described incel (involuntary celibate) who deliberately drove his van into a crowd in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, said he was motivated by his resentment toward women for having sexually rejected him in favor of giving “their love and affection to obnoxious brutes.” Should we then demand that studios producing romantic comedies and publishers of romance novels be shamed into contributing to anti-incel causes? The 2017 Las Vegas shooter killed 59 and injured 851 during a country music festival. Should country music bear some responsibility?"
"This is so personal it makes Chris Eubank look like an old friend of mine by comparison."
"I do detest him, I really do. It's no joke. I can't stand him"
"I was always fighting from a young age… I wouldn’t back down, I knew Andy wouldn’t have backed down."
"I don’t know if I wanted to top myself or if I just wanted someone to hug me."
"He has unbelievable body punching power and is exciting to watch."
"In accordance to the way that Benn speaks, he is not educated. Sure, he's educated to a certain extent, but under different circumstances he would be a bouncer on some door in the West End and he'd have three kids from three different women … I am a superior person to that. I have finer points. So, superior in mentality, yes. As a fighter in accordance to the trade, yes."
"It would give me a terrific sense of satisfaction to be the man who sent both Eubank and Benn into retirement. Benn doesn't need me to tell him that he's over the hill because, deep down, he knows it."
"This is portrayed after my wife when she was 21 years old, the third day after we were betrothed, on the 8th of June 1633"
"Quote in original Dutch (citaat van Rembrandt in Nederlands): Dit is naer mijn huijsvrou geconterfeit do si 21 jaer oud was, den derden dach als wij getroudt waeren, den 8 junijus 1633"
"A pious mind / Places honor above wealth - Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1634"
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Een vroom gemoet / Acht eer voor goet - Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1634"
"..that I am very diligently engaged in proficiently completing the three Passion paintings which his Excellency has personally commissioned me [to do]: an Entombment a Resurrection, and an Ascension of Christ.. .Of the above three, one has been completed, namely Christ's Ascension to Heaven, and the other two are more than half-finished.. ..as a token of my readiness to serve you with my favor, I cannot refrain from presenting you, [dear Sir, my latest work. I trust that you most graciously will accept it in addition to my greetings.. ..reside [on] Nieuwe Doelstraat [Amsterdam], Feb. 1636"
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): ..dat ick seer naerstich / doende ben met die drie passij stucken voorts / met bequameheijt aftemaeken die sijn excellencij / my selfs heeft geordijneert, een grafleg[ing] ende een Verrijsenis en een Hemelvaert / Chrisstij. / De selvijge ackoordeeren met / opdoening en afdoeningen vant Chruijs Chrisstij. / Van welken drie voornomden / stuckens een van opgemaekt is daer / Chrisstus ten Heemel opvaert ende / die ander twee [schilderijen] ruym half gedaen sijn.. ..En ken oock niet naerlaeten volgens mijn dienstwillijgen / gunst mijn heer te vereeren van mijn jonsten / werck vertrouwenden dat mij ten bessten sal / afgenoomen werder neffens mijne groeteenissen.. ..[wonend] niuwe doelstraet [Amsterdam], Feb. 1636"
"My [dear] Sir: Let me first offer my kind regards. I agree that I should come soon to see how the picture accords with the rest. As regards the price, I certainly deserve 200 pounds for it, but shall be content with whatever His Excellency pays me. And if you, Sir, do not deem it presumptuous, I shall not neglect to requite the favor. Your humble and devoted servant Rembrandt - It [the picture] will show to [the] best advantage in His Excellency's gallery, since there it will be [displayed] in bright light."
"Because of the great zeal and devotion which I experienced in executing well the two pictures which His Highness commissioned me to make - the one being Christ's dead body being laid in the tomb [ 'The Entombment of Christ' ], and the other Christ arising from the dead to the consternation of the guards — these same two pictures are now finished through studious application, so that I am now disposed to deliver the same and so to afford to His Highness. For in these two paintings the greatest and most natural movement has been expressed [and rendered], which is also the main reason why they have taken so long to execute."
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Door die grooten lust ende geneegenheijt die ick gepleecght hebbe int wel wtvoeren van die twe/ stuckens die sijn Hoocheijt mijn heeft doen maeken weesende het een daer dat doode lichaem Chrisstij/ in den graeve gelecht werd ende dat ander/ daer Chrisstus van den doode opstaet dat met/ grooten verschrickinge des wachters. Dees selvij/ twe stuckens sijn door stuijdiose vlijt nu meede/ afgedaen soodat ick nu oock geneegen ben om die/ selvijge te leeveren om sijn Hoocheijt daer meede/ te vermaeken want deesen twe sijnt daer die meeste/ ende die naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt . in/ geopserveert is dat oock de grooste oorsaeck is dat/ die selvijge soo lang onder handen sij geweest. - in margin: deessen 12 Januwarij 1639, Mijn heer ik woon op die binnenemster, thuijs is genaemt die suijckerbackerrij [in Amsterdam]."
"I have read your pleasant letter of 14th with singular pleasure. I discern your kind inclination and affection which I feel deeply obliged to requite [you] with service and friendship. Because of [my] inclination to do this, [and] in spite of your wish (of Constantijn Huygens], [I] am sending [you] along [with this letter] a painting, hoping that you will accept it, because it is the first momento which I offer you, Sir.. ..postscripttum]: My [dear] Sir: hang this picture in a bright light and in such a manner that it can be viewed from a distance. It will then sparkle at its best."
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): ..soo ist door [mijn] geneegentheijt [voor Huygens de raadspensionaris] tot sulx tegens mijns/ heeren begeeren dees bijgaenden douck toesenden [ bij de brief]/ hoopende dat u mijner in deesen niet versmaeden/ sult want het is die eersten gedachtenis/ die ick aen mijn heer laet./.. ..[postscriptum]: Mijn heer hangt dit stuck op een starck licht en dat men daer wuijt ken afstaen soo salt best voncken."
"For some variation it would be better to place the donkey seen from behind [to avoid] all faces looking out of the picture [forward] And the tree could also have more foliage. 1. Joseph has been portrayed too fat and too recklessly 2. Mary should hold the child more gently because a vulnerable child can't stand being held so firmly Joseph is too short fat - his head is growing from his trunk and both [Joseph & Mary] their heads are too big"
"Quote in original Dutch (citaat van Rembrandt in Nederlands): Beeter waert dat (om de veranderin) den eesel van achteren was / dan dat al de hoofden iuist wt het stuck sien dat oock omtrent die boom wat meerder groente was 1 iosep heft alte swaer en te onbesuist 2 maria most het kindeken wat meerder vieren want een teeder kint magh sulck duwen niet ve[elen?] iosep alte kort en dick / syn hooft wast hem wt de [romp?] sij hebben alle beide al te groote koppen"
"Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time, discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know. By following carefully the rules of teachings provided that they are truthful, you can save a lot of time. But a student full of doubt is unable to move forwards and to judge well the truth."
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Schikt u daer nae, dat gy 't geene gy alreets weet, wel leert in 't werk stellen, zoo zult gy de verborgentheden, daer gy nu na vraegt, tijts genoeg ontdekt zien..."
"As seen from the Weighing House, the Town Hall of Amsterdam / after it was burnt down. / July, the 9th 1652. / Rembrandt van Rijn.[Rembrandt The Ruins of the Old City Hall in Amsterdam (After the Fire). [ Rembrandt The Ruins of the Old City Hall in Amsterdam (After the Fire) ]."
"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Van d'waech af te sien statshuis van Amsterldam / doen 't afgebrandt was. / Den 9 july 1652. Rembrandt van Rijn."
"[..that he] would not touch the painting, nor finish it unless the claimant pays him the balance due or guarantees it by giving a security."
"..in order to etch, take white turpentine oil, and add half the turpentine to it; pour the mixture into a small glass bottle and let it boil in pure [?] water for half an hour."
"I am most astonished by what has been written about the [painting] 'Alexander', which is so well done that I must suppose there are not many lovers of art [amatori] at Messina. I am also surprised that Your Lordship [Don Antonio Ruffo] should complain as much about the price as about the canvas, but if Your Lordship wishes to return it as he did the sketch [schizzo] of Homer, I will do another Alexander.. .If Your Lordship likes the Alexander as is, very well. If he does not want to keep it, six hundred florins remain outstanding. And for the Homer [painting] five hundred florins plus the expenses of canvas, it being understood that everything is at Your Lordship's expense. Having agreed to it, would he kindly send me his desired measurements. Awaiting the response to settle the matter."
"Anno 1659 / On Wednesday, May 14 / You are requested to attend the funeral of / Aegtje Nachtglas / daughter of the late Jacob Pietersz / Nachtglas / at the Cleveniers-Doele [Amsterdam] at one o'clock. Come as friend of the house / Nieuwe-Kerck. [Verso] So eager to catch Christ out in his answer that they could not wait for written reply."
"The Ground of Rinebrant of Rine: Take half an ounce of Expoltum burnt of Amber, one ounce of Virgin's was, half an ounce of Mastick, then take the Mastick and Expoltum, and beat them severally very fine in a Mortar; this being done, take a new earthen pot and set upon it a charcoal-fire, then shake into it the Mastick and Expoltum by degrees, stirring the Wax about till they be thoroughly mingled, then pour it forth into fair water and make a ball of it, and use it as before mentioned, but be sure you do not heat the plate too hot when you lay the ground upon it, this is the only way of Rinebrant."
"I can't paint the way they want me to paint and they know that too. Of course you will say that I ought to be practical and ought to try and paint the way they want me to paint. Well, I will tell you a secret. I have tried and I have tried very hard, but I can't do it. I just can't do it! And that is why I am just a little crazy."
"Choose only one master — Nature."
"Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God."
"A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished."
"A painting is not made to be sniffed."
"Also, the son of a miller [= Rembrandt] in Leiden is esteemed highly, though prematurely. Elyas Veldenus [= Esaias van der Velde ] is an elegant painter, though unimportant, now residing at the Hague. The rector Scrivelius showed me his portrait, very lifelike on a panel by the Haarlem painter Frans Hals."
"I have deliberately reserved for last a noble pair of youths from Leiden [Huygens visited Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in 1628]. Were I to say that they alone can vie with the greatest among the superior mortals mentioned earlier, I would still be underestimating the merits of these two; were I to say that they will soon surpass them, I would merely be expressing what their astonishing beginnings have led connoisseurs to expect."
"I maintain that it did not occur to Protogenes, Appeles or Parrhasius, nor could it occur to them were they return to earth that (I am amazed simply to report this) a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could bring together so much in one human figure and express what is universal. All honor to thee, my Rembrandt! To have carried Illium, indeed all Asia, to Italy is a lesser achievement than to have brought the laurels of Greece and Italy to Holland, the achievement of a Dutchman who has seldom ventured outside the walls of his native city (...)"
"Due to their parents' straitened circumstances, the youths [Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, living in Leiden, then] were compelled to take teachers whose fees were modest. Were these teachers to be confronted with their pupils today, they would feel just as abashed as those teachers who gave Virgil his first lessons in poetry, Cicero in rhetoric and Archimedes in mathematics. Let it however be said, with due respect for everyone's capacities and without detracting from anyone (for what is it to me?): these two owe nothing to their teachers but everything to their aptitude. Had they never received any tuition but been left to their own devices and suddenly been seized by the urge to paint, I am convinced that they would have risen to the same heights as they indeed have. It would be wrong to think that others have led them to this point."
"He was seized with the desire to paint my portrait. I assured him that I should be only too pleased to grant him the opportunity if he would come to The Hague and put up at my house for a while. So ardent was his desire that he arrived within a few days, explaining that since seeing me his nights had been restless and his days so troubled that he had been unable to work. My countenance had lodged so firmly in his mind that his eagerness brooked no further delay."
"Rembrandt surpasses Lievens in the faculty of penetrating to the heart of his subject matter and bringing out its essence, and his works come across more vividly. Lievens, in turn, surpasses him in the proud self-assurance that radiates from his compositions and their powerful forms. Because Lievens's spirit - and this is due in part to his youth - is charged with the great and the glorious, he is inclined to depict the objects and models before him not life-sized but larger than life. Rembrandt on the other hand, obsessed by the effort to translate into paint what he sees in the mind's eye, prefers smaller formats, in which he nonetheless achieves effects that you will not find in the largest works of others."
"I stand firm: neither Protogenes, Apelles nor Parrhasius ever came up with the idea, nor, if they were to return to earth could they produce anything like this, created by a young, as yet beardless Hollander [Rembrandt, c. 1631], a miller, what he has combined in one figure and created in its entirety. It fills me with astonishment even as I say it. Congratulations Rembrandt!. ..the achievement of a Dutchman who has never ventured outside the walls of his native city."
"Ah Rembrandt, do paint Cornelis' voice His appearance is the least of him The invisible one can learn by ear Those wanting to see Anslo, must him hear. (translation from original Dutch: Anne Porcelijn)"
"original old-Dutch version of Vondel: 'Ay, Rembrant, mael Cornelis Stem. Het zichtbre deel is 't minst van hem: 't onsichtbre kent men slechts door d'ooren wien Anslo zien wil, moet hem hooren."
"Explanatory version: Ah Rembrandt, try to paint Cornelis Anslo's voice / What one sees of his appearance is so little of him / What you can't see of him you can learn through hearing. / Those wanting a complete impression of him will have to hear him (preach). (transl. Aernout Hagen, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam)"
"As for the art of Panting and the affection off the people to Pictures, I thincke none other goe beeyond them, there having bin in the Country Many excellent Men in thatt Faculty, some att Presentt, as Rimbrantt [Rembrandt], etts, All in general striving to adorne their houses, especially the outer or street roome, with costly peeces, Butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes, which are Fairely sett Forth, yea many tymes blacksmithes, Coblers, etts., will have some picture or some other by their forge and in their stalle. Such is the general Notion, enclination to Paintings. [i.m.] The affection of the people thereto, as Allso to the curious adorning and cleanly keeping of their houses, streets, etc."
"Dear Sir, You would do me a great favor, when in London, to greet Mr. Cornelius Poelenburg, the celebrated painter, and other friends on my behalf. And if, by chance, the illustrious Mr. van Dyck has arrived there, I send him my humble greetings and tell him that yesterday I was called upon to appraise the paintings belonging to Mr. Lopez, including some by Titian.. ..Sir, if you happend to think of it, when you pass through Holland, please.. ..[try to] obtain paintings by Mr. Cornelio [Cornelius Poelenburgh] which you can easily find in London and Utrecht. In the latter city greet Gerrit [van] Honthorst, and in Amsterdam give my greetings to Mr. Rembrandt and bring back [buy!] something by him. Tell him also that yesterday I appraised his painting 'The Prophet Balaam', [Rembrandt painted in 1626}. which Mr. Lopez bought from him. This piece will be sold together with the ones mentioned above."
"In the name of our Lord Amen.. ..Saskia van Uijlenburch, wife of the Honorable Rembrant van Rhijn, residing in this city, well known to me, the notary, although sick in bed, yet in full control of her memory and understanding, as it outwardly appeared, after commending her soul to God Almighty and her body to Christian burial, before me declared and appointed as her heirs Titus van Rijn, her son, as well as any other lawful child or children she might bear.."
"Thus is Anslo depicted [by Rembrandt Thus his piety is rendered his countenance So that if perchance The grand old man shall cease to speak, This present likeness will speak to nations."
"..dumb integuments teach. Cuts of flesh, though dead, for that very reason forbid us to die. Here, while with artful hand he slits the pallid limbs, speaks to us the eloquence of learned Tulp: 'Listener, learn yourself! and while you proceed through the parts, believe that, even in the smallest, God lies hid.'"
"that with her needle she eclipses what Rembrandt, in his paintings, does with his brush, for she also paints with gold.."
"original old-Dutch text: ..dat zy de schilderyen, Van Rembrant zellever, verduistert met de naald, Die een pinceel verstrekt, daar zy met goud mee maalt..."
