people-from-glasgow

"He remained a staunch supporter of the old order during the Reformation era, and being an independent thinker, with feelings and views very similar to those of the 'old catholic' school of this century, tried to stem the reformation of the church from within."

""would absolutely have to look at options"."

"Depending on what we learn from AI . . . there may be an opportunity for BT to be even smaller by the end of the decade."

"We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great man's myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most."

"If we are to consider what holds the South back from the modern world in so graceless and often base a way, we must allow for the survival of the Confederate legend. This legend is now less an heroic memory than poison in the blood; it recalls less Chancellorsville, or even Nashville, than Oxford, Mississippi, with Ross Barnett as the poor man's Jefferson Davis."

"It is, I have been told, one of the most formidable of Chinese imprecations to wish that your enemy lived "in interesting times." We live in very interesting times; times not to be made better by any simple formula. Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning."

"There is only one word for aid that is genuinely without strings, and that word is blackmail."

"The combination of a profound hatred of war and militarism with an innocent delight in playing soldiers is one of these apparent contradictions of American life that one has to accept."

"The basic Canadian relationship is not either with the United States or with the United Kingdom, but with the world of the hydrogen bomb. The very fact that Canada is now one of the treasure-houses of the world makes the naive isolationism of the inter-war years...impossible. A uranium-producing country cannot be neutral."

"A country has the kind of army its total ethos, its institutions, resources, habits of peaceful life, make possible to it. The American army is the army of a country which is law-respecting without being law-abiding. It is the army of a country which, having lavish natural wealth provided for it and lavish artificial wealth created by its own efforts, is extravagant and wasteful. It is the army of a country in which melodramatic pessimism is often on the surface but below it is the permanent optimism of a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America. It is the army of a country whose national motto has been "root, hog, or die." When convinced that death is the alternative, the hog roots."

"For Americans, war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis—an American decision that this war is sport, or that it is business."

"We have followed the bright rainbow of humanistic promise, too zealously and too long. It still hangs in the sky, but its colours have faded; and the floods are still rising about us."

"American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone."

"After the Civil War any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats."

"The original acoustic guitar hero, Bert Jansch was a player’s player, and you need only look at the list of people that count him as an influence to see that. Everybody from Jimmy Page and Neil Young to Pete Doherty and beyond cite Jansch’s distinctive and wide-ranging style as an essential ingredient in their playing. One of the true pathfinders of the ‘60s folk music, Jansch’s complex fingerpicking and dark, brooding songwriting established his reputation, and whether solo or with Pentangle he proved his boundless ability with an acoustic time and time again."

"The Scottish bishops can tell you that the vast majority of the Catholic people, many other Christians, and indeed people of other faiths respond positively and rejoice to hear religious and moral truth expounded clearly and simply and openly. Even in these highly secularised times, the thirst for authentic religion still asserts itself."

"Scholarship is warmed with the holy flame of Christian zeal."

"Upon our annexation of the Punjab the fanatic fury, which had formerly spent itself upon the Sikhs, was transferred to their successors. Hindus and English were alike infidels in the eyes of the Sittana Host, and as such were to be exterminated by the sword. The disorders as ‘ which we had connived at, or at least viewed with indifference, upon the Sikh frontier, now descended as a bitter inheritance to ourselves, Their followers were found preaching sedition in different parts of the country so far apart as Rajshahiin Bengal, Patna in Bihar and the Punjab frontier. Throughout the whole period the fanatics kept the border tribes in a state of chronic hostility to the British Power."

"Religion and philosophy have been the great contributions of India to the world."

"To the aboriginal races alone can we appear in the light of friends and deliverers. They have yet to start on the path of progress. It remains for us to decide whether that path is to lead them to Hinduism, or to the purer faith and civilisation which we represent."

"‘In the year A.D. 1000 it [the Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakra, and flowed in the Eastern Nara . . . Thus the Sutlej or the Hakra—for both streams flowed in the same bed—is probably the lost river of the Indian desert, whose waters made the sands of Bikaner and Sind a smiling garden.’"

"... the entry ‘Saraswati (Sarsuti)’, defined as a ‘sacred river of the Punjab, famous in the early Brahmanical annals’. We learn that the river rises ‘in the low hills of Sirmur State, emerges upon the plain at Zadh Budri [Ad Badri], a place esteemed sacred by all Hindus’, and, before joining the Ghaggar, ‘passes by the holy town of Thanesar and the numerous shrines of the Kuruksetra, a tract celebrated as a centre of pilgrimages, and as the scene of the battle-fields of the Mahabharatha’. The Gazetteer repeats, ‘In ancient times, the united stream below the point of junction appears to have borne the name of Sarsuti, and, undiminished by irrigation near the hills, to have flowed across the Rajputana plains . . .’ ‘Some of the earliest Aryan settlements in India were on the banks of the Saraswati, and the surrounding country has from almost Vedic times been held in high veneration. The Hindus identify the river with Saraswati, the Sanskrit Goddess of Speech and Learning.’"

