non-fiction-authors

"Peter von Bohlen claimed in 1835, the historian of the Orient must treat all people equally: ‘... he must learn to regard the wonders, which belong to the very spirit of the ancient legends, as an inviolable national inheritance, neither setting them aside by forced interpretations, nor proscribing them as the offspring of pure imagination or intentional deception, but simply endeavoring to discover the original nucleus of fact... .”” Moreover, he continued, the historical critic must strive, “unbiased by preconceived opinion, fully to understand and fairly to estimate the individual character of every people, according to their own standard of perfection, their peculiar turn of thought and their mode of action... .”"

"Viewing history in the large, we cannot fail to see that the world we live in is essentially a . All its fundamental forms and moulds for law and government, art, architecture, and literature, thought and faith., were created beside the Mediterranean; all its political and religious struggles, all its wars, were the fighting over of old Mediterranean questions; and as a system of types and forms, it never can be really understood and known except as it be reduced to Mediterranean terms, and studied in the perspective of a Roman, Greek, or Syrian horizon."

"There was no priestly hierarchy either for Greece as a whole or for single cantons; not even among priests of the same in different cantons was there organized coöperation. Some popular or oracle might win more than local prestige and secure the protection and support of various neighboring states, but there the drift toward centralization and organization found its limit. At no time did there exist an organized authority which could formulate standards of faith or dictate the usages of religious etiquette. Ritual, seeking that which in matter and manner was believed to be well pleasing to the , followed the traditions of the individual shrines, and there were no better theologians than the poets."

"No single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon which built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life."

"The rate at which your knowledge will ripen into wisdom depends in considerable part upon your distinguishing what is important and what is relatively unimportant. Some people seem never to know any difference between the s and the s."

"If Monica Dickens means nothing more to you than horsey books and no-nonsense memoirs of nursing and service, then this eloquent novel about the genteel poverty of a widow shunted between her three egotistical daughters is a fine corrective."

"... I took the ashes out to the , leaving a little trail of cinders from a broken corner of the box. The trouble about housework is that whatever you do seems to lead to another job to do or a mess to clear up."

"With the suit, Christine wore a grey felt beret which had been sold to her cheaply by Mrs Arnold in Millinery, because it had a mark on the back and no customer would buy it. Women were absurdly fussy when they had money to spend. When they were walking along they were just ordinary women, quite meek and obeying the policeman at the crossing; but as soon as Goldwyn's commissionaire, who bought his medals at the Surplus Supply stores in the , had pushed open the swing doors for them, they became customers, and that made them arrogant. Christine had easily removed the mark on the hat with some lighter fluid. Any woman could have done the same; but to have noticed the mark with a shrewd mouth, to have refused to buy the polluted hat made them feel recherché."

"The road from Boston to Cape Cod is long and straight and ruthless. Two black slashes cutting through the sandy country of pine and scrub oak which never grow to any size before a motorist throws out a cigarette on to the dry grass and levels everything neatly down again. In winter, the cars carry Boston businessmen in hats worn straight and true, and women with plastic statues of the Sacred Heart suctioned to the dashboard. In summer, the cars are full of families, and trail boats and little houses behind them. When the road was made, for the locust families to redouble their assault on Cape Cod, hills were leveled, hollows filled, the landscape brought to order. The bare scrub land is empty since everyone has gone top-heavily to the coast, like passengers crowding to the ship's rail."

"In the Refusal Race, you had to trot up to a jump, stop the horse and sail over the jump by yourself on to Anna's spare-room mattress."

"Pure, undisturbed and quiet prayer is accomplished, performed, constituted and kept by four virtues, and is diminished, tarnished, destroyed and hindered by four passions."

"So far as a Brother who desires solitude is concerned, his aim and the advantages which he should strive to gain from his solitude are the following:"

"If you truly love the life of solitude, you should desire purity of heart more than anything else, and direct to it all your aim and your course. Enquire, learn, read and understand what is this purity of heart, and whence it is acquired, and which passions engender which passions, and by what labours and exertions a man is able to overcome them in the length of the time of his solitude."

"Local evolution cannot account for such abrupt changes (…) The pottery is relatable to the earliest Neolithic in the Middle Urals and Soviet Central Asia."

"Early in her career, Gimbutas had been deeply sceptical of the original theory of mounted nomads from the Pontic Steppes spreading Indo-European languages into Europe, leaving kurgan burial mounds as their signature, but towards the end of it, she cast her initial methodological caution to the wind and turned a male gratification fantasy about mounted Übermenschen on its head to produce a feminist fantasy in which nasty, brutish nomads from the Steppes had destroyed the peaceful, matriarchal, earth goddess worshipping Neolithic cultures of the Balkans."

"We are still living under the sway of that aggressive male invasion and only beginning to discover our long alienation from our authentic European heritage—gylanic, nonviolent, earth-centered culture and its symbolic language, whose vestiges remain enmeshed in our own system of symbols."