"This drawing shows the outer Amstel bank so properly drawn by Mr. Rembrant's own hand P[hilips de] Ko[ninck] f 5:-"
"original old-Dutch text: Dees tekeningh vertoont de buiten amstel kant / Soo braaf getekent door heer Rembrants eijgen hant / P. Ko: f 5:-"
"..I will not attempt your fame O Rembrandt, with my pen to scrawl For the esteem you receive in every hall Is known when I merely mention your name.."
"in original old-Dutch: Ick sal niet pogen uwe roem O Rembrandt met mijn pen te malen, Elck weet wat eer dat ghy kont halen Wanneer ick slechts u name roem"
"Ah, Rembrant, be careful when you etch Coppenol , It is fraught with danger: the burin will slip from your hand When your eyes feast on this calligraphy Your stylus will lose all its power."
"When I read St. John's inscription of this scene And turn to see it in this splendid painting [of Rembrandt], then I ask myself if brush has ever followed pen As aptly, or dead paint near to life has been."
"Christ seems to say 'Mary don't tremble. I am here It's me. Your master's free of Death's authority' Believing, though not yet wit all her heart and mind, she Seems poised between her joy and grief, her hope and fear."
"They are both [Rembrandt's second wife Hendrickje and his son Titus very much in need of aid and assistance in this enterprise.. ..[and because] no one is more suitable for this purpose than the afore-mentioned Rembrandt van Rhijn [Rembrandt himself would live with them in the house on the Rozengracht, board and lodging supplied, paid for by supplying artworks for the inventory]."
"[that] Nature stands abashed—red faced For never before has she been so well rendered By any artist.. [than Rembrandt]"
"Here Rembrandt shows us how old Simeon With joy takes his savior into his arms And now wants to die, because the sun of his mercy [represented by beams of light in the drawing, falling onto the infant Jesus.. ..Has shown forth"
"My father engraves as well as anyone.. ..just the other day he engraved a curious woman with a pap pot \ pap-potgen \ that gave everyone a pleasant surprise."
"O, Rembrand, although your diligence has painted de Dekker So artful that his soul seems to radiate from his countenance, 'Tis only the shadow of the bark that covered him; His pen was mightier than any brushwork It renders his very spirit, which casts a shadow longer Than his body, extending up to Heaven."
"Thursday 29 [December].. .His Highness [ Cosimo de' Medici ], after attending Mass, went with Blaeu and Ferroni to look at paintings by various masters, among them the designer Van Velde, Reinbrent [= Rembrandt] the famous painter, Scamus who does seascapes, and others who did not have finished paintings, so that we visited private homes where we could look at their works."
"..four flayed arms and legs anatomized by Vesalius.."
"On 4 October 1669 [my] cousin, Rembrant van Rhijn, painter died."
"[comparing] great painters [who] try to show a beautiful nude body in which one can see their knowledge of drawing [with] an incompetent [=Rembrandt] who tries to cover their figures with dark clumsy garments.. ..a kind of painter, who does the contours so that one does not know what to make out of it."
"..a Leda or a Danae.. ..as a naked woman with swollen belly, hanging breasts and garter marks on the legs."
"Rembrandt, the son of a miller, a pupil of Lastman, attained to a high degree of excellence in art through industry and natural gifts, although he never visited Italy and was but imperfectly developed.. .He sinned against the laws of anatomy, proportion, perspective, and the antique, as against Raphael's draftsmanship; and he warred also against academies and relied on nature."
"His engravings bear witness to his industry, and by its means he acquired affluence.. .If he had been more prudent in his relations with others, he would have become still wealthier. But although he was no spendthrift, he cared little for social rank, and was addicted to the society of humble folks, who interfered a good deal with his work."
"Sometimes I was so saddened by my master's [Rembrandt] hard instructions that I would not eat or drink and slake my thirst with my tears.."
"..that the strong impasto was due to Rembrandt's slow way of painting and his habit of returning to the same passage over and over again, and that consequently the portrait commissions eventually stopped coming in."
"the great Rembrandt.. ..the first heretic in painting.. .What a shame for the sake of art.. ..that so able a hand made no better use of his inborn gifts. But ah! The nobler the man, the wilder he'll become if he fails to tie himself to a rein of rule."
"[Rembrandt's habit of taking] a washerwoman or peat-trader from some barn [and] calling his whim the imitation of Nature and everything else decoration."
"[an artist should paint] with a bold hand, but not like Rembrandt or Jan Lievens, whose colors run down the piece like dung.. ..an artist should evenly and lushly.. ..[so that] your subjects appear rounded and raised by Art alone, and not by daubing."
"Rembrandt has observed this requirement [of unity] in 'The Night Watch' / 'De Nachtwacht' very well.. ..though in the opinion of many [17th century critics] he went too far, making more of the overall picture according to his individual preference, than of the individual portraits he was commissioned to do. Nonetheless, the painting, no matter how much it is criticized, will, in my opinion, survive all its rivals because it is so painterly [schilderachtigh] in conception and so powerful that, according to some people, all the other pieces [c. 4 other paintings] in De Doelen [in Amsterdam] look like playing cards alongside it. Although I would have liked that he had put more light in the painting."
"In a nicely set up little work by Rembrandt of 'John the Baptist preaching', I can remember seeing a wonderful attention in (the faces) of the listeners, in all sorts of positions, this was really praiseworthy. But one could also see how a dog indecently jumps on a bitch. You can say that this happens and is normal, but I say this is an abominable impropriety in this story. But I want to state here that this scene belongs more to a preaching by the dog-like Diogenes than by John the Baptist.. .Pictures like this serve to illustrate the stupidity of the Master and become even more ridiculous as they drift into ever more trivial additions."
"[[w:Karel van Mander|[Karel] Van Mander]] says that a certain Jaques de Bakker in Antwerp first introduced the fleshy way of painting, by not painting only with white, but by heightening the colour/paint with a natural physicality. Certainly, his namesake Jaques de Bakker from Amsterdam followed him in this commendable observation.. ..Not to mention Rembrandt and the others Aert de Gelder in particular, Rembrandt's last pupil], who highly valued this aspect of art."
"But the empty spaces [in the painting] devoid of all shine or reflection we put in the fifth and last grade, and see them as identical to the black, the deepest colour [tone]. This remark will make us careful not to try and go further than the ability of our paint/colour allows. Because, if we go too far in height we will lack at the bottom of the picture [from light gradations: light to dark]. Such as will happen to those who, when painting a picture of the night, place a burning torch or candle in the foreground. They then no longer have the possibility of giving the rest of the painting clarity. As far as he was able, Rembrandt painted the strength of candlelight in a few brown prints, but when one covers the light the rest of the work remains dark because we tend to hold our hand up to the light, so that this does not obstruct our ability to differentiate everything clearly and vividly."
"The shadows cast in the house by sun shining inside are like those out of doors, except that they appear stronger and are more defined by a window or a door. Albrecht Dürer really enjoyed sun shining into a room in his 'Hieronymus in the Room' [https://www.Rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/RP-P-OB-1224.. .Our own Rembrandt concerned himself in an amazing way with sunlight reflections. It seems as though he is really in his element when reflecting any light whatsoever. If only he had understood the basic rules of this art a little better. Because those who only trust their own eyes and delusional experiences, often make mistakes that earn the derisive remarks from pupils, not to mention the masters."
"I therefore advise you not to put too many lights and shadows together, but to arrange them cleverly in groups. Allow your brightest lights subtly flow into the not so bright lights. I can assure you that they will light up all the more. Always surround your deepest and darkest areas with a clear brown, this way they will allow the light to brighten in strength and intensity. Rembrandt has used this virtue to great effect and he was expert in bringing together related colours."
"I will not deny that I used to have a particular weakness for his [Rembrandt's] manner. But this was before I began to be aware of the infallible rules of painting. I later found myself obliged to concede my mistake and reject his art as based on nothing more than insubstantial imaginings."
"And Rembrandt, imaging the night too figuratively; in its bottom, full of darkness."
"Dutch original text: En Rembrandt, die den nagt verbeelde te figuurlijk. In zijnen duisteren grond."
"He had an excellent Disposition for Painting. His Vein was fruitful, and his Thoughts fine and lively. But having suck'd in, with his Milk, the bad Taste of his Country, and aiming at nothing beyond a faithful Imitation of the living (heavy) Nature, which he had always before his Eyes, he form'd a Manner entirely new, and peculiar to himself. He prepar'd his Ground with a Lay of fiich(?) friendly Colours as united, and came nearest to the Life. Upon this he touch'd in his Virgin Tints (each in its proper Place) rough , and as little disturb'd by the Pencil, as possible: And with great Masses of Lights and Shadows rounding off his Figures, gave them a Force and Freshness, that was very surprising."
"With regard to art he [Rembrandt] was rich with ideas, so that you frequently see him making a great number of different sketches of one and the same object, full also of changes in the figures and poses as well as the arrangement of the clothing; for which he is to be praised above all others – especially above those who employ such figures and clothing in their work as if they were twins."
"He [Rembrandt] had been so busy painting continuously over so many years that people had to wait some considerable time for their paintings, in spite of the fact that he continued working dexterously, particularly in his later period when, seen close to, it looked as though the paint had been smeared on with a bricklayers trowel.."
"Dutch original text: Vele jaren agter den anderen heeft hy het met schilderen zoo druk gehad dat de menschen lang naar hunne stukken moesten wagten, niettegenstaande dat hy met zyn werk vaardig voortging, inzonderheid in zyn laatsten tyd, toen het 'er, van na by bezien, uitzag of het met een Metzelaars truffel was aangesmeert..."
"He [Rembrandt] was not to be dissuaded from this practice, saying in justification that a work is finished when the master has achieved his intention in it."
"[that Rembrandt] tugged people away who peered to closely at his pictures when visiting his studio saying: 'The smell of the paint would bother you'."
"[that because] Rembrandt's manner was so generally praised, everything had to be based on it [so that] to please the World he (Govert Flinck) found it advisable to go and learn from Rembrandt for a year, where he became accustomed to that handling and manner of painting.. ..It was the mark of Flinck's talent that after only this brief time his own work was taken and sold as the rue brushwork of Rembrandt."
"He only lived with the lower class and people much below himself.. .He looked to nature as the only one capable of teaching him. He chose no other studio for his studies than his father's windmill."
"Works produced in an accidental manner [as Rembrandt did, according to Reynolds] will have the same free, unrestrained air as works of nature, whose particular combinations seems to depend upon accident."
"I have had three masters, Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt."
"I have likewise made many 'skies' and effects - for I wish it could be said of me as Fuselli says of Rembrandt: 'he followed nature in her calmest abodes and could pluck a flower on every hedge — yet he was born to cast a steadfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature'."
"Rembrandt the Thinker."
"Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael. I write down this blasphemy which will cause the hair of the school-men to stand on end without taking sides."
"I am very sure that if Rembrandt had held himself down to his studio practice (drawing every figure nude before putting clothing on them) he would not have either that power of pantomime nor that power over effects which makes his scenes so genuinely the expression of nature.. ..the further I go on in life the more I feel within me that truth is what is most beautiful, and most rare.. ..[this] is to be found again in Rembrandt's mysterious conception of his subjects, in the deep naturalness of expressions and of gestures."
"I have a memory above all of a small landscape by Rembrandt with this inscription 'Tacet sed loquitur', which made such an impression on me in my childhood."
"You speak to me of Rembrand, of this famous, of this great, of this giant.. .I would very much like to see the painting by Rembrandt of which you speak, because it should be quiete splendid. I eat it up from here (you know the fashionable phrase)"
"He [Rembrandt] introduced a new ideal, not the ideal of forms, but the ideal of clair-obscur, not the ideal of beauty, but the ideal of expression."
"Rembrandt was also fond of this subject from the story of Tobias [and the Angel of which he painted various scenes in an informal style, which recalls a little the peasant-like style of M. Millet.. ..For two centuries, the exclusive amateurs of the grand Italian style have always manhandled Rembrandt, which have not prevented him from making inroads in the museums.. ..of Europe, This should console the realists [a. o. Millet a bit fort the current injustices and give them some hope for the future."
"Of the old etchers, Rembrandt, as all acknowledge, is the sovereign prince."
"The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."
"This print speaks [the 'Hundred Guilder Print', a famous etching of Rembrandt], the shadow is vaporous like an autumn day and the figures are animated with a breath of air.. ..it summarizes everything, sentiment, order, moral, light and painting. If I looked at it an entire day, I would be dazzled and almost frightened by Rembrandt's genius.. [Rousseau ended up the talk paying 8.000 francs for the print]"
"Rembrandt printed himself. We have known this without a doubt since Doctor Scheltema, the wise archivist in Amsterdam, found in the archives in this city and published the inventory of all that was recorded in Rembrandt's house [location: Jodenbreestraat, Amsterdam] when it was seized in 1656 to be sold by the Chamber of Insolvents. We encounter scattered here and there all the trappings of a printmaker-printer: 'In the room behind the antechamber: a small oak-table, four lampshades; an oak press. In the room behind the livingroom: a press of marbelized yellow wood'."
"Would you believe it – and I honestly mean what I say – I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture [Rembrandt's 'Jewish Bride'] for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?"
"What an infinitely sympathetic painting. This is the essence of Rembrandt's genius. It's his sympathy for humankind which makes his art eternal."
"There is something of Rembrandt in the Gospel, or something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, as you like it — it comes to the same, if one only understands the thing in the right way."
"Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. Rembrandt is truly called a magician... that's not an easy calling."
"Above all the popular attracted him [Rembrandt], and in the squares, in the suburbs, the workers and the countryfolk appeared to him wearthy of attention.. ..their expressive gestures become more frankly marked, their attitude and their expressions are more natural... Rembrandt never stopped studying them. He loved living among the poor."
"Rembrandt, in effect, belongs to the race of artists who cannot have descendants, the race of Michelangelo, the race of Shakespeare, of Beethoven; like these Prometheuses of art he wanted to ravish the celestial fife, to put the vibrations of life into still form, to express in the visible, that which by its very nature is non-material and undefineable."
"Did you know that in 1900 I had the bold idea of renewing German art?.. .First of all I needed to invent a technique of grasping everything while it was in motion, and it was Rembrandts drawings in the Kupferstichkabinett in Munich that showed me how. I practiced seizing things quickly in bold strokes, wherever I was, walking and standing still.. ..and in this way I learned how to depict movement itself, and I found new forms in the ecstasy and haste of this work.."
"I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed."
"There he Rembrandt stood, when everything was on the canvas [of the 'Night Watch'], but then he shook his head.. .In his opinion the two men [in the center] did not yet come forward into the foreground. Then he [Rembrandt] took up his large palette again, dicked his thickest brushes deep into the paint, and once again took on these two front figures with powerful strokes; here more depth, there more light. In this way he put everything to the test, in order to give an even more powerful relief to what needed to stand out. Then he saw that it was good, and that is how he left it."
"Compare me with Rembrandt! What sacrilege! With Rembrandt, the colossus of Art! What are you thinking of, my friend! We should prostrate ourselves before Rembrandt and never compare anyone with him!"
"Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me."
"Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures—of these, 3,000 are in existence."
"He can blend, like no one else, reality with mystery, the bestial with the divine, the most subtle and powerful 'craftsmanship' with the greatest, the loneliest depths of feeling that painting has ever expressed."
"Rembrandt was himself a universal spirit, and this spirit informs everything that he painted, so that a biblical legend, a carcass of an ox, a naked woman, his own self-portrait — all stand as symbols of an all-embracing sympathy. Perhaps only Shakespeare, in another art, has that kind of universal intelligence."
"His temperament was that of a Prophet — a God-possessed man, brother to Dostoevski, and teeming with the future, a future he bore within him as the Hebrew prophets bore within them the coming of the Messiah, and as he bore within himself the past."
"A painting by Rembrandt not only stops the time that made the subject flow into the future, but makes it flow back to the remotest ages. By means of this operation Rembrandt achieves solemnity. He thus discovers why, at every moment, every event is solemn: he knows it from his own solitude."