"The grammar of Panini stands supreme among the grammars of the world, alike for its precision of statement, and for its thorough analysis of the roots of the language and of the formative principles of words. By employing an algebraic terminology it attains a sharp succinctness unrivalled in brevity, but at times enigmatical. It arranges, in logical harmony, the whole phenomena, which the Sanskrit language presents, and stands forth as one of the most splendid achievements of human invention and industry. So elaborate is the structure that doubts have arisen whether its complex rules offormation and phonetic change, its polysyllabic derivatives, its ten conjugations with1heir multiform aorists and long array of tenses, could ever have been the spoken language of a people." 29"

"‘In ancient times the lower portion of the river seems to have borne the name of its confluent the Saraswati or Sarsuti, which joins the main stream in Patiala territory. It then possessed the dimensions of an important channel . . . At present, however, every village through which the stream passes has diverted a portion of its waters for irrigation, no less than 10,000 acres being supplied from this source in Ambala District alone . . . During the lower portion of its course, in Sirsa District, the bed of the Ghaggar is dry from November to June, affording a cultivable surface for rich crops of rice and wheat.’"

"The Hindus attained a very high proficiency in arithmetic and algebra independently of any foreign influence." The romance of the composition of Lilavati - the standard Hindu textbook on Arithmetic by Bhaskaracharya - is very interesting and charming. It deals not only with the basic elements of the science of arithmetic but also with questions of interest, of barter, ofpermutatlOns and combinations, and of mensuration. Bhaskaracharya knew the law of gravitation. The Surya Siddhanta is based on a system of trigonometry. Professor Wallace says: "In fact it is founded on a geometrical theorem, which was not known to the geometricians of Europe before the time of Vieta, about two hundred years ago. And it employs the sine of arcs, a thing unknown to the Greeks." The 47th proposition of Book I of Euclid, which is ascribed to Pythagoras was known long ago to the Hindus and must have been learnt from them by Pythagoras."

"The whole conception of Islam is that of a church either actively militant or conclusively triumphant forcibly converting the world, or ruling the stiff-necked unbeliever with a rod of iron."

"Memories are important. They are the little pockets of nostalgia we dip into now and again just to remember what the past tasted like and sometimes it was good. In this way, we can build up a whole ladder of memories and reach a whole other world whenever we want it. It's comforting, it's an escape, but why not?"

"If Julian is to be prosecuted, then there’s a equally good case for the editor and journalists in The Guardian or New York Times, Der Spiegel, El País, La República and all the other organizations involved in this coverage being prosecuted, too."

"Another whistleblower that I owe much to is Edward Snowden. I went to Hong Kong in 2013 with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and spent over a week holed up with Snowden in our hotel room in Hong Kong. Whistleblowers are essential to good journalism. They allow reporters to get behind... the walls of secrecy built up by officials and press officers."

"Most shows, if you’re on them long enough, they feel like family, but sometimes it’s a dysfunctional family."

"... since the Sacred Book is a phenomenon of religion in general, and as isolation is a fruitful source of wrong judgment in the historical investigation of ideas and institutions, we decline to detach our Sacred Book from similar books of its class in other faiths of the world. Now, in surveying the history of religion, I seem to detect four negative truths about the Sacred Book. (i) Not every religion possesses a sacred book. (ii) The sacred book does not lie beside the cradle of the faith in question. (iii) No religion lives by its sacred book alone. And (iv) no sacred book can be judged apart from the specific ethos of the faith out of which it rose and for which it exists."

"Hell is an element of any religion which is morally healthy."

"'The theology of the gospels!' some will exclaim in dismay, 'and we verily thought the gospels were a refuge from theology!'"

"Gamaliel had a reputation for mildness and moderation, but his brilliant young pupil flung himself with fanatical zeal into the task of stamping out the new heresy of the Nazarenes."

"If I had wanted to distract anyone, I would not have chosen ufology, as this opens me up to ridicule."

"The main enemy of the people is the state. The state does everything it can do to get more and more control over people’s lives and access to more of their data while cutting down on personal freedom and choice. No government ever undoes the unpopular legislation of the previous government, no government ever gives back to the people what a previous government has taken from them. The attack on the Human rights act is symptomatic of this general drive by the state to have more control and curtail our freedoms."

"we could do a great deal worse than look back across the drift to the great reader Lewis. We need to try to recall what literature was; what it meant, and can still mean, to grasp literary works in memory."

"A great teacher and a great writer need not be an efficient supervisor."