"Our study of high-resolution satellite images revealed the Teniky site was much larger than previously known. It showed there were more terraces and stone walls on a hill 2km to the west. This led us to take a closer look, hoping to get a better sense of who had lived there and when."

"A major contribution to African and Indian Ocean archaeology."

"What we found at Teniky"

"Who were the people who lived at Teniky?"

"There are few accounts of Madagascar written at the turn of the first and second millennia AD. Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, a tenth-century Persian sailor and writer, collected stories from sailors in port towns on the Persian Gulf which suggest that Persian contacts with Madagascar may have existed then. The name Madagascar did not exist at that time but names like "Wak-wak" or "Qumr"/"Komr" may have referred to the island."

"Chinese ceramics in the collection of the Museum of Art and Archaeology of the University of Antananarivo."

"There is no other archaeological site like Teniky in Madagascar. So, the question arises as to what group of people settled there, far inland, and carved the niches and chambers in the cliff walls about 1,000 years ago. The presence of imported ceramics indicates that they took part in the Indian Ocean trade networks at the time but doesn't tell us where they came from."

"“Ethical issues are the cornerstone of computer ethics in cyberspace and IT society.”"

"Borobudur Temple was built with an overwhelming mass of images and more than 1,400 narrative relief illustrating the life of Buddha and Buddhist texts."

"Recent economic and technical growth in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei demands a common regional language to foster linguistic and literary understanding in these interconnected & frequent activities."

"It is a starting time to express our computational language through math: sentences with variables, paragraphs with equations, and language context with formulas."

"Mathematics and computational languages are among the most thrilling and transformative tools for AI-driven recognition and voice communication ever created by humanity."

"The best way to shape and build a promising future is through passionate learning, continuous effort and striving for excellence, empowered by the wisdom of advanced AI and smart w:Metaverse technology, where physical and virtual worlds blend and merge in exciting new dimensions."

"Teknologi informasi bukan hanya sekedar alat, tetapi merupakan jembatan yang menghubungkan masa lalu, sekarang, dan masa depan."

"“Without Statistics and numbers, it's a mere thought of unconvincing opinions.”"

"“In industrial network communications, urgent assistance is the highest form of priority.”"

"Yes, a musical entitled The Train has for its theme that notorious contraceptive train which ran from Belfast to Dublin in 1971 and is to open next week in Dublin. I participated in that original stunt, but I have declined any further connection with the performance in question and chosen not to appear on any radio or television programme associated with it. I do not endorse Rough Magic's enterprise in turning this episode into a musical, because, for me, it is not the way to explain the historical context of birth control in Ireland - and elsewhere. I also feel that an experience which belongs to my life has been stolen. It is for me to tell my story, at least while I am alive, not others."

"[On the "contraceptive train" episode] I knew that this was something which had to be done, because it would make a point dramatically, sensationally, even historically. I was also wretched about doing it. I knew how upset my mother would be – how mortified to see her daughter in the headlines, even identified as a ringleader, in a stunt which involved buying French letters in Belfast."

"It is in spirit and in mind, then, that he says that one should pray and sing to God; he does not say anything at all about the tongue. The reason is that this spiritual prayer is more interior than the tongue, more deeply interiorized than anything on the lips, more interiorized than any words or vocal song. When someone prays this kind of prayer he has sunk deeper than all speech, and he stands where spiritual beings and angels are to be found; like them, he utters ‘holy’ without any words. But if he cease from this kind of prayer and re-commence the prayer of vocal song, then he is outside the region of the angels and he becomes an ordinary man again."

"Do not imagine, brother, that prayer consists solely of words, or that it can be learnt by means of words. No, the truth of the matter, you should understand, is that spiritual prayer does not reach fullness as a result of either learning or the repetition of words. For it is not to a man that you are praying, before whom you can repeat a well-composed speech: it is to Him who is Spirit that you are directing the movements of your prayer. You should pray therefore in spirit, seeing that He is Spirit."

"For God is silence, and in silence is he sung by means of that psalmody which is worthy of Him. I am not speaking of the silence of the tongue, for if someone merely keeps his tongue silent, without knowing how to sing in mind and spirit, then he is simply unoccupied and becomes filled with evil thoughts: he is just keeping an exterior silence and he does not know how to sing in an interior way, seeing that the tongue of his ‘hidden man’ has not yet learnt to stretch itself out even to babble. You should look on the spiritual infant that is within you in the same way as you do on an ordinary child or infant: just as the tongue placed in an infant’s mouth is still because it does not yet know speech or the right movements for speaking, so it is with that interior tongue of the mind; it will be still from all speech and from all thought: it will simply be placed there, ready to learn the first babblings of spiritual utterance."

"Thus there is a silence of the tongue,"

"And when you recite the words of the prayer that I have written for you, be careful not just to repeat them, but let your very self become these words. For there is no advantage in the reciting unless the word actually becomes embodied in you and becomes a deed, with the result that you are seen in the world to be a man of God—to whom glory, honour and exaltation is fitting, for eternal ages, amen."