"Probably no one has combined to as great a degree as Rembrandt a disciplined exposition of what his eye saw and a love of line as a beautiful thing in itself. His 'Winter Landscape' displays the virtuosity of performance of an Oriental master, yet unlike the Oriental calligraphy, it is not based on an established convention of brush performance. It is as personal as handwriting."
"The psychological truth of Rembrandt's paintings goes beyond that of any other artist who has ever lived. Of course they are masterpieces of sheer picture-making. In the 'Bathsheba' he makes use of studies from nature and from antique reliefs to achieve a perfectly balanced design. We may think we admire it as pure painting, but in the end we come back to the head. Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings as she ponders David's letter are rendered with a subtlety and a human sympathy which a great novelist could scarcely achieve in many pages."
"Did it ever occur to anyone how boring his pictures are?"
"Of all the Baroque masters, it was Rembrandt who evolved the most revolutionary technique and who seemed to grow into the Italians' spiritual heir. Where others needed five touches he was using one, and so the brushstrokes had begun to separate and could sometimes only be properly read from a distance. The exact imitation of form was being replaced by the suggestion of it: to some of his contemporaries, therefore, his paintings began to look unfinished. It was from the Venetians that he had learned to use a brown ground so that his paintings emerged from dark to light, physically as well as spiritually. Yet, despite a palette that was limited even by seventeenth century standards, he was renowned as a colorist for he managed to maintain a precarious balance between painting tonally, with light and shade, and painting in color. Just as form was suggested rather than delineated, so the impression of rich color was deceptive. Never before had a painter taken such a purely sensuous interest and delight in the physical qualities of his medium, nor granted it a greater measure of independence from the image."
"It is tempting to believe that Rembrandt might have owned, or seen, Chinese or Japanese paintings. But there is no evidence for this at all. Yet when we look at some of his drawings, notably those sketched freely in ink or ink wash, we find a combination of formal clarity and calligraphic vitality in the movement of pen or brush that is closer to Chinese painting in technique and feeling than to anything in European art before the twentieth century. This, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must attribute to coincidence and to Rembrandt's unique gifts as a draughtsman."
"Kolakowski, as we will see, has clearly depicted the religious life and the forms of community constructed by the cultured strata of the Dutch bourgeoisie. Spinoza lives in this world, with a vast network of simple and sociable friendships and correspondences. But for certain determinate strata of the bourgeoisie the sweetness of the cultured and sedate life is accompanied, without any contradiction, by an association with a capitalist Power ('potestas'), expressed in very mature terms. This is the condition of a Dutch bourgeois man. We could say the same thing for the other genius of that age, Rembrandt van Rijn. On his canvases the power of light is concentrated with intensity on the figures of a bourgeois world in terrific expansion. It is a prosaic but very powerful society, which makes poetry without knowing it because it has the force to do so."
"Offhand, I think of the Schubert Fantaisie in F Minor. The weight of the melody here is such that you can't place where it is, or what it's coming from. There are not many experiences of this kind in music, but a perfect example of what I mean can be found in Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Frick. Not only is it impossible for us to comprehend how this painting was made; we cannot even fix where it exists in relation to our vision. Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians."
"About 1630, Constantijn Huygens in his briljant analysis of the figure of Judas in Rembrandt's 'Judas Repentant' argues that: 'Rembrandt had surpassed the painters from Antiquity, as well as the great sixteenth-century Italian artists when it came to the representation of emotions expressed by figures that act in a history painting'."
"Was the miller's son, all of twenty-three, stuck in pious, professional Leiden, already presuming to present himself as the incarnation of Genius? No wonder a visitor from Utrecht, Arnout van Buchell, who encountered Rembrandt in 1628, thought him 'highly esteemed but before his time.'"
"..the Rembrandt whom Constantijn Huygens had discovered was driven constantly to measure himself against the mark others had set: his Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman; his Leiden friend and rival Lievens;.. ..Most of all, though, and for an entire decade, Rembrandt measured himself compulsively against 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes': Peter Paul Rubens. To become singular, Rembrandt had first to become someone's double."
"Rembrandt was already deeply involved in his attachment to Rubens — at once adopting him as his model and fighting to have the differences noticed. His [painting] 'Descent from the Cross', also painted in 1631 for the Stadholder, was directly taken from the engraving after Rubens's greatest masterpiece in Antwerp Cathedral', while at the same time being a calculated Protestant response to the immense diapason of the [catholic] Flemish master's altar-piece."
"City chronicler Jan Orlers's 1641 account relates that 'he had no desire or inclination' to study at the university, and that 'his only natural inclination was for painting and drawing, so that his parents were compelled to take their son out of the School and following his own wishes to apprentice him with a Painter where he might learn the foundation and principles [of art]."
"But the first documented encounter [ of Rembrandt and Jan Six] was in 1647, 'when Rembrandt made a portrait etching of Jan Six', a work exactly calculated to gratify his self-image as a gentleman-virtuoso. What did the two men of unequal age, background, and ambition see in each other in 1647? Rembrandt had many pupils, assistants, and patrons, but few friends, least of all of the elegantly cultivated kind, personified by Jan Six."
"The picture of Jan Six, painted in 1654 is, then, a virtual encyclopedia of painting, from the loosest handling to the dry brush, sparely loaded with yellow, dragged over the surface at the edge of Six's right cuff; from the finest detail to the most impressionist daring. Yet Rembrandt manages to bring all this diversity of technique into a totally resolved single image. So that Jan Six does indeed stand before us much as we would dearly wish to imagine ourselves, all the contradictions of our character—vanity and modesty, outward show and inward reflectiveness, energy and calm—miraculously fitted together."
"There's a lot of great talent there [in Hollywood], but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."
"During this period [1830 – 1900, in France], Rembrandt was appropriated as a symbolic figure by critics and painter-printmakers and assigned a heroic, cult-like artistic and political status. French critics molded and reinvented earlier anecdotal biographies.. ..to formulate an artistic persona that had particular meaning [for] nineteenthcentury French vanguard art and politics."
"Rembrandt was a model from the past that artists and critics [in France] sought out because he fulfilled their needs for a new 'non-ideal' exemplar, someone who could justify and bolster their own artistic projects and political views.. ..as a successful predecessor and he functioned as a mentor.. ..through the practical emulation of his artistic techniques.. .French artists did their utmost to absorb, invoke, subsume and usurp Rembrandt’s artistic persona in an effort to define their own identities."
"Two aphorisms about Rembrandt's paintings were drawn from his early biographies and repeatedly attributed to the artist by the French writers: 'A painting is finished when the artists says that it is finished' and 'A painting is not made to be sniffed', but contemplated from a distance.. .These paintings were identified with the latter years of Rembrandt's life, the period in which critics said he suffered most from financial pressures and a lack of public acclaim. Works identified with these final years were the most popular in France during the last decades of the nineteenth century."
"[Rembrandt] The most famous brand name in western art. In America alone it graces toothpaste, bracelet charms, restaurant and bars, counter-tops and of course the town of Rembrandt, Iowa just halfway around the world from the Rembrandt Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Funny thing is Rembrandt might have been quite pleased with such widespread notoriety. (...) Rembrandt was a realist craftsman who showed off his craft to sell his work. His paintings brim with self-confidence as this in bold oil sketch of the entombment of Christ painted with an almost modern bravado. His drawings were dashed off with a Zen-like assurance. His etchings complete and elaborate works of art in themselves which sold in great quantity to two Dutch middle class."
"One thing that really surprises me is the extent to which Rembrandt exists as a phenomenon in pop culture. You have this musical group call the Rembrandts, who wrote the theme song to Friends—'I'll Be There For You.' There are Rembrandt restaurants, Rembrandt hotels, art supplies and other things that are more obvious. But then there's Rembrandt toothpaste. Why on Earth would somebody name a toothpaste after this artist who's known for his really dark tonalities? It doesn't make a lot of sense. But I think it's because his name has become synonymous with quality. It's even a verb—there's a term in underworld slang, 'to be Rembrandted,' which means to be framed for a crime. And people in the cinema world use it to mean pictorial effects that are overdone. He's just everywhere, and people who don't know anything, who wouldn't recognize a Rembrandt painting if they tripped over it, you say the name Rembrandt and they already know that this is a great artist. He's become a synonym for greatness."
"Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt's has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great."
"I gave up painting by 16. I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then. I don't believe in genius. I believe in freedom. I think anyone can do it. Anyone can be like Rembrandt.. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It's about freedom and guts. It's about looking. It can be learned. That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings."
"It's an exhilarating feeling, holding that painting, especially when you have studied it for so long and are now the sole proprietor of said piece. To an art lover, possessing a Rembrandt can be likened to winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all at once. You feel a real sense of almost being a part of the artist's mind."
"There's a Rembrandt trapped in this body. It's your job to find it."
"Well, any draftsman knows about speed. I mean, Rembrandt drawings, you can see speed in them. I am interested in speed. I think most painters paint faster than they tell you."
"There's a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it's the greatest drawing ever done. It's in the British Museum and it's of a family teaching a child to walk, so it's a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: 'If you find a better drawing send it to me. But if you find a better one it will be by Goya or Michelangelo perhaps.' But I don't think there is one actually. It's a magnificent drawing, magnificent."
"His own house figures in many aspects of his work. This was his home, but it was also his workshop and his showroom. The most evocative room is his sunlit studio, where so many of his paintings evolved. In a way, it's still a workshop. Visitors are taught to make their own artworks here."
"The Chinese regarded not acknowledging the brush and the marks it makes as a bit crude; to them, that was trying to cover something up, so not such a high form of art. European art historians don't look at China very much. But I suspect Rembrandt must have known Chinese drawings, and had probably seen a few. Amsterdam was a port, and the Dutch were trading a great deal in the Far East. For example, a Chinese master looking at Rembrandt's drawing of a family, now in the British Museum, would recognise it as a masterwork. (...) The trace of Rembrandt's hand is still alive. Your eye can go back and forth between brown ink: sister; fast mark: mother. How rewarding this is, to move from the physical surface of the paper to its disappearance when you read the “subject”, and then back again. How many marvelous layers does this drawing have? The mother has a double profile, Picassoesque. Was it an accident with the pen that he then used as a master would? Both profiles are fascinating about her character. Her skirt is a bit ragged, without any real detail; one seems to know this, and then marvels at how these few lines suggest it. Then, there's a passing milkmaid, perhaps glancing at a very common scene, and we know the milk pail is full. You can sense the weight. Rembrandt perfectly and economically indicates this with – what? Six marks, the ones indicating her outstretched arm. Very few people could get near this. It is a perfect drawing."
"In a way, Vermeer and Rembrandt are opposites. But Rembrandt is the greater artist, I think, because he's got more ingredients than Vermeer. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone else ever has, before or since, because he saw more. And that was not a matter of using a camera. That was to do with his heart. The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart. I think that remark is very, very good. Two won't do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye. It applies to every drawing and painting Rembrandt ever made. His work is a great example of the hand, the eye – and the heart. There is incredible empathy in it."
"Rembrandt is revered as one of the greatest and most important figures in the trajectory of art, and for good reason. He was, by design or nature, a revolutionary. As such he is perhaps a uniquely qualified interlocutor with other cultures and civilizations. (...) For the first time in the history of art, the painting speaks for itself. To put it another way, as Malraux phrased it, Rembrandt was the first to touch the soul with his paintings. He went well beyond the subject matter, which is only a pretense of sorts, to reach a more profound truth. As one watches the trajectory of his career arc, he is always stretching further and further in his paintings, to find his own concept of 'beauty'. That is why he was influential for future generations. By throwing off the confines of classicism, he freed others to push their own boundaries in the pursuit of beauty through their own conceptions of truth.. ..André Malraux described Rembrandt as prophet. He drew from the past to unleash the future. It is an exciting thought. Of course, he came to be seen as a metaphor for virtuosity. André Gide made a wonderful compliment to Dostoyevsky by claiming that he was the greatest novelist because he created portraits in his writings like Rembrandt painted."
"Rembrandt to me is the greatest artist in history — not just because of his work, but also the impact that he had on the trajectory of art, by allowing artists to express themselves with unprecedented freedom. The DNA of Rembrandt can be found in Goya, Van Gogh, Picasso, Delacroix, Turner and all the way through to Russian avant-garde and Chinese contemporary art. That's what I would call transcendent influence."
"If you look at early Rembrandt portraits, they are very linear and the brushstrokes are almost invisible. The late ones are much freer, and the brushstrokes are very obvious and as much a part of the work as the subject. These things are never intentional, and I cannot see how they can be explained."
"..on 'Christ Presented to the People' Rembrandt confronts us head on with the dramatic events described in the Bible. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate appears on the platform with his retinue. Beside him stand two prisoners, one of them Christ. The people are allowed to decide. On the extreme left of the platform someone stands ready with a jug of water. Pilate would wash his hands to demonstrate his innocence after the people had chosen. That Rembrandt used such a large copper plate to create this spectacular and strictly organized composition is admirable enough. He scored the angular and expressive lines of the many figures into the tough metal with a hard, sharp needle. But then he had the courage to remove large parts that had already been completed and start all over again."
"Rembrandt is the most transparent artist I know. What he proclaimed as his credo, the commentaries of his contemporaries and what we find in the drawings all add up to one obsessively truthful, artist. One who proclaimed that he drew from nature (life) and 'anything else (invention) was worthless in his eyes'. He could not have been clearer, yet because this credo directly contradicts the apparent credo of our times: the more an artist differs from nature the more 'creative' that artist is, Rembrandt's true gift to us has been excised."
"Rembrandt was the sharpest observer of human behavior. This is his amazing strength and needs to be studied. We cannot understand him if we deny his use of models and de-attribute half his output. He was the most important signpost for artists. Scholarly antics have pushed him into a position where he is no longer trusted by the young. I have been preaching the need for a paradigm shift in the mind-set of the tribe of art historians for years. They need to start by experiencing practical art for themselves, or at minimum, have the humility to listen to those who have."
"My discoveries came as a result of practising art. For me Rembrandt's drawings exemplify above all others, the sculptural values of space and form. The scholars live in a world apart, reading each others books but refusing all correction from artists; alas, it is our history they are ravaging!"
"Rembrandt was on a continuous journey of discovery; not on a production line of consistent art objects for the market-place, as the scholars hope to recreate him. His wide ranging methods and interests produced very wide ranging quality. He did not tidy away his less successful works, nor should the scholars do so. He has left us the fullest record of his explorations of any artist and naturally his work includes many comparative failures. But astonishingly, even some of his greatest drawings have been mis-attributed to minor students."
"Real Christians revel in desperate ventures for Christ, expecting from God great things and attempting the same with exhilaration."
"Now that I have seen I am responsible, faith without deeds is dead."
"Whatever you feed yourself, is what's going to come out. You could say life is like that, Scripture is the answer to that. I love to read, I love the Bible, I have a bad back because of it."
"Songs are not only like poo, but songs are almost like the ground that's fertilized by the manure of life."
"When it comes to worship, I think that one of the special things about Hillsong Church is that every single one of our songwriters are people who are either serving in the church, volunteers or staff [but] none of us are on staff to write. We're in the business of building the church, Meaning where there's life, there's mess. That's the reality of humanity, I think that all of that manure, in all of its stench and warmth is a fertilizer for songs."
"One of the things about being a follower of Jesus is that though our calling doesn't change - the Great Commission - our assignments that are attached to that calling do change. So for that reason I really don't feel comfortable with any kind of titles because I'm really just doing whatever the Lord has me do in whatever particular season that is and that changes. I wrote a song about this a few years ago called 'New Wine', about not becoming so attached to the wineskins or not so attached to the ways that we assume God wants to use us, that we become so attached to that that we can't hold maybe the next thing that God wants to take us into."