"Going in and out of a song, you know you might just be good enough to improvise a little bit when you’re playing live when you haven’t recorded a song, but then you get a chord and you say, oh, that little bit that I’m playing there, that doesn’t fit quite right, you know, or there’s something missing in that chord. It’s like putting a microscope on the song, you know, and polishing it to the way that you wanted, that’s what I think. I think things like … there was one chord this time, and we’re using good guitars, but nothing sounded right. Slightly out of tune. As you move from the top of the neck to the bottom of the neck, you’d never have noticed it when you were playing live, but when you’re recording it it becomes so so intricate that I think it’s a great way to get into the song"

"As an actor, if you’re lucky enough to get any roles then that’s a good thing. If you can choose a little bit, then even better. I try and read things that are coming up and see what looks interesting. Things morph over the years as you get more and more interested in different things."

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan”"

"One terracotta, from a late level at Mohenjo-daro , seems to represent a horse, reminding us that the jaw-bone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in northern Baluchistan." He" notes as well, after referring to the bone of a camel recovered from a low level at Mohenjo-daro: "There is no evidence of any kind for the use of the ass or mule. On the other hand the bones of a horse occur at a high level at Mohenjo-daro , and from the earlier (doubtless pre-Harappan) layer at Rana Ghundai in northern Baluchistan both horse and ass are recorded. It is likely enough that camel, horse and ass were in fact all a familiar feature of the Indus caravans."

"One terracotta, from a late level of Mohenjo-daro, seems to represent a horse, reminding us that a jawbone of a horse is also recorded from the same site, and that the horse was known at a considerably earlier period in Baluchistan."

"Since India’s and Pakistan’s independence, South Asian archaeology was significantly influenced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (born 1890, died 1976) and, to a lesser degree, by the late Stuart Piggott. Wheeler secured a reputation as one of the most prominent archaeologists in the English speaking world.... If Jones’ had his “philologer paragraph,” Wheeler had his “Aryan paragraphs” which directed archaeological, historical, linguistic, and biological interpretations within South Asian studies for over a half century."

"Wheeler (1968, 3rd edition) proposed the following: It is, simply, this. Sometime during the second millennium B.C. – the middle of the millennium has been suggested, without serious support – Aryan-speaking peoples invaded the Land of Seven Rivers, the Punjab and its neighboring region. It has long been accepted that the tradition of this invasion is reflected in the older hymns of the Rigveda, the composi- tion of which is attributed to the second half of the millennium. In the Rigveda, the invasion constantly assumes the form of an onslaught upon walled cities of the aborigines. For these cities, the term used is pur, meaning a “rampart,” “fort,” “stronghold.” One is called “broad” ( prithvi) and “wide” (urvi). Sometimes strongholds are referred to metaphorically as “of metal” (dyasi). “Autumnal” (saradi) forts are also named: “this may refer to the forts in that season being occupied against the Aryan attacks or against inundations caused by overflowing rivers.” Forts “with a hundred walls” (satabhuji) are mentioned. The citadel may be of stone (afmanmayi): alternatively, the use of mud-bricks is perhaps alluded to by the epithet ama (raw, unbaked); Indra, the Aryan war-god is purandara, “fort-destroyer.” He shatters “ninety forts” for his Aryan protégé, Divodasa. The same forts are doubtless referred to where in other hymns he demolishes variously ninety-nine and a hundred “ancient castles” of the aboriginal leader Sambara. In brief, he renders “forts as age consumes garment.” If we reject the identification of the fortified citadels of the Harappans with those which the Aryans destroyed, we have to assume that, in the short interval which can, at the most, have intervened between the end of the Indus civilization and the first Aryan invasions, an unidentified but formidable civilization arose in the same region and presented an extensive fortified front to the invaders. It seems better, as the evidence stands, to accept the identification and to suppose that the Harappans of the Indus valley in their decadence, in or about the seventeenth century BC, fell before the advancing Aryans in such fashion as the Vedic hymns proclaim: Aryans who nevertheless, like other rude conquerors of a later date, were not too proud to learn a little from the conquered . . . (1968: 131–2)"

"The city, so far from being an unarmed sanctuary of peace, was dominated by the towers and battlements of a lofty man‐made acropolis of defiantly feudal aspect. A few minutes’ observation had radically changed the social character of the Indus civilization and put it at last into an acceptable secular focus. (Wheeler, 1955: 192)"

"‘For a civilization so widely distributed as that of the Indus no uniform ending need be postulated.’"

"The anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day."

"Archaeology is not a science, it’s a vendetta."

"One important legacy of Wheeler's influence is an a priori acceptance by scholars of the use of migration and stimulus diffusion to describe all major South Asian discontinuities - beginning with the invention of agriculture and ending with the arrival of the British. Alternative explanations of cultural change are not considered. Wheeler's interpretations promoted an encapsulation of South Asian culture history into a series of chronologically and culturally distinct units focused on northern areas. It the became difficult to perceive or reconstruct a cultural account incorporating an integrated sub-continent. Recent archaeological data suggests fundamental interpretive changes are now warranted."