"The historian Gaspar Correa describes what da Gama did next: When all the Indians had been thus executed [sic], he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats; and they were put on board, heaped on top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for the shore, and the vessel set on fire … and the small vessel with the friar [Brahmin], with all the hands and ears, was also sent ashore, without being fired."

"He (Da Gama) then ordered the upper and lower lips of the Brahman to be cut off, so that all his teeth shewed, and he ordered the ears of a dog on board the ship to be cut off, and he had them fastened and sewn with many stitches on the Brahman instead of his, and he sent him in the Indian boat to return to Calicut."

"This is the goal of fighting and jihad against the enemies of the faith; it is to ward off their evil from the faith and to defend the religion of Allah, Who created people to follow this path, so that it will be supreme over all other religions."

"NGO activism is presented and based on the ‘act now, think later’ mantra. Theory, and particularly grand theory, is dismissed as academicism, unworthy of activists. Yet, we know, that every practice gives rise to theory and that every action is based on some theoretical or philosophical premise or outlook. NGO action is also based on certain theoretical premises and philosophical outlooks. In their case however, theory is written off as ‘common sense’ and therefore not interrogated. [...] The ‘common sense’ theoretical assumption of the current period underpinning NGO roles and actions is neoliberalism in the interest of global imperialism. It is fundamentally contrary to the interests of the large majority of the people."

"While some NGOs may be quite involved with and appreciated by the people whom they purport to serve, ultimately NGOs, by their very nature, derive not only their sustenance but also their legitimacy from the donor-community. In the current international conjuncture, even political elites located in the state or political parties seek legitimacy from so-called ‘development-partners’, rather than from their own people. Not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of circulation of the elite between government and non-governmental sectors."

"How can you make poverty history without understanding the history of poverty? We need to know how the poverty of the five billion of this world came about. Even more acutely, we need to know how the filthy wealth of the 500 multinationals or the 225 richest people was created. We need to know precisely how this great divide, this unbridgeable chasm, is maintained; how it reproduced itself, and how it is increasingly deepened and widened. We need to ask ourselves: What are the political, social, moral, ideological, economic and cultural mechanisms which produce, reinforce and make such a world not only possible, but seemingly acceptable?"

"Colonialism left by the front door and returned through the back door in the form of neocolonialism. Radical nationalists such as Nkrumah and were over-thrown in military coups. Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara were assassinated in Western sponsored imperial adventures. The few who survived including Nyerere and Kaunda did so through compromise and a game of hide-and-seek. Others, for example Sékou Touré, became paranoid and despotic, apprehensive of being overthrown or assassinated. Others – Kenyatta, Moi, Houphet Boigny and Senghor – simply became compradors in the bidding of their imperial masters."

"Economists have described the 1980s as Africa’s lost decade. The 1980s were also a transition period marking the beginnings of the decline of and the rise of neoliberalism, euphemistically called globalisation. The lost decade signalled both the decline of the developmental state and the loss of its political legitimacy: the loss of both development and democracy. Internally, political stirrings and rethinking began, both practical and ideological. But as the African political economy has again and again demonstrated, the continent is firmly inserted in the imperialist web. Instead of allowing a space to open up for internal popular struggles, the opportunist imperialist intervention derailed it by imposing top-down, so-called multi-party democracy and ‘good governance’. Western powers took the opportunity to reassert their political and ideological hegemony. They recovered the ground lost during the nationalist decades, a trajectory worth recapitulating."

"Globalisation in Africa is manifest in the neoliberal economic and political packages, centering around trade liberalisation, privatisation of national assets and resources, commodification of social services and marketisation of goods and services, both tangible and intangible. In sum, the underlying thrust of neoliberal and globalised development ‘discourse’ is for a deeper integration of African economies into global capital and market circuits, without fundamental transformation. It is predicated on private capital, which in Africa translates into foreign private capital, as the ‘engine of growth’. It centres on economic growth, without questioning whether growth necessarily translates into development. It banishes issues of equality and equity to the realm of rights, not development."

"Colonial and imperial history are at the heart of the present African condition. History is not about assigning or sharing blame. Nor it is about narrating the ‘past’, which must be forgotten and forgiven, or simply remembered once a year on remembrance of heroes or independence days. History is about the present. We must understand the present as history, so as to change it for the better; perforce, in the African context where the imperial project is not only historical, but the lived present. Just as we cannot ‘make poverty history’ without understanding the history of poverty, so we cannot chant ‘another world is possible’ without accurately understanding and correctly describing the existing world of five billion slaves and 200 slave masters. How did it come about and how does it continue to exist? Indeed to answer these questions, we must understand history as the philosophy and political economy that underpin the existing world and the vested interests – real social interests of real people – that ensure and defend its existence."

"The colonial state was an implant, an alien apparatus imposed on the colonised society. It was an excrescence of the metropolitan state without the latter’s liberal institutions or politics. It was a despotic state."