"Community is one of the ways that God is still rubbing off some of my sharp edges and some of my spiky bits. The things that come with community that can be really uncomfortable are actually one of the ways the Lord uses to form us more into his likeness."
"Darlene Zschech. Eighteen years ago she saw something in me I didn’t see in myself. She called me out and up and on — as she has for so many others — and continues to do so. A true mother in every sense."
"A believer’s theology is being shaped by the worship songs they’re singing in church or listening to through the week, as much as the sermons they’re hearing on Sundays. And what we believe about God completely dictates the way we see Him, ourselves, others, and indeed our very lives."
"In my opinion, a good guitar is the guitar that brings the best out of you as a player and helps you articulate your musical voice in its highest and most authentic form."
"If I was a furniture mover, I’d probably volunteer to put out the chairs at church on Sunday. If I was a barista, I’d probably volunteer to make coffees in the church foyer on Sunday. Music is what I have in my hand, so it’s how I can serve."
"Fervent bella horrida, fervent ossibus inclusa fremit et discordibus armis non simplex natura hominis."
"Corde natus ex parentis Ante mundi exordium A et O cognominatus, ipse fons et clausula Omnium quae sunt, fuerunt, quaeque post futura sunt. Saeculorum saeculis."
"Nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum, gremioque hunc concipe molli. Hominis tibi membra sequestro, generosa et fragmina credo."
"Illic, precor, optime ductor, famulam tibi praecipe mentem, genitali in sede sacrari quam liquerat exsul et errans."
"Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death."
"Children love and want to be loved and they very much prefer the joy of accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure. Do not mistake a child for his symptom."
"When established identities become outworn or unfinished ones threaten to remain incomplete, special crises compel men to wage holy wars, by the cruelest means, against those who seem to question or threaten their unsafe ideological bases."
"Doubt is the brother of shame."
"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness."
"All world-images are apt to become corrupt when left to ecclesiastic bureaucracies. But this does not make the formation of world-images expendable. And I can only repeat that we deny the remnants of old-world images at our own risk, because we do not overcome them by declaring them — with all the righteousness of skepticism — something of a secret sin. They are not less powerful for being denied."
"In Freud's view, development is largely complete by adolescence. In contrast, one of Freud's students, Erik Erikson (1902–1994) believed that development continues throughout life. Erikson took the foundation laid by Freud and extended it through adulthood and into late life."
"Here's what I know. I could not be standing here without that undying love that was just sung about by, not Bruce [Springsteen], but Neil Young. And I have that in a lover that is so close to fine, we should all be able to experience such heaven right here on earth. I know also that, I should not be doing this, I should not be here, but I am because of the union of such filmmakers as Ed Saxon, Ron Nyswaner, Kristi Zea, Tak Fujimoto, Jonathan Demme -- who seems to have these [referring to the Oscar] attached to his limbs for every actor that works with him of late. And a cast that includes Antonio Banderas, who, second to my lover, is the only person I would trade for. And a cast that includes many other people, but the actor who really put his film image at risk, and shone because of his integrity, Mr. Denzel Washington, who I really must share this with."
"I would not be standing here if it weren't for two very important men in my life, so... two that I haven't spoken with in awhile, but I had the pleasure of just the other evening. Mr. Rawley Farnsworth, who was my high school drama teacher, who taught me to act well the part, there all the glory lies. And one of my classmates under Mr. Farnsworth, Mr. John Gilkerson. I mention their names because they are two of the finest gay Americans, two wonderful men that I had the good fortune to be associated with, to fall under their inspiration at such a young age. I wish my babies could have the same sort of teacher, the same sort of friends."
"And there lies my dilemma here tonight. I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels. We know their names. They number a thousand for each one of the red ribbons that we wear here tonight. They finally rest in the warm embrace of the gracious creator of us all. A healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident, common sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago. God bless you all. God have mercy on us all. And God bless America."
"Thank you. I'm standing here in lieu of my fellow nominees who are just as deserving, if not more so of this moment."
"I'm standing here because of an army of people who over the course of a back-breaking schedule that was set by Bob Zemeckis worked much harder than I did and who had much more at risk if our efforts were not successful."
"I'm empowered to stand here thanks to the ensemble of actors, men and women, who I shared the screen with and who in ways they will never understand made me a better actor."
"And I am standing here because the woman I share my life with has taught me and demonstrates for me every day just what love is. [Voice breaks as wife Rita Wilson tearfully mouths 'I love you'.]"
"Man, I feel as though I'm standing on magic legs in a special effects process shot that is too unbelievable to imagine and far too costly to make a reality."
"But here is my mark, and there is where I'm supposed to look, and believe me, the power and the pleasure and the emotion of this moment is as constant as the speed of light. It will never be diminished, nor will my appreciation."
"And the meaning between two simple words that I can only offer you here: Thank you, God bless you in this room and God bless you all around the world."
"We live in a society where there is no law in making money in the promulgation of ignorance or, in some cases, stupidity. There are a lot of things you can say never happened. You can go as relatively quasi-harmless as saying no one went to the moon. But you also can say that the Holocaust never happened."
"Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made, the same option for all grown-ups to make: to be one of three types of Americans — those who embrace liberty for all, those who won’t, or those who are indifferent — and only the first do the work of creating a more perfect union."
"In the never-ending battle you have all officially joined as of today, the difference is in how truly you believe, in how vociferously you promote, in how tightly you hold onto the truth that is self-evident: that of course we are all created equally yet differently, and of course we are all in this together."
"We are all in a cage match, mixed martial arts battle royale with agents of intolerance and braying incompetence, the malevolent equals to Imperial stormtroopers, Lex Luther, and Loki. And we could use a superhero right now."
"The work that is called for is the construction of our ‘more perfect union. That job will never, ever be completed, one that requires rigorous attention and unfading wherewithal and all hands. The work is the keeping of the promises of our promised land, the practice of decency, the protection of freedom, and the promotion of liberty for all, with no exceptions. That takes a lot of work done on multiple job sites every single day, and you can call each of them a battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way."
"Another day on the set we were brought into the room where they replayed the dailies. While me and Bill were watching the monitor, Tom Hanks come up from behind and said, "Bill, Babe, don't turn around yet." When we did, he was dressed in an English officer's uniform. He said, "They gave me a cameo role. I'm going to be an English officer." I said, "Good, Tom, you could use the work." I told Tom Hanks he could use the work! I forgot he was Tom Hanks. He's such a regular guy. I'll tell you, I'd like to put a medal on him. Couldn't do enough for us. He kept telling people, "Take care of Bill and Babe. Take care of my boys from South Philly." Tom Hanks is top shelf."
"When first thy pencil did these beaties give And breathing figures learnt from thee to live"
"Creation smiles in various beauty gay While day to night, and night succeeds day"
"Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train."
"But how is Mneme dreaded by the race, Who scorn her warnings and despise her grace? By her unveil'd each horrid crime appears, Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears. Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe! Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know."
"No more, America, in mournful strain Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain, No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain, Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land. Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, Whence flow these wishes for the common good, By feeling hearts alone best understood, I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent's breast? Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?"
"But, Madam, let your grief be laid aside, And let the fountain of your tears be dry'd, In vain they flow to wet the dusty plain, Your sighs are wafted to the skies in vain, Your pains they witness, but they can no more, While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore."
"Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light, Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write. While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms, She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms."
"See mother earth her offspring's fate bemoan, And nations gaze at scenes before unknown! See the bright beams of heaven's revolving light Involved in sorrows and the veil of night! The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,"
"Olive and laurel binds her golden hair: Wherever shines this native of the skies, Unnumber'd charms and recent graces rise. Muse! bow propitious while my pen relates How pour her armies through a thousand gates,"
"As when Eolus heaven's fair face deforms, Enwrapp'd in tempest and a night of storms; Astonish'd ocean feels the wild uproar, The refluent surges beat the sounding shore; Or thick as leaves in Autumn's golden reign,"
"Such, and so many, moves the warrior's train. In bright array they seek the work of war, Where high unfurl'd the ensign waves in air. Shall I to Washington their praise recite? Enough thou know'st them in the fields of fight."
"Thee, first in peace and honor - we demand The grace and glory of thy martial band. Fam'd for thy valor, for thy virtues more, Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore! One century scarce perform'd its destined round,"
"When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found; And so may you, whoever dares disgrace The land of freedom's heaven-defended race! Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales, For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails."
"Anon Britannia droops the pensive head, While round increase the rising hills of dead. Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia's state! Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,"
"Thy ev'ry action let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, With gold unfading, ! be thine."
"Your favour of the 26th of October did not reach my hands 'till the middle of December. Time enough, you will say, to have given an answer ere this. Granted. But a variety of important occurrences, continually interposing to distract the mind and withdraw the attention, I hope will apologize for the delay, and plead my excuse for the seeming, but not real neglect. I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant lines you inclosed; and, however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your poetical talents; in honor of which, and as a tribute justly due to you, I would have published the poem had I not been apprehensive that, while I only meant to give the world this new instance of your genius, I might have incurred the imputation of vanity. This, and nothing else, determined me not to give it place in the public prints. If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters. I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the muses, and to whom Nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations. I am, with great Respect, etc."
"Phyllis's poems do credit to nature—and put art—merely as art—to the blush.—It reflects nothing either to the glory or generosity of her master—if she is still his slave—except he glories in the low vanity of having in his wanton power a mind animated by Heaven—a genius superior to himself—the list of splendid—titled—learned names, in confirmation of her being the real authoress.—alas! shews how very poor the acquisition of wealth and knowledge are—without generosity—feeling—and humanity.—These good great folks—all know—and perhaps admired—nay, praised Genius in bondage."
"A PHILLIS rises, and the world no more Denies the sacred right to mental pow’r; While, Heav’n-inspir’d, she proves her Country’s claim To Freedom, and her own to deathless Fame."
"Unfavorable as were these conditions in the latter part of 1761, just before the birth of American freedom, arose our first contribution to literature. So strange were the conditions under which this race flower throve, we were not surprised at the doubt of her contemporaries as to whether she wrote the poems credited to her."
"A great deal of this new freedom rests upon the type of education which the Negro woman will receive. Early emancipation did not concern itself with giving advantages to Negro girls. The domestic realm was her field and no one sought to remove her. Even here, she was not given special training for her tasks. Only those with extraordinary talents were able to break the shackles of bondage. Phyllis Wheatley is to be remembered as an outstanding example of this ability — for through her talents one was able to free herself from house hold cares that devolved upon Negro women and make a contribution in literary art which is never to be forgotten. The years still re-echo her words. “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain/May be refined, and join the Angelic train”"
"No more snickering," Alice Walker counseled, at "the stiff, struggling, ambivalent lines," of the first published African-American poet, Phillis Wheatley. This kidnapped and enslaved Black woman wrote in the only materials available to her, in the only language in which she could write, and in the only cadence she knew as song. Of Wheatley, Walker also wrote: "It is not so much what she sang, as that she kept alive... the notion of song."
"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."
"How many iambs to be a real human girl? Which turn of phrase evidences a righteous heart? If I know of Ovid may I keep my children?"
"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is. When Robert Hayden gave us the ballads to remember how captured Africans survived the Middle Passage and arrived on these shores, it was an act of love. When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love. When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love. When Sonia Sanchez makes lightning of her tongue, moving from Southern colloquialisms to stanzas shaped by Swahili, traversing an ocean in one breath, it is an act of love. Jefferson's conceptions of love seem to have been so distorted by his own prejudices that he was unable to recognize the endless examples of love that pervaded plantations across the country: mothers who huddled over their children and took the lash so their little ones wouldn't have to; surrogate mothers, fathers, and grandparents who took in children and raised them as their own when their biological parents were disappeared in the middle of the night; the people who loved and married and committed to one another despite the omnipresent threat that they might be separated at any moment. What is love if not this?"
"I am going to do some drawings or paintings...in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something."
"I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world..and yet I know it will..I think I will count because I am patient and recueilli (contemplative) in some degree."
"The remembrance of death is very powerful to restrain us from sinning.For he should well consider the day will come(and he knoweth not how soon).....no more Suns will rise and set upon him;..no more seeing,no more hearing.no more speaking,no more touching,no more tasting,no more fancying,no more understanding,no more remembering,no more desiring,no more loving,no more delights of any sort to be enjoyed by him...let any man duly and daily ponder these things,and how can it be that he should dare....."
""God is love," as Scripture says, and that means the revelation is in the relationship. "God is love" means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. "God is love" does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. "God is love" is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith is being grasped by the power of love."
"Of God's love we can say two things: it is poured out universally for everyone from the Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet; and secondly, God's love doesn't seek value, it creates value. It is not because we have value that we are loved, but because we are loved that we have value. Our value is a gift, not an achievement."
"I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap and then you grow wings."
"It is often said that the Church is a crutch. Of course it's a crutch. What makes you think you don't limp?"
"One of the reasons why I believe in God is there is no other explanation for Apple's continuous survival than the existence of God."
"How many Macintosh division employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?" The answer is one. The Macintosh division employee holds up the light bulb and expects the universe to revolve around it."
"How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?" The answer to that is none because Bill Gates has declared darkness the new standard."
"This was the Macintosh division, which was arguably the largest collection of egomaniacs in the history of California. We held that record for about 30 years until Google broke it recently."
"Nulla enim alia re uidemus populum Romanum orbem subegisse terrarum nisi armorum exercitio, disciplina castrorum usuque militiae."
"Scientia enim rei bellicae dimicandi nutrit audaciam: nemo facere metuit quod se bene didicisse confidit."
"Etenim in certamine bellorum exercitata paucitas ad uictoriam promptior est, rudis et indocta multitudo exposita semper ad caedem."
"Caesa enim, quouis impetu ueniat, non frequenter interficit, cum et armis uitalia defendantur et ossibus; at contra puncta duas uncias adacta mortalis est."
"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum; qui uictoriam cupit, milites inbuat diligenter; qui secundos optat euentus, dimicet arte, non casu."
"An ambuscade, if discovered and promptly surrounded, will return the intended mischief with interest."
"What can a soldier do who charges when out of breath?"
"Amplius iuuat uirtus quam multitudo."
"Paucos uiros fortes natura procreat; bona institutione plures reddit industria."
"Numquam ad certamen publicum produxeris militem, nisi cum eum uideris sperare uictoriam."
"Qui frumentum necessariaque non praeparat, uincitur sine ferro."
"Quid fieri debeat, tractato cum multis, quid uero facturus sis, cum paucissimis ac fidelissimis uel potius ipse tecum."
"Boni duces publico certamine numquam nisi ex occasione aut nimia necessitate confligunt."
"In omnibus proeliis expeditionis condicio talis est, ut quod tibi prodest aduersarium noceat, quod illum adiuuat tibi semper officiat."
"Nulla consilia meliora sunt nisi illa, quae ignorauerit aduersarius, antequam facias."
"aduersarium amplius frangunt transfugae quam perempti."
"Where else could this heavy slumber have befallen except here among the priests showered with riches and domains by the Emperor? Those men slept, benumbed by a heavy dream, (intoxicated by their newly won wealth) after a poverty to which they had held by faith. Formerly they preached about the poverty of Christ and his disciples and other faithful priests after them; now they reject poverty having accepted domains, imperial honors, and even precedence over imperial authority. (In their former estate) they accepted poverty as (a part of faith) commanded by Christ and His example. It shows that the priest must have been stunned in dream and have a blackening of his heart to be able to make this quick and easy change: after poverty, to plunge into such luxury and such an exalted position in the world. In the beginning he hid in caves, among rocks and in forests for Christ’s name, and behold, now the Emperor guides him around Rome, seating him on a white mare – or was it a white horse? No matter! It always was a ‘bird of ill omen’ – paying him homage ostentatiously before the whole world. That is the way it was recorded by those who wrote down what they saw for future generations: multitudes in Rome ran to behold that wonder shouting, “Papa, Papa! The Pope! What is it? What goes on? Look there, the Emperor himself saddled the horse and, seating the Priest, he leads him through town!”"
"It was then and there that the net became greatly torn, when the two great whales had entered it, that is, the Supreme Priest wielding royal power with honor superior to the Emperor, and the second whale being the Emperor who, with his rule and offices, smuggled pagan power and violence beneath the skin of faith. And when these two monstrous whales began to turn about in the net, they rent it to such an extent that very little of it has remained intact. From these two whales so destructive of Peter’s net there were spawned many scheming schools by which that net is also so greatly torn that nothing but tatters and false names remain. They were first of all the hordes of monks in all manner of costumes and diversified colors; these were followed by hordes of university students and hordes of pastors; after them came the unlearned hordes with multiform coats-of-arms, and with them those of the wicked burghers. The whole world and its wretchedness have entered Peter's net of faith with these evil hordes."
"He who obeys God needs no other authority."
"Our faith obliges us to bind wounds, not to make blood run."
"And he says about the Christian discipline that when the soldiers came to John to be baptized saying, “And we, what must we do?” John should he have given them another answer: “Throw your weapons away, give up war service, wound and kill no one.” According to these arguments, it would seem necessary for the Roman Church to fight, to shed human blood, and to gain peace by the sword… For this reason there is a need of soldiers who would go to war for the Holy Church and for Country."
"Wars and other kinds of murder have their beginning in the hatred of the enemy and in the unwillingness to be patient with evil. Their root is in intemperate self-love and in immoderate affection for temporal possessions. These conflicts are brought into this world because men do not trust the Son of God enough to abide by his commandments."
"The Church of Rome has allied herself with the state, and now they both drink together the blood of Christ, one from a chalice, and the other from the ground where it was spilled by the sword…"
"When the Jews were prisoners of the King of Babylon, they sent a message to the Jews of Jerusalem, saying, Pray for the life of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and for the life of Belshazzar his son, that their days may be like the days of heaven upon the earth. And the Lord, will give us strength, … and we will live under the shadow of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and under the shadow of Belshazzar his son, and we will serve them for a long time and find favor in their sight. This prayer was offered by prisoners – and they prayed for the king their jailer. He was their enemy, and yet they prayed for him…"
"Facts witness to the reality that [Christians] have abandoned God, that they have entered the world and become one with the world. Whatever the world considers praiseworthy – vanity, comfort, wealth, fancy notions, blasphemies – the Christians, too, praise with one accord, quite blatantly without shame and without conscience. We can find with difficulty one man in a thousand who does not conform himself to the world."
"A world contrary to God must be kept within bounds by the world’s sword. But true Christians love God and their neighbors as themselves; they commit no evil by the grace of God. It is not necessary to compel them to goodness since they know better what is good than the law-imposing authority. They have a knowledge of God within, which is a knowledge of His commandments and His love. Having His love within they do good to others and are just to all men in accordance with His law so that the authorities which rule the world have no occasion to find them guilty."
"Regardless of nationality, all men are brothers. God is "our Father who art in heaven." The commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is unconditional and inexorable. … The lowly Nazarene taught us the doctrine of non-resistance, and so convinced was he of the soundness of that doctrine that he sealed his belief with death on the cross. … When human law conflicts with Divine law, my duty is clear. Conscience, my infallible guide, impels me to tell you that prison, death, or both, are infinitely preferable to joining any branch of the Army."
"Either Christ is a liar or war is never necessary, and very properly assuming that Christ told the truth, it follows that the State is without [in the words of Father Macksey] ‘judicial authority to determine when war is necessary,’ because it is never necessary."
"A "just war" – if there could be such a thing – would not require conscription. Volunteers would be plentiful."
"Now, a new creature, I in Christ am born, The old man stripped away; -- I am new-made; And mounting in me, like the sun at morn, Love breaks my heart, even as a broken blade: Christ, First and Only Fair, from me hath shorn My will, my wits, and all that in me stayed, I in His arms am laid, I cry and call -- O Thou my All, O let me die of Love!"
"O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me? In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest. From five sides You move against me: Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent. To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You. If I come out through sight I see Love Painted in every form and color, Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You. If I leave through the door of hearing, What I hear points only to You, Lord; I cannot escape Love through this gage. If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims: "Love, divine Love, hungering Love! You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me." If I leave through the door of scent I sense You in all creation; You have caught me And wounded me through that fragrance. If I come out through the sense of touch I find Your lineaments in every creature; To try to flee from You is madness."
"As air becomes the medium for light when the sun rises, And as wax melts from the heat of fire, So the soul drawn to that light is resplendent, Feels self melt away, Its will and actions no longer its own. So clear is the imprint of God That the soul, conquered, is conqueror; Annihilated, it lives in triumph. What happens to the drop of wine That you pour into the sea? Does it remain itself, unchanged? It is as if it never existed. So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in, It is united with Truth, Its old nature fades away, It is no longer master of itself."
"The soul wills and yet does not will: Its will belongs to Another. It has eyes only for this beauty; It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont -- It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness. The base of this highest of peaks Is founded on nichil [nothing], Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord."
"Love, infusing with light all who share Your splendor, You teach us the true light Is not to be found in the light of this world. Light that enlightens, light that teaches, He who is not illumined by You Does not reach the fullness of love. Love, You give light To the intellect in darkness And illumine the Object of love. Love, Your ardor, Which enflames the heart, Unites it with the Incarnate One."
"Love, where did You enter the heart unseen? Lovable Love, joyful Love, unthinkable Love, In Your plenitude You lie far beyond the reach of reason. Love, jocund and joyous, Divine fire, You do not stint Of your endlessly beautiful riches"
"In losing all, the soul has risen To the pinnacle of the measureless; Because it has renounced all That is not divine, It now holds in its grasp The unimaginable Good In all its abundance, A loss and a gain impossible to describe."
"To lose and to hold tightly, To love and take delight in, To gaze upon and contemplate, To possess utterly, To float in that immensity And to rest therein -- That is the work of unceasing exchange Of charity and truth."
"There is no other action at those heights; What the questing soul once was it has ceased to be. Neither heat nor fiery love Nor suffering has place here. This is not light as the soul has imagined it. All it had sought it must now forget, And pass on to a new world, Beyond its powers of perception."
"Love beyond all telling, Goodness beyond imagining, Light of infinite intensity Glows in my heart."
"Light beyond metaphor, Why did You deign to come into this darkness? Your light does not illumine those who think they see You And believe they sound Your depths. Night, I know now, is day, Virtue no more to be found. He who witnesses Your splendor Can never describe it."
"I once thought that reason Had led me to You, And that through feeling I sensed Your presence, Caught a glimpse of You in similitudes, Knew You in Your perfection. I know now that I was wrong, That that truth was flawed."
"On achieving their desired end Human powers cease to function, And the soul sees that what it thought was right Was wrong. A new exchange occurs At that point where all light disappears; A new and unsought state is needed: The soul has what it did not love, And is stripped of all it possessed, no matter how dear."
"In God the spiritual faculties Come to their desired end, Lose all sense of self and self-consciousness, And are swept into infinity. The soul, made new again, Marveling to find itself In that immensity, drowns. How this comes about it does not know."
"One of the greatest and most interesting Italian mystical poets: Jacopone da Todi, the typical singer of the Franciscan movement, the first writer of philosophic religious poetry, and perhaps the most picturesque figure in the history of early Italian literature...this vigorous missionary and subtle philosopher: this poet, by turns crude satirist, ardent lover, and profound contemplative, who can sink to the level of the popular hymnal and rise above that of St. John of the Cross...a hard and avaricious lawyer, converted in middle life by crushing domestic sorrow, who renounces the world, accepts Franciscan poverty, in its most drastic sense, and becomes like brother Juniper a "fool for Christ"...A rich and complete human experience, a fully-developed physical, emotional and intellectual life, was the foundation from which Jacopone climbed up to those heights where he had communion with the Eternal Order and satisfied at last his craving for perfection. Thither he carried a warmth of human feeling, a passionate energy, a romantic fervour, which represent the spiritualization of qualities developed not in the cloister but in the world."
"Was Rome dispensing "God's divine Justice" when it forbade Peter and Paul from preaching in public? Were Peter and Paul "justly reprimanded for their sins" by being imprisoned and executed? Was Jesus being justly punished for his sin when the Sanhedrin sent him to be executed by Pilate? Was Germany dispensing divine wrath to Israel, Poland, etc., when they plotted to take over the world and exterminate all non-Aryans? … I am trying to say that the State does not have a license to do anything it wants … and when we are ordered by the State to violate God's law, we must not bow to Baal. Civil disobedience is just as mandatory as civil subservience. It all must past through the filter of conscience, not to mention Christ's mandate that we recognize that the Kingdom has already come. We are now its citizens. … we are under no obligation to abdicate conscience on behalf of the State."
"Every day I talk with the enemy. But I do not see an embodiment of "him who opposes goodness." If we approach the war on terrorism with the fervor of a Christian jihad against Islam, our battle is already lost, for we have become what we opposed and we are now the fundamentalists. Our battle is not one of flesh and blood, but against the spiritual powers and principalities which rule this present darkness. We cannot allow ourselves to be caught up in "war mode" against a fleshly enemy, or the true enemy is already within us, and we have failed to believe in the power of a redemption which (we say) we believe has saved us. … My comfort and liberty must not be won by the sacrifices of a new and foreign poor now paying the price for our moral failings of diplomacy,. economy and statesmanship, turning our Republic into an Empire."
"Joining the army is not a sacrament, it's a pagan allegiance."
"We must at least allow the pain inflicted upon us by our enemies to be a megaphone to our own deafness to the world, waking us up to the needs of others, to the violence inflicted upon them."
"I don't complain about "the military" because of inconvenience or discomfort … I complain about how perilous it feels to attempt an authentic Christianity in the midst of "exploiting persons of their intelligence value," and then listening to the news, hearing of the bombing campaign just undertaken in the town that I just wrote an intelligence report on only days previous. Those bombs are given coordinates by my reports."
"Since the day I walked onto Academy grounds at West Point, I have been in an ongoing and quite conscious battle with my military service. Whether it was my first decision in college to turn away from military service altogether, or my post-September 11th decision to return to service, I have been attempting to mitigate conscience and duty for the past seven years. In the absence of a clear and articulate objection to service, I have defaulted to evolving forms of duty as my guiding principle. … Conscientious objection is now the only way dutifully to fulfill my obligations both to faith and to nation, and to my own internal commitments to personal courage."
"We can never be too Pagan when we are truly Christian, and the old myths are eternal truths held fast in the Church’s net."
"What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself."
"Man—vir, woman—femina, go to make up the man—homo. There can be no comparison, no rivalry between them; they are the complement of each other, and a little child shall lead them."
"A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity.The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power.Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual."
"Those who hold that it is no matter what happens after them, hold a wicked and inhuman doctrine... When we feel in our hearts this indifference to the fleeting, and this warm regard for the permanent, let us believe that God has implanted the instinct for a wise purpose; and then follow it as a heavenly guide. It is manifestly intended to turn us from the labors of the day — from the things which perish when the hand which formed ceases to uphold them — to tile things and objects which endure through indefinite ages — renewing, I should rather say augmenting their magnitude and their benificent fruits with every successive generation."
"Probably there is no department of science, no form o humanity, in which greater advances have been made of late years, than in the medical and moral management of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments of the insane. When we contrast the spacious and airy apartments and the grounds of our asylums, with the dark, and narrow, and dirty cells, in which, twenty years ago, the best accommodated of these poor creatures were immured - their neat and confortable dress, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, with their former rags and nakedness - their wholesome food, their former rations - and abovel all, the kindness and affection which is shown to them noew, with their ulter neglect in the days when they were executed from the privileges and society of men, we find ourselves shuddering at the thought of what we have seen, and lost in admiration of what we now see. Wherever the Christian religion exists,we find the same rapid advances making towards the accomplishment of the great purposes of humanity. It seems as if the miracles of our Saviour were meant as protoypes of what his religion was to accomplish. It is by the influence of this religion of the march of science and philosophical discovery, that, by all Christian nations, the winds and the waves have been rebuked - that man is enabled to ride out the storm upon the ocean, as if it were hushed, and, like Peter of old, to walk upon the sea as on dry land."
"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man, has to make a man appreciate the creation of God and the love of God."
"Being on the moon had a profound spiritual impact upon my life. Before I entered space with the Apollo 15 mission in July of 1971, I was a lukewarm Christian, to say the least! I was even a silent Christian, but I feel the Lord sent me to the moon so I could return to the earth and share his Son, Jesus Christ. The entire space achievement is put in proper perspective when one realizes that God walking on the earth is more important than man walking on the moon. I believe that God walked on the earth 2,000 years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. I have totally yielded my life to the Lord’s service to tell people everywhere about the life-changing message of Christ."
"I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before."
"For the one who does not practice mercy will have his judgment without mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment."
"Of what benefit is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but he does not have works? That faith cannot save him, can it? If a brother or a sister is lacking clothing and enough food for the day, yet one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but you do not give them what they need for their body, of what benefit is it? So, too, faith by itself, without works, is dead."
"Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell."
"But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace."
"Come, now, you rich men, weep and wail over the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothing has become moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted away, and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh. What you have stored up will be like a fire in the last days. Look! The wages you have withheld from the workers who harvested your fields keep crying out, and the cries for help of the reapers have reached the ears of Jehovah of armies. You have lived in luxury and for self-gratification on the earth. You have fattened your hearts on the day of slaughter."
"You got to control your own destiny. You got to keep writin' different stuff. Keep switchin' up and never do the same thing too many times."
"Lazy technology: the electric toothbrush—that always made me laugh. The electric toothbrush—what, is brushing your teeth too strenuous an exercise? For some people? You got people goin' [imitates fast, strenuous brushing of teeth]. "Man, I am really feeling the burn here. Wish this thing had a motor on it." Why don't you just have electric deodorant? [imitates use of electric deodorant]"
"Y'all ever seen these commercials for these pills, this medication you take? It's like one pill for one thing, but they list, like, a hundred side effects? It's just like they're just scrolling for a minute. And you're thinkin, "Is that really a good trade? That can't be a good trade." You got people going, "Well, I can take the headaches, nausea, and vomiting, if it'll make my elbow feel better. It's really worth it—it is. I mean I've been taking it—Oh, oww! Owww! I can move it around, play with the kids, and—[pretends to vomit]. I've got full range of motion here.""
"I would love to stay at SNL forever. But you can't stay in the same place. People think you're a loser."
"I'm not gay, so I don't know much about Broadway musicals."
"My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died. … I come from a long line of death. That's my point. And so I fear it. I fear it a lot."
"Patton Oswalt, he told me, "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagreed. Yeah, I thought it was the raping."
"Roseanne was so broken up [after her show was canceled] that I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that. But she was just so broken and just crying constantly. There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, 'What about the victims?' But you know what? The victims didn' t have to go through that."
"I am completely behind the #MeToo movement. You'd have to have Down Syndrome to not feel sorry for— #MeToo is what you want for your daughters and you want that to be the future world, of course""
"Every generation has believed they lived ins the End Time, @NellScovell. It is a product of Man's narcissism. Deeply, we believe that when we die, so then does the world. Which is true. Because when we die, we don't disappear, the world does."
"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."
"You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him."
"Macdonald is currently 49, and looks worryingly like he'll be hailed as one of the greats only in retrospect. Watch him at your earliest convenience, and start making recommendations soon."
"Success comes on God’s terms, in His time, and in His way. God only allowed me to have success after I’d been broken after I’d stopped seeking success for myself, and after I’d come to terms with the idea that my labors for God might not ever bring me a penny. It was only after I’d lost everything that God was able to get my heart right to the point where He could trust me with success."
"Make sure that you are next year's big success story. Don't fall into the pit of people who have given up on making something of themselves, and make sure you take everything out of yourself. I'm getting too old for this. And when I retire someday, I'm going to want to sit down at a computer and play your games, read your stories, and watch your videos. Don't fall in with the people who have already given up on themselves. You are tomorrow's next big thing."
"I’d made a family-friendly game about a beaver before this, when I went to put it online it got torn apart by a few prominent reviewers. People said that the main character looked like a scary animatronic animal. I was heartbroken and was ready to give up on game-making. Then one night something just snapped in me, and I thought to myself- I bet I can make something a lot scarier than that."
"The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse."
"An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy."
"He said: "If I thought more of myself?" "You wouldn't have much difficulty in finding it," she answered. "Let's walk." He didn't understand the first phrase, but he turned and went by her side, silent while he heard the words. Much difficulty in finding what? in finding it? the it that could be found if he thought of himself more; that was what he had said or she had said, whichever had said that the thing was to be found, as if Adela had said it, Adela in her real self, by no means the self that went with Hugh; no, but the true, the true Adela who was apart and his; for that was the difficulty all the while, that she was truly his, and wouldn't be, but if he thought more of her truly being, and not of her being untruly away, on whatever way, for the way that went away was not the way she truly went, but if they did away with the way she went away, then Hugh could be untrue and she true, then he would know themselves, two, true and two, on the way he was going, and the peace in himself, and the scent of her in him, and the her, meant for him, in him; that was the she he knew, and he must think the more of himself."
"There were no Calvinists or Dominics or Augustines. The man who was most like those great ones was a Dane, a contemporary of Hans Andersen, but though Hans Andersen achieved world-wide repute at once, Soren Kierkegaard had to wait for his through some seventy years. It has taken Christendom that long to catch him up; it took fifty years to catch up St. Thomas, and it has not caught up Dante yet. He coordinated experiences in a new manner; say, using the old word, that he caused alien and opposite experience to coinhere. ... No doubt as soon as Kierkegaard becomes fashionable he will be explained. His imagination will be made to depend on his personal history, and his sayings will be so moderated in our minds that they will soon become not his saying but ours. It is a very terrible thing to consider how often this has happened with the great, and how often we are contented to understand what we have neatly supposed that they have said."
"Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruit of hell."
"If one is anxious to write about God, one ought to be anxious to write well."
"Christianity and life ought to be one."
"She was dead, but her very death heightened that word "supernatural"; it was what she, not being, was."
"I’m what C.S. Lewis would call a ʽMere Christianʼ, and all of my two books are very, very much meant to be from the point of view of what C.S. Lewis called ‘Mere Christianity’, meaning that I don’t touch upon anything at all where Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians differ, they express just the basics of the faith, from a basic, ecumenical Christian viewpoint. They only talk about the Christian faith that they have agreement on."
"We do not want to harm any human being, not even our worst enemy. Our walk of life is to live in truth and righteousness of God, in peace and unity. ... If all the world were like us there would be no war and no injustice."
"The axe is laid to the root of the tree. ... I will hew it down. And as I live, I will plague your Honor, Pomp, Greatness, Superfluity, and confound it into parity, equality, community."
"For this honour, nobility, gentility, propriety, superfluity, etc. hath (without contradiction) been the father of hellish horrid pride, arrogance, haughtiness, loftiness, murder, malice, of all manner of wickedness and impiety. Yea, the cause of all the blood that ever hath been shed - from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of the last Levellers that were shot to death."
"We didn’t win the World Series. How are we satisfied with that? That’s what we want. That’s why we work, that’s why we train, that’s why we do everything in the offseason, the cage work. Everything is to get an opportunity to win a World Series. We came up short."
"Getting my first chance to play in front of crowds like that, situations like that, is going to be huge for us going on. We have a lot of young guys on this team, and getting as far as we did is going to be beneficial down the road for us."
"It was fun. It was fun coming to the ballpark and competing with these guys. If we were down, if we were up, it didn’t matter. We were always having fun. It was a joy."
"Christian. Faith, Family, then Baseball. If what you did yesterday still seems big today, then you haven't done anything today!"
"I was checking out all the bats he had and kind of rubbing a couple of them on me to get a little bit of luck. It’s pretty impressive what he swung, for someone his size, too. You see the pictures of him, I’m thinking this guys’ 6-5, 6-6 but you hear he was maybe 5-11, 5-10. It’s pretty impressive he was able to swing something like this and produce the numbers he did."
"I think his future is extremely bright. I think he had an unbelievable season. I don’t think I would have predicted that he would be an MVP candidate . . . That’s a lot to ask from a rookie to be an MVP type of candidate. I think the sky’s the limit for this kid. And again, he’s a natural-born leader. And that doesn’t happen at an age where he’s at, where people look to him, and it’s already happening."
"He is putting on the most amazing display I think I have ever seen!"
"I do so many convention appearances and have a lot of face-to-face interaction with the fans. They tell me that they prefer seeing a live human being in a costume. Humans like to watch other humans, period, whether it’s in makeup or not. They can appreciate the artwork that goes into computer graphics—it’s an art form unto itself, getting better all the time—but there’s something connectable when you actually have a live person. The true fanboys actually want to connect with another person, that’s what I’m told. Me personally, as an audience member, I can appreciate the artistry of both types. When it’s completely rendered by an artist with no live performers involved, sometimes it can look like you’re watching a video game. That takes you out of the film for just a second. What I love about the medium is when they can be combined."
"I've always been a religious person, and I try to think that every disappointment might just be a blessing in disguise. … I pray every day. In the mornings and, before I go to bed. I think it's important to pray not just when things are going bad."
"I have a better understanding of my body now. … Everyone wants to feel fresh in the game – there’s no better feeling – so I just make sure I’m doing the right things and trying to tick every box: , massage, eating the right things. … I think I’ve managed [to adopt veganism] successfully. … I don’t find anything hard to give up, as such, because I know the feeling scoring goals gives me. … I just want to try to play as long as I can. So I do the stuff that will give me the best opportunity to perform and score goals."
"God, you must be a couple of pansies."
"They [the Middle East Anti Locust Unit] were the golden key that unlocked Arabia for me. To somebody who was interested in desert exploration the Empty Quarter offered the, sort of, ultimate challenge."
"I think the harder the life, the finer the type, yes, and I certainly felt this about the Bedu. When I went there, I felt that the difficulty was going to be living up physically to the hardships of their life. But, on the contrary, it was the difficulty of meeting their high standards: their generosity, their patience, their loyalty, their courage and all these things. And they had a quality of nobility."
"The biggest misfortune in human history is the invention of the combustion engine. Cars and airplanes diminish the world, rob it of all its diversity. Young men who meet me want to know how they could do what I've done. But all they can be is tourists now."
"I might have been homosexual if I was born in a different age but as it was I remained asexual."
"The harder the life the finer the type and there’s no doubt about that; the easier you make life the lower goes your standards."
"We parted before I went to Abu Dhabi, which I found an Arabian Nightmare, the final disillusionment. For me this book remains a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people."
"A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease…..No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match."
"The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world. Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely. I found it among the Bedu. Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance."
"My first night in camp, as I sat eating sardines out of a tin and watching my Somalis driving the camels up from the river to couch them by the tent, I knew that I would not have been anywhere else for all the money in the world. For a month I travelled in an arid, hostile land. I was alone; there was no one whom I could consult; if I met with trouble from the tribes I could get no help; if I were sick there was no one to doctor me. Men trusted me and obeyed my orders; I was responsible for their safety. I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall."
"I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future."
"For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge."
"In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found, too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquillity was to be found there. I had learnt the satisfaction which comes from hardship and the pleasure which derives from abstinence: the contentment of a full belly; the richness of meat; the taste of clean water; the ecstasy of surrender when the craving for sleep becomes a torment; the warmth of a fire in the chill of dawn."
"Arabs rule but they do not administer. Their government is intensely individualistic, and is successful or unsuccessful according to the degree of fear and respect which the ruler commands, and his skill in dealing with individual men. Founded on an individual life, their government is impermanent and liable to end in chaos at any moment. To Arab tribesmen this system is comprehensible and acceptable, and its success of failure should not be measured in terms of efficiency and justice as judged by Western standards. To these tribesmen security can be bought too dearly by the loss of individual freedom."
"At first glance they [his Bedu companions] seemed to be little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning to them. They had heard vaguely of the war as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden government as a Christian government. Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it."
"The rifles with which they fought were all that they accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them."
"I had yet to learn that no Bedu thinks it shameful to beg, and that often he will look at the gift which he has received and say, ‘Is this all that you are going to give me?’ I was seeing the worst side of their character, and was disillusioned and resentful, and irritated by their assumption of superiority. In consequence I was assertive and unreasonable."
"Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good. While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming. Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame."
"There is always trouble if meat is not divided by lot. Someone immediately says that he has been given more than his share, and tries to hand a piece to someone else. Then there is much arguing and swearing by God, with everyone insisting that he has been given too much, and finally a deadlock ensues which can only be settled by casting lots for the meat – as should have been done in the first place. I have never heard a man grumble that he has received less than his share. Such behaviour would be inconceivable to the Bedu, for they are careful never to appear greedy, and quick to notice anyone who is."
"All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their deep religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier."
"They were Bedu, and these empty spaces where there was neither shade nor shelter were their homelands. Any of them could have worked in the gardens around Salala; all of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men. Among the Bedu only the broken are stranded among the cultivations on the desert’s shore."
"After all, many people feel today that it is morally indefensible to hang a man, even if he has raped and killed a child, but I could not forget how easily we ourselves had taken to killing during the war. Some of the most civilized people I had known had been the most proficient."
"It is not hunger nor thirst that frightens the Bedu; they maintain that riding they can survive in cold weather for seven days without food or water. It is the possible collapse of their camels which haunts them. If this happens, death is certain."
"But we seldom spoke of sex, for starving men dream of food, not women, and our bodies were generally too tired to lust."
"What use will money be to him in the Sands."
"Now I had crossed it [the Empty Quarter]. To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that."
"Strike a Bedu and he will kill you either then or later. It is easy for strangers to give offence without meaning to do so. I once put my hand on the back of bin Kabina’s neck and he turned on me and asked furiously if I took him for a slave. I had no idea that I had done anything wrong."
"It is characteristic of Bedu to do things by extremes, to be either wildly generous or unbelievably mean, very patient or almost hysterically excitable, to be incredibly brave or to panic for no apparent reason. Ascetic by nature, they derive satisfaction from the bare simplicity of their lives and scorn the amenities which others would judge essential."
"These [RAF] airmen were my fellow countrymen, and I was proud to be of their race. I knew the essential decency which was the bedrock of their character, their humour, stubbornness, and self-reliance. I knew that if called upon they could adapt themselves to any kind of life, in the desert, in the jungle, in mountains or on the sea, and that in many respects no race in the world was their equal. But the things that interested them bored me. They belonged to an age of machines; they were fascinated by cars and aeroplanes, and found their relaxation in the cinema and the wireless. I knew that I stood apart from them and would never find contentment among them, whereas I could find it among the Bedu, although I should never be one of them."
"This incident impressed upon me the Bedu’s indifference to human life. The man was sick and if God ordered it he would die. He was a stranger who came from a tribe unrelated to theirs. None of them felt an interest because he was a human being like themselves. His death would in no way affect them. Yet their code demanded that, however unwanted he might be, they should fight in his defence if he were attacked whilst with them."
"They strolled with me through the streets hand in hand, as is usual with Arab friends, but I was lightly uncomfortable, having re-acquired my inhibitions with my trousers."
"In the deserts, however arid, I have never felt homesick for green fields and woods in spring, but now that I was in England I longed with an ache that was almost physical to be back in Arabia."
"As I listened I thought once again how precarious was the existence of the Bedu. Their way of life naturally made them fatalists; so much was beyond their control. It was impossible for them to provide for a morrow when everything depended on a chance fall of rain or when raiders, sickness, or any one of a hundred chance happenings might at any time leave them destitute, or end their lives. They did what they could, and no people were more self-reliant, but if things went wrong they accepted their fate without bitterness, and with dignity as the will of God."
"…I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy."
"I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither. When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes."
"All my life I had hated machines. I could remember how bitterly at school I had resented reading the news that someone had flown across the Atlantic or travelled through the Sahara in a car. I had realized even then that the speed and ease of mechanical transport must rob the world of all diversity."
"I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority."
"As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile."
"Memories of that first visit to the Marshes have never left me: firelight on a half-turned face, the crying of geese, duck flighting in to feed, a boy's voice singing somewhere in the dark, canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reedbeds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes. A naked man in a canoe with a trident in his hand, reed houses built upon water, black, dripping buffaloes that looked as if they had calved from the swamp with the first dry land. Stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine. Once again I experienced the longing to share this life, and to be more than a mere spectator."
"My own tastes went, perhaps, too far to the other extreme. I loathed cars, aeroplanes, wireless and television, in fact most of our civilization's manifestations in the past fifty years, and was always happy, in Iraq or elsewhere, to share a smoke-filled hovel with a shepherd, his family and beasts. In such a household, everything was strange and different, their self-reliance put me at ease, and I was fascinated by the feeling of continuity with the past. I envied them a contentment rare in the world today and a mastery of skills, however simple, that I myself could never hope to attain."
"The desert Arabs had always been a people born to hardship. For them there was no ease or comfort, only the weariness of long marches and toil at well-heads. 'We are Bedu,' they boasted, and asked only the freedom that was theirs. Stoical in pain, and often very brave, they lived for the raid and the counter-raid, which were conducted according to set rules and usually with great chivalry. They took a fierce pride in danger and suffering, and never doubted their superiority over villager and townsman."
"I have led a hard life; this was my choice. It was also an inexpensive one: this was essential. I would not have had it otherwise, nor asked for more. Looking back, I would happily live these years again, in the context of the past."
"For untold centuries the Bedu lived in the desert; they lived there from choice.... All of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men. Valuing freedom above all else, they took a fierce pride in the very hardship of their lives, forcing unwilling recognition of their superiority on the townsmen and villagers who feared, hated and affected to despise them. Even today there is no Arab, however sophisticated, who would not proudly proclaim Bedu lineage."
"To me it is always the people rather than the places that matter."
"..I was thankful that I had not gone there with members of my own race, as one of large, meticulously organised expedition. I should have hated, in those surroundings, to listen to the wireless, the news, sports commentaries and European music; it would have seemed utterly incongruous. All I ever want to bring with me from our civilisation are some books, and those that I had, though there had been little opportunity to read them. In Arabia I had learnt to move from one world to another as easily as changing clothes, but always tried to keep the worlds apart."
"The Nuristanis had retained their individuality as a race even after conversion to Islam. Now they would be visited by an ever-increasing number of expeditions seeking adventure in wild places. This would disrupt a society utterly unprepared. Each expedition by its very presence would help destroy what it had come to find."
"All that is best in the Arabs came from the desert....... From the desert too has come the Arabs' pride of race, their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the reagrd they have for the dignity of others; their humour; their courage and their patience; the language that they speak, and their passionate love of poetry. But they are a race who produce their best only under conditions of extreme hardship."
"The desert Arabs had no tradition of civilisation behind them; no architectural inheritance - they lived in black tents, or in rooms devoid of furnishings in their villages and towns. They had no taste for refinements, demanded only the bare necessities of life. It was a life that produced much that was noble, little that was gracious and nothing that was artistic."
"Now that the Arabs are among the economic masters of the world I fear that many will find unendurable the boredome of their wealth."
"I believe that day [Ras Tafari's victory parade, Addis Ababa, 3 Nov 1916] implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world."
"No wonder that in this setting [Eton], during those impressionable years, I acquired lasting respect for tradition and veneration of the past. Here, too, from masters and boys alike, I learnt responsibility, the decencies of life, and standards of civilised behaviour."
"Later he [Evelyn Waugh] asked, at second-hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I refused. Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned."
"[re Danakil country] I was among a savage, good-looking people with a dangerous reputation. I was travelling with camels in hot, arid country under testing conditions where, if things went wrong, I could get no help and where men's lives depended on my judgement."
"I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been."
"I believe that most men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill and that even today this primitive urge has only been eradicated in a small minority of the human race."
"As I looked round the clearing at the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying."
"Personally, I would forgo any other comfort to drink clean water."
"I also questioned whether it was right to try to impose on the Sudanese the conventions and values of our utterly alien civilization, and sometimes expressed these doubts in letters to my mother. I could not help feeling that other races were entitled to their own customs and moral standards, however much these might differ from ours."
"More important, something decisive in my life, he [Guy Moore] taught me to feel affection for tribesmen. Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me, rather than places. I have never craved magnificent scenery or opportunities for sport in the way that I have longed to be with certain tribes and, above all, certain individuals among them."
"I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills."
"I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today."
"Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep."
"It is difficult to analyse the motive that induced me to make those journeys, or the satisfaction I derived from such a life. There was of course the lure of the unknown; there was the constant test of resolution and endurance. Yet those travels in the Empty Quarter would have been for me a pointless penance but for the comradeship of my Bedu companions. All they possessed were their camels and saddlery, their rifles and daggers, some waterskins and cooking pots and bowls, and the very clothes they wore; few of them even owned a blanket. They possessed, however, a freedom which we, with all our craving for possessions, cannot experience. Any of them could have found a job in the towns and villages of the Hadhramaut; but all would have rejected that easier life of lesser men. They met every challenge, every hardship, with the proud boast: We are Bedu."
"In July 1969 I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the 'Wazungu' - as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man. Even as a boy I recognized that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled."
"I agree about Wilfred Thesiger. I know him fairly well, from and common friends. He is either half naked in Kenya, surrounded by assegai-weilding Masai even nakeder, or pacing along in glittering , dog skin gloves, a stiff collar with an old Etonian tie, bamboo-handled umbrella tightly rolled, and a , staring down dead straight over a nose like a beak, scowling and glowering eyes, and clenched teeth. He really is very extraordinary. There's a very nice glimpse of him which you must know at the end of the Short Walk in the Hindu Kush."
"...His greatest legacy was his vast body of images of ways of life that were vanishing. These were all donated to the archives in Oxford and form a unique body of work. Thesiger carried his Leica in a goatskin bag and never, ever took more than a single shot of each subject, which often came out perfectly. After my father died, I moved briefly to London and I used to love talking to Thesiger in . By that time he was reluctant to leave his flat except for a nearby restaurant called . In Britain, stay in London and never visit the countryside, was his advice. If you leave London, go somewhere remote. He hated modernity and blamed the ‘motor car’ for destroying the planet. In time Thesiger’s friends moved him to an old people’s home in . On my last visit to Wilfred, I found him sitting alone in his room. We went to lunch in the canteen where they served institutional food with sweet orange squash. ‘Nobody knows who I am,’ said Wilfred. ‘I wish I could have stayed in .’ I said perhaps his friends had moved him to England because they thought the were exploiting him for his money. Wilfred struck the dining table with his fist and said: ‘How I wish I could have stayed! I so liked being exploited!’"
"Your picture of W.T. [Thesiger] is very accurate. He now realizes he is a misfit, but a misfit only in a Government and owing to excess of certain ancient virtues and not because of any vices - a brave, awkward, attractive creature."
"He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing."
"If any Jew should suppose that he should purchase the slave of another sec or people, such slave shall be immediately vindicated to the fisc. If the Jew should purchase a slave and circumcise him, he shall be penalized not only with the loss of the slave, but he shall also be visited with capital punishment."
"Pagan superstition and sacrifices are completely forbidden, in accord with the law set forth by Constantine."
"Pagan temples are to be closed; access to them is denied, and violators face capital punishment. The property of a violator will be given to the state treasury. Governors who fail to carry out this punishment will be punished."
"Those guilty of idolatry or pagan sacrifices must suffer capital punishment."
"Constantius declares a curse on those who perform the magic arts and thereby “jeopardize the lives of innocent persons.”"
"Anyone who consults a soothsayer on account of curiosity of the future will suffer capital punishment."
"Even a high-ranking man convicted of wizardry will face torture."
"We’re gonna take back our country. 2012 is the time we are going to send Mr. Obama home, to Kenya or wherever it is. We’re gonna do it."
"Question: The question I have, if you’re sent to Congress, will you pursue some kind of investigation to find out whether or not this, uh, guy is really a citizen and entitled to those authorities? Meadows: Yes. If we do our job from a grassroots perspective, we won’t have to worry about it. We’ll send him back home to Kenya or wherever it is. We’ll send him back home."
"[Trump did a good job at the meeting] laying out a conservative agenda"
"[but] I got an interview I got to run to"
"I feel like if there is any ribbing or maybe roasting of the church or Christian culture, I like to say it's not me pointing at you guys, it's me shining a mirror at us. I'm in the front of it, look at us. A lot of times it comes off as, if someone is making a joke about Christianity in the public forum, whether it be on social media, we are very defensive of it, because ... you're an outsider, you're against us. And I'm kind of like, 'hey, I'm with you. I grew up here, I love Jesus, I think the local church is our only hope. That being said, we do some weird stuff'."
"I think Christian comedy has gotten a bad rap in the past because it's very passive, and it's not honest. It's like knock-knock jokes type humor. What we're bringing to the table is another level of honesty, and maybe transparency that I think does make some people uncomfortable."
"Over the past number of years, various women have accused me of behavior that has been hurtful to them. While I am not guilty of everything I've been accused of, I confess to being guilty of this—I have treated relationships with women far too casually, in some cases even recklessly. My behavior has been destructive and sinful. I've sinned against God, against women and the people who I love the most. I have violated my own Christian beliefs, convictions and values, and have hurt many people in the process. I am sorry for the hurt and pain I have caused these women and will continue to seek their forgiveness. I have also hurt the name of Jesus and have sought His forgiveness."
"According to multiple sources, Crist has exploited his Christian reputation and platform to harass, manipulate and exploit young women over the last seven years. The allegations include, but are not limited to, individually sexting multiple women during the same time period, initiating sexual relationships with married women and women in committed relationships, offering show tickets in exchange for sexual favors and repeatedly calling these women late at night while drunk."
"John Crist is a man claiming to follow Jesus but living in a world of blurred lines. His intake of sexual toxicity is indicative of what is happening to millions of men in the atmosphere of our culture today. I pray he will recover."
"Whenever we (people of Swaziland) go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland."
"We call on the United Nations once again to uphold the principle of universality and its multilateral efforts toward total inclusion and to allow Taiwan to participate in relevant extensions on a dignified and equal footing."
"Sustaining the SDGs (sustainable development goals) will require that member states develop innovative financing strategies to ensure that implementation reaches those most left behind. At this critical juncture, including Taiwan is an essential next step if we are to successfully achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. We call for Taiwan's inclusion in the United Nations system, which encompasses participation in meetings, mechanisms and activities that pertain to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Doing so would not only strengthen global cooperation and partnership, but also emphasize the principle of ensuring that "no one is left behind"."
"Africa's last remaining absolute monarch, King Mswati III of Swaziland, took power at the age of eighteen. Since then he has allowed his country to slide into extreme poverty, with 69 percent of the Swazi people living on less than $1 a day. Swaziland has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world: almost 40 percent. The nation operated without a constitution for thirty years. Mswati agreed to implement a new one in 2006; however, it bans political parties, gives Mswati the right to reject any laws passed by the legislature, and grants him immunity from all possible crimes."
"When I was twenty-four I had a spiritual experience one night while reading the Bible. Just like Saul on the road to Damascus, I 'saw the light' and came to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Word of God. That night I believe God told me that I would be alive at the moment Jesus Christ comes back. For twenty-one years I have been convinced of this."
"On the night I came to know Jesus Christ, I had a vision. I believe that vision will soon be a reality. I know God's hand has been on my life."
"I grew up in the Midwest, so Tarzan was always one of my favourite heroes. It fits with what I’m passionate about. […] I’m an advocate for any animal that is treated inhumanely. […] I was very much alone. So the animals became my friends. We owned a farm. And I became almost like an animal whisperer. Cats would come to me. Hens. Cows. I’m a feeler, I guess."
"We’re moving from a semi-democratic to a semi-authoritarian system and the central government wants to limit our freedoms."
"I only said that independence was one theoretical option for Hong Kong if the party collapses, alongside a federal state or an EU-style confederation."
"People in Hong Kong still believe in democracy – the big question after the Umbrella Movement is how we can achieve it."
"If the struggle for democracy is a long battle, what is a few months or years in prison if I can gain more resilience for the future."
"There will be darker times ahead for Hong Kong, but the sun will rise again. We need to keep strong."
"Each human being is a totality of the human life."
"Patience is not passivity; it is aggressiveness without anxiety."
"To be slow is to miss a present opportunity, whereas to be patient is to anticipate a coming opportunity."
"Whether a matter is great or small, its importance and weight depend on whose hands it is in."
"Faults invariably exist among the good, and merit among faults."
"Never neglect your daily living, for it builds up your habits."
"Being slow means not acting when there is time to act, whereas being stable means allowing time to do its work."
"The highest morality is one in which divinity is added to our humanity. This is the divine attributes of God expressed in the created virtues of man."
"Holiness is the manner of this life that enjoys the divine nature to the uttermost."
"God is embodied and expressed in Christ (John 1:1, 14; 1 Tim. 3:16; Col. 2:9), and Christ is realized and experienced as the Spirit (John 14:16-17; 1 Cor. 15:45b; 2 Cor. 3:17; Rom. 8:10; Phil. 1:19). The Spirit is the very constituent of the church which is the Body of Christ, His fullness (Eph. 1:22-23; 1 Cor. 12:12). Now the Body of Christ is expressed in all the local churches, for the local churches are the expressions of the universal church (1:11-12). The local churches are the expression of the Body, the Body is the realization of Christ as the life-giving Spirit, and Christ is the embodiment of God."
"The second generation did not pass through as much as the first generation did, but they received the benefit of what the first generation experienced."
"The more spiritual we become, the more normal and human we will be."
"Efforts at self-vindication are a sign of their selfcondemnation."
"Some have criticized Paul for not trying to reform the social system. We realize, however, that Paul used the worst social system as an opportunity to charge the believers to live a Jesusly human life in the midst of it. If the saints could live such a human life in the worst social system imaginable, then we should be able to live such a life in any kind of circumstances today. (...) by the divine life we can have the highest human living even in the worst social system!"
"Money is not in the realm of God. Money is outside the kingdom of God; it is in the world of Satan. Therefore, money is unrighteous both in position and existence. Actually, as far as God is concerned, money should not exist. In this universe there should not be such a thing as money. If we love money, we love something that should not exist."
"If we are short of grace and lack the wisdom to handle a particular situation, we may need to be silent. But we must never be political."
"Religion is to do something for God, to worship God, yet without [God]. Now I would add something more to this definition of religion. When we say something is religion, we also mean that you have more than one way to live in your human living. In one of the ways for living, you don't apply the spiritual teachings to your life. You live a life without God. You just live it by yourself.... As long as you make a spiritual thing only a section of your daily living and not your whole daily living, that is a performance. That is religion."
"All religions lead to hypocrisy. Nowhere is hypocrisy more prevailing than in religion. Religion is a field, a realm, for hypocrisy to prevail."
"Religion is much used by the usurper to keep God’s chosen people under his oppression."
"Human religion is always like this: it begins by serving God and it ends by killing people."
"I think that being isolated from the Hollywood world of premieres and red carpet events was probably good for me because I could ease into those at will and by my own choice. But in other aspects, when it comes to fanfare Hawaii is nuts and in L.A. they're all so jaded. They don't care. They see another star and it's like, 'oh yeah, we've seen a hundred of them before. You're a dime a dozen'. Which is a little bit easier to deal with."
"The only way to want millions of people invading your life is to be off your rocker. This industry is conducive to cuckoo. It likes cuckoo. It encourages cuckoo. I've had to find my sanity."
"I’m very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don’t even like the word feminism because when I hear that word, I associate it with women trying to pretend to be men, and I’m not interested in trying to pretend to be a man. I don’t want to embrace manhood, I want to embrace my womanhood."
"It’s funny, because there’s a lot of fear in Hollywood about ever being typecast, and I kind of feel like, “Man, if you’re going to be typecast, what better to be typecast as a kick-ass chick?” I try to put my stamp on these strong female characters, which is the idea that they’re strong because of their compassion, they’re strong because of their vulnerability, they’re strong because of their emotion and they’re strong in spite of their fear. And that’s why I do get involved very heavily in the creative process because I think it’s a dangerous trap that sometimes male writers can find themselves getting into where they’re trying to create a strong woman, but they actually don’t know what female strength looks like. They don’t know what it means and so they create strength that looks manly. And I think it’s really important that young women and women of all ages see female characters that represent true femininity and that that isn’t weak, but that’s strong."
"I was there for three weeks before I shot a single thing. And that first day of shooting... I was so nervous, man. Everyone was sort of going "Who's this guy?" You know, there was a lot of that, and... You know, "Is he gonna deliver?", and that-- You can feel all that kinda pressure."
"It's always the suit's fault. Never the actor."
"I think every male at some point thinks about playing James Bond so it was not right then, but it may be right if it comes back. I think you've got to be scared as an actor and keep taking risks. It doesn't always work out but it's a healthy place to be."
"This is pretty much one of those roles that had me pinching myself all the way through the shoot. I got to shoot a big-budget, shamelessly old-fashioned romantic epic set against one of the most turbulent times in my native country's history, while, at the same time, celebrating that country's natural beauty, its people, its cultures... I'll die a happy man knowing I've got this film on my CV."
"Nothing has ever opened my eyes like transcendental meditation has. It makes me calm and happy, and, well, it gives me some peace and quiet in what’s a pretty chaotic life!"
"The Broadway thing is full-on—we were nine months in, six days a week. When you get a week off, there’s something so miraculous about it and freeing. I was sitting on a beach, not a care in the world, and for some reason, the thought came into my head: What do you want to do? And the first two things had nothing to do with work—then literally, I thought: Deadpool-Wolverine. I want to do that movie. That’s what I want."
"I'm an actor, not a politician. I don't represent a race. I don't represent any group. I just represent the character I'm playing at the time."
"If you don’t love your fellow man, women, person, then you don’t have anything."
"But I do see you today. And I’m encouraged by what I see. I’m strengthened by what I see. I love what I see."
"I actually kissed a man in the film, but they took it out, they cut it. I think they got chicken."
"I wasn't put on this earth to act. I was put on this earth to share and to be an example of the power and wisdom and grace and mercy of God in my life."
"From our snow-capped mountains to our nearly endless prairies, Montana is an awe-inspiring place of tremendous beauty. We call it Big Sky Country, the Treasure State, the Last Best Place. And we call it home, but there’s something even more special than the beauty of an eastern Montana sunset or being knee deep in a crystal clear mountain stream -- it’s the people of Montana, Montanans are a kind, warm, generous, and hard-working people."
"One’s life is one’s faith when you commit your life to Christ, if you really want to be a Christian it will cost you your life. I learned that from a man who wrote books."
"I don’t think schools are the best way to teach children. Schools should be for fish, not human beings."
"It was a was a hard road to come back from, but it definitely taught me perseverance and grit, but also it taught me empathy, which I think I would not have learned otherwise."
"The voters of Western North Carolina responded to these allegations by giving Madison Cawthorn a 12-point victory over his opponent. Rep. Cawthorn is now busy doing the work he was elected to do including helping our economy recover from the pandemic, creating jobs and opportunity, making health care more affordable, protecting our natural environment and defending life and our Second Amendment rights."
"We are entering a new stage of the development of the statehood. The radical changes in the domains of public construction, judicial system, market economy, freedoms have become irreversible, and, with cooperation between the executive and legislative branches, we must bring all these to their natural development. The further promotion of democracy and continuation of the reforms have no alternatives. In this direction, the efficient work of the Parliament and its constructive attitude can greatly stimulate the positive processes. As a result, Armenia may come out in the world as a front runner in the region as far as permanent democratic values and stability are concerned. Everything depends on our level of responsibility and us. The accord in society, political dialogue and constructive cooperation are to become the credo of our people in the upcoming four years."
"Today we have not only a government seeking revenge in Azerbaijan, but also a similarly minded Azerbaijani people. And when these two circumstances combine, the danger of a renewed war increases."
"I am trying to understand how the formula “Artsakh is Armenia, full stop” can be combined with a solution that should satisfy all parties. The formula of these authorities implies that either Karabakh should abandon the idea of independence, or Azerbaijan should agree with the independence of Karabakh."
"All my close friends ask me ‘Why are you doing this [running for office]?’. And I always tell myself: ‘If not me, then who?’ I asked this question to myself in 1992, 1997 and I'm asking myself the same question now, today. It feels like it's my destiny to fix what others broke."
"In reality, all experts were voicing that the policy led in Armenia made the war inevitable. Different expert circles insisted we were not ready and we night face a controversial and severe war."
"An unduly unfair peace cannot be lasting and sustainable. I want to end this conflict, and we must find a solution which which will be fair."
"I have extensive management experience in crisis situations, accumulated experience, and knowledge in the security and defense system. I have experience in overcoming the economic crisis. The current dangers and the accumulated experience and knowledge practically coincide"
"What are we going to do when we come to power? First of all, it is necessary to assess the scale of the damage done to the country in all spheres: economy, legal system, education, science, etc. This is necessary to plan the next steps. Anti-crisis steps must be taken to stem the further degradation of security and governance. We must stop the economic downturn, we must restore the country's creditworthiness and predictability. We have long lost our reputation as a reliable partner in the international arena."
"It is fundamentally important that people immediately feel the changes in the country, and people will feel it. We will not give empty promises, the key to our success is professionalism, experience, hard work, discipline and love for the country."
"We will propose the concept of a working country, we will turn the country into a construction site again. Creating tens of thousands of jobs every year is a priority. We did it once, we will do it again."
"The fight for the purity and efficiency of the state apparatus will be the best tool in the fight against corruption. This will be concrete work, not the slogans that the authorities are guided by today. Lying will be excluded in the state system. We have become a world of lies, we must start by eliminating those lies."
"We will build a country that every Armenian can be proud of. We understand that no one will ensure our security, the development of our country and economy for us. Yes, we have allies, friends, but no one will do for us what we ourselves must do. They will be with us, they will help us, but our fate must be in our hands. We will build everything that I said in my speech. We will bring dignified peace and prosperity. Rest assured everything will be fine. Thank you."
"You don’t survive as a screenwriter-for-hire if you’re not willing to incorporate other people’s ideas or at least be willing to consider them. What I’ve found is that other people have really good ideas, which make you look better. It’s part of the process. At all stages of production, including pre- and post-, your film is going to change because it’s being shaped by all these people and ideas."
"I became a victim all over again; my life became as a bird in a cage. I asked, why me? Why do I suffer so much? I felt so bitter and angry, I wanted those who had caused me suffering to suffer even more than me."
"Try not to see her as she was then – suffering, crying out in pain and fear. Try to see her as she is today: as a mother, a grandmother and a survivor, calling out for peace."
"The more I prayed for my enemies, the softer my heart became. When I felt real forgiveness, my heart was set free. If I can do it, all of you can do it too."
"I came through the fire, and I am so blessed to be with you today. My dream is that one day, all people will live without fear, in real peace, with no fighting and no hostility."
"The fire burned off my clothes. And I saw my arm got burned with the fire. I thought, oh, my goodness, I get burned. People will see me different way. Nine years old, I became the victim of war. I didn’t like that picture at all. I felt like, why he took my picture, when I was agony, naked, so ugly? I wished that picture wasn’t taken. I went through 17 operations. I had to deal with the pain every single day. I used to compare my scars with buffalo skin. And because my skin wasn’t have any pores, I cannot sweat, make me feel so tired, so headache."
"All my journey, I help children, building school, building hospital, orphanage home. It’s about relationship. Now I’m working, not because of my duty, not because of my mission, but because of my love."
"If I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bomb, I could tell him we cannot change history. But we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace."
"When I was growing up, the pain was so sharp, it was like I’d been cut by a knife. As I get older, the pain is different, it is deep in there and stays there."
"Every time I touch my scar I am so thankful. My scar reminds me that God is with me. It is the mark that God stamped on my body to remind me he is there. I touch my scar and I love it – it humbles me, it makes me love people and do the work I am doing now. It takes me back to being that little girl, but now I have no upset or anger about it, I just go to the Lord and pray. And the more I pray, the more peace I have over my suffering. My scar makes me have more intimacy in my relationship with God. It’s the strength inside of me. My scar is a miracle."
"Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful. We would not have war at all if everyone could learn how to live with true love, hope, and forgiveness. If that little girl in the picture can do it, ask yourself: Can you?"
"Everybody will try to knock you down but only you can see where you are going, so you must be strong and keep going."
"Do not limit yourself from who you learn from, everyone has something you can learn."
"Success is when God is happy with you, when the closest people around you are happy and when your soul is at peace with you."
"Have a vision of where you want your life to be."
"Start with whatever you have, there is something in your hand no matter how small."
"Women should empower themselves while staying true to their marriages and husbands"
"There will always be disgruntled elements concerning whatever you do. Keep your heart clean, stay focused and work hard."
"Be yourself, you might not understand it, others might not understand it, but someday, your purpose will be enough."
"There has to be something that drives you. Find that thing that drives you and you'll be able to have longevity in it."
"We can rise. We can achieve so much at the end of the day if we get it right."
"You can't do everything at the same time, don't be too much in a hurry. Space out yourself, rest, understand yourself and love yourself."
"If you do whatever you do diligently and excellently, you would surely make a difference."
"I believe the new African woman is a woman who respects her man and knows that the man is the head of the family, but doesn’t lose herself in that either but commands and demands respect in her own way."
"I think the new African woman is career minded and family oriented."
"Everybody will try to knock you down but only you can see where you’re going, so you must be strong, believe in yourself and keep going."
"I used to think I was odd, as the things that interested many weren’t my interest. Not anymore, now I understand my interests and live in my truth."
"We need to get to a situation where we understand what we stand for and how much power we have, we are not fully conscious of how we form people’s mindset and how we change people’s mind."
"You can’t define success in one sentence, a lot of people have tried to do that. Success is relative. What is success to you might not be success to me but I think generally its a state of peace of mind. A state of acceptance and a state of joy."
"There is space for you in this world and the world is waiting for you to PERFECT yourself and PRESENT yourself."
"Women should empower themselves while still remaining true to their marriage and husbands. If a marriage is stressful, emotionally destructive, I think we should be strong enough to walk away from such damaging unions."
"The only thing that keeps you sane as a man or woman is when you’re empowered."
"Learn which parts of yourself to nourish and which sections to heal."
"The creator of the stars, mountains, oceans, galaxies is not too busy for you. He is available and accessible. You do not need a special place or a religious person to talk with Him, just talk with Him. He is right here and He is obsessed with you!"
"People should never regret. If it is good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it is experience."
"Take your heart back from the past, take your mind off the irrelevant, and take the time to be better."
"I appreciate the mistakes I made in the past cause it is shaping my future."
""In your flaws are hidden your strength. Your perfect imperfection will lead you to change."]"
"I’ll never regret the love I gave anyone, even if it wasn’t reciprocated. Love always comes back full circle, that love is coming back to me in some shape or form. Keep putting love into the universe, because it’s coming back with interest!! No Regrets, Just Lessons To Grow!!"
"My burning desire is to lead my generation into the very act of worship, worshiping the Lord in spirit and in truth."
"Sometimes, it is necessary to have a taste of what it feels like to be an ordinary woman on the street."
"If you want to introduce Jesus to people, you have to look good. If you want to tell people that Christ is a good saviour, the first thing they would look at is your appearance."
"When someone is not free to do what they feel like doing, like every other person on the street, it causes depression which can even lead to death."
"We spent three trillion dollars in the Middle East, right now, where that money could have been used to take care of our veterans, first and foremost, who've been over there fighting, but also take care of the people that need help here in the United States instead of wasting it overseas."
"I want to speak up about representation in the industry because it is important. My experience has been hard coming up. I was naive and didn't know about the systemic stuff that still continues today and having experienced it, I know there's a need for change and I want to be a voice for that."
"Faith has enabled me to survive in this business: faith in God through Christ Jesus. I trust in him that he has a purpose regarding my life and career, and he knows what is best for me. I also need to have faith in myself, my abilities, my value. I have business skill-sets to help me create my own work. I no longer want to just survive, but thrive. I’m also trying to help other people who come from where I come from."
"I want to tell stories that reflect people from all walks of life."
"When I was younger, I used to dress up as police officers and firefighters, and on other occasions would imitate Bob Marley and Michael Jackson, who were both musical inspirations of mine."
"On growing up, as quoted by The Jamaica Gleaner, , October 30, 2021."
"You have people like Marcus Rashford who is part of our generation. He's seen a need and is using his voice. A lot of us are rising up to create change for ourselves.""
"On combatting the inequalities in the system, as quoted by My london, , October 28, 2020."
"When you exclude a child, you are essentially saying they're not good enough for society. A lot of my peers who have been excluded ended up in prison or dead."
"On the effects of school exclusions as spoken on ITV News london, , October 25, 2019."
"This statement I LOVE YOU has wrecked more horrendous havoc on humanity that can’t be imagined."
"I LOVE YOU, has caused people to enter marriages that has marred their destinies"
"It was Charles Martel who had crushed the despots who were claiming dominion for themselves throughout the whole land of the Franks. It was he, too, who had conquered the Saracens, when they were striving to occupy Gaul, in two battles, one in Aquitaine, near the city of Poitiers, and the other by the River Berre, near Narbonne. In this way he compelled them to withdraw to Spain."
"The Frankish power, it must be remembered, was under Charles Martel at the height of its greatness as a purely Frankish power. It was, in everything but formal titles, fully the peer of the Empire. And the personal glory of Charles stood above that of any living man in Christendom. He had beaten back the Mussulmans in the West, as the Emperor Leo had beaten them back in the East. The deliverer of the Church in Gaul was the founder of the Church in Germany. If the Lombard threatened, if the Emperor could or would give no help, the Frankish Mayor undoubtedly could give it effectually if he would. But the personal character and position of Charles must be taken into account. His reign—one cannot help calling it so—had been full of battles, full of victories. But he was not an adventurous or aggressive ruler. His object, whether for his own house or for the kingdom, was to keep what was in possession, to win back what had been lost, but to seek for nothing more."
"A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. From such calamities was Christendom delivered by the genius and fortune of one man. Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pepin, was content with the titles of mayor or duke of the Franks, but he deserved to become the father of a line of kings. In a laborious administration of twenty-four years, he restored and supported the dignity of the throne, and the rebels of Germany and Gaul were successively crushed by the activity of a warrior, who, in the same campaign, could display his banner on the Elbe, the Rhône, and the shores of the ocean."
"The epithet of Martel, the Hammer, which has been added to the name of Charles, is expressive of his weighty and irresistible strokes: the valour of Eudes was excited by resentment and emulation; and their companions, in the eye of history, are the true Peers and Paladins of French chivalry."
"The figure of Charles Martel was destined to occupy an important place in the epic poetry of France. His splendid victory over the Saracens at Poitiers was doubtless made the subject of many contemporary songs, and its memory may perhaps still be traced in some of the incidents of the Song of Roland. But it is interesting to note that certain traditions which in the later French epic are attached to Martel's more illustrious grandson, must have originally related to the victor of Poitiers himself, in whose history they have their only actual counterpart. This substitution of a later and more celebrated hero in the place of one more remote, has already been indicated as a common phenomenon in the development of epic poetry. But the confusion of these two heroes in the tradition is of later generations becomes still more intelligible if we remember that the fathers of both bore the name of Pepin, and that they themselves were known generally to their contemporaries by the simple name of Charles. Of those epic poems which form what has been called the Charlemagne Cycle, two at least—those which claim to relate the birth and the youthful exploits of the great emperor—formed originally a part of the poetic tradition which had Charles Martel for its hero, while a large number of isolated episodes in other poems point to the same process of epic substitution."
"To be a human being is to have to come to terms with the fact that your time here is finite. Shows that heighten that fact all speak to the reality of our own existence—and how high the stakes become as a result."
"I like to stay busy and that’s partly why I produce and I’m now directing. I just love storytelling, and as an actor, you can often feel like a cog in a wheel. I don’t want to be a cog in a wheel. I want to be the wheel. In fact, I’d rather own the whole bicycle."
"Nowhere on earth has been better at covering up racism in my opinion than Great Britain. The thing I like about living in America is that racism comes at you head on. In the UK it sneaks up behind you."
"Good governance can neither be decreed as you will find in dictatorships nor legislated in a democratic set up alone. It can only be achieved by a people’s consensus around doing the right thing for the right purpose."
"I believe that with what we left behind and with what the new government will also acquire we will be able to [bring] this war on terror to a reasonable conclusion."
"I like to ask people: was it that there was 24-hour electricity and Jonathan came and switched it off and damaged the equipment? The answer is no. Power is an age-old problem in Nigeria and we have to understand that."
"I can tell you very clearly that violence will not break out because of my interests. I can tell you very clearly."
"Politics in the Nigerian standard is about betrayals. https://www.thecable.ng/jonathan-nigerian-politics-is-about-betrayal-i-witnessed-it-in-2015/"
"In Nigerian Politics, you find it difficult to see somebody who will say the same thing in the morning and in the evening."
"Most Nigerian politicians, you cannot take their words to the bank."
"Politics in the Nigerian Standard,You will find it difficult to see somebody who will say the same thing in the morning and say the same thing in the afternoon and in the evening."
"It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood."
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."
"So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God."
"For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all."
"Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead."
"And when the Lord had given the linen cloth to the servant of the priest, he went to James and appeared to him. For James had sworn that he would not eat bread from that hour in which he had drunk the cup of the Lord until he should see him risen from among them that sleep. And shortly thereafter the Lord said: Bring a table and bread! And immediately it added: he took the bread, blessed it and brake it and gave it to James the Just and said to him: My brother, eat thy bread, for the Son of man is risen from among them that sleep."
"The disciples said to Jesus, "We know you will leave us. Who is going to be our leader then?" Jesus said to them, "No matter where you go you are to go to James the Just, for whose sake heaven and earth came into being.""
"James, the brother of the Lord, called the Just, received the administration of the Church of Jerusalem... He drank neither wine nor any other intoxicating drink, and never ate meat."
"Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."
"Shortly before he died, Jesus set up a provisional government with twelve regional officials, one over each of the twelve tribes or districts of Israel, and he left his brother James at the head of this fledgling government. James became the uncontested leader of the early Christian movement. This significant fact of history has been largely forgotten, or as likely, hidden. Properly understood, it changes everything we thought we knew about Jesus, his mission, and his message. Everyone has heard of Peter, Paul, and John—but the pivotal place of James, the beloved disciple and younger brother of Jesus, has been effectively blotted from Christian memory."
"There is no evidence that James worshipped his brother or considered him divine. His emphasis in his letter was not upon the person of Jesus but upon what Jesus taught."
"I am saying if we are getting ZWL$7000, it should be US$7000 and if we are getting 20 litres worth of coupons it should be 20 litres in US Dollars"
"On a point of privilege Hon Speaker, it is said half a loaf is better than nothing"
"I would like to appreciate the salary we are getting but if you convert the salary we are getting per month, it amounts to US$170 and as an MP you are expected to do everything from that US$170 including looking after your family, servicing the vehicle and everything"
"I also appreciate the coupons we are getting which are not acceptable in all garages including the garages which are owned by our chefs (leaders). They need coupons which are in US Dollars"
"Hon. Member Chingosho, you have been too pre-emptive"
"I am meeting the chief whips this afternoon to discuss among other things the two issues you have raised."