First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"“for every event which took place in the life of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq meticulously recorded in his Sira in which month it took place,” and “this meticulous and systematic dating by month which is Ibn Ishaq’s wont, is, of course, one of the main reasons why Western historians classified his book as historiography in the normal sense of that word.”... “How then,” asks Jansen, “is it possible that not a single one of the numerous events Ibn Ishaq describes and attaches a date to, took place during a leap month? If his narrative of the life of Muhammad would be based on historical memories and on real events, however distorted, but remembered by real people, how can half a solar year (or more) remain unmentioned and have disappeared from the record?”... Ibn Ishaq/Ibn Hisham’s biography, Jansen observes, “can only date from a period in which people had forgotten that leap months had once existed.”... “These stories by Ibn Ishaq,” concludes Jansen, “do not attempt to describe memories of events that took place in the past, but they want to convince the reader that the protagonist of these stories, Muhammad, is the Messenger of God.”59"
"Nothing from the contents of Ibn Ishaq is confirmed by inscriptions or other archeological material. Testimonies from non-Muslim contemporaries do not exist. Greek, Armenian, Syriac and other sources about the beginnings of Islam are very difficult to date, but none of them is convincingly contemporary with the Prophet of Islam. Under such circumstances, no biography can be a scholarly work in the modern sense of that word, not even with the help of an omniscient Ibn Ishaq."
"Ibn Warraq's book will either be ignored with deadly thoroughness or cause an enormous riot."
"We have not come to quarrel with the Netherlands, but to come to solutions for Curaçao in mutual respect."
"It is important that we continue to practice good hand hygiene and physical distancing when necessary (due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic). Remember, if experiencing symptoms, stay at home and contact the Saba Health Care Foundation at telephone number 416-3288 to receive further instructions."
"Mark Rutte Let's not forget Ukraine is fighting a war of self defence, and that means that Ukraine has the right to defend itself. And as we know, international law, and according to international law, this right does not end at the border. So that means that supporting Ukraine's right to self defence means that it is also possible for them to strike legitimate targets on the aggressor territory. At the end, it's up to each Ally to determine its support for Ukraine. That's not up to me. This is for the individual Allies in their relationship with Ukraine. And we also have to be clear that not a single, one single weapon alone will win the war. But obviously this is an important debate. Jonathan Beale (BBC) And do you support Ukraine's request? NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte Well, I can understand Ukraine's request. I understand so I'm with Jens Stoltenberg on this and what he said before. But in the end, that is up to each Ally to decide what they want to do. And when I look at in particular Allies which are involved here they have now, for example, the United States and their leadership, they have spent tens of thousands, tens of billions in dollars to support Ukraine's right to self defence. And let's be clear, Ukraine likely would not exist as a country today without US support."
"We have to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent, democratic nation."
"The more we help Ukraine at the moment, the sooner [the war] will end. The cost of supporting Ukraine is far, far lower, than the cost we would face if we allow Putin to get his way."
"Mark is a true transatlanticist, a strong leader and a consensus-builder. I wish him every success as we continue to strengthen NATO. I know I am leaving NATO in good hands."
"NATO... is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage."
"On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health and social security systems. We need a small fraction of that money to make our defences much stronger, and to preserve our way of life."
"Mark has the perfect background to become a great secretary-general. He has served as prime minister for 14 years and led four different coalition governments … therefore he knows how to make compromises, create consensus, and these are skills which are very much valued here at NATO."
"I made mistakes, in communication. In the beginning, I put too much emphasis on people's own responsibility and not enough on the mandatory measures (with regards to COVID-19 pandemic). The second is that I did not succeed in convincing people to a sufficient extent about the basic measures."
"(About the President Donald Trump's comments this week that NATO member countries should shoot down Russian drones and airplanes if they enter their airspace) If so necessary. So I totally agree here with President Trump: if so necessary."
"Tensor calculus would not exist in its modern form if there had never been a theory of relativity. The ties between these two branches of mathematics and physics are so many that they would fill a big textbook. ... Although the affine invariant form of the electromagnetic equations was not unknown to preceding authors, ... van Dantzig was the first to develop in a long series of publications a consistent theory of relativity which was independent of metrical geometry."
"In 1905 "L'Enseignement Mathématique" started an inquiry into the methods of working of mathematicians. The results of this inquiry augmented and developed later by several authors, for instance Carmichael and Hadamard, can be expressed shortly as follows. The faculty of deduction belongs to the conscious mind, the subconscious being in general only able to perform very simple and trivial deductions. On the contrary the faculty of rearranging is typical of the work of the subconscious and is described by Carmichael as consisting of an extremely rapid passing over of innumerable useless combinations till a vital one or some vital ones rise to consciousness, to bring, after a severe control of the conscious mind, new truth to light."
"I certainly learned a great deal from him; especially the combination of algebraic and geometric thinking typical of Klein and Darboux. Our first common publication appeared in 1918; it investigated the connection between geometry and mechanics in the static problems of general relativity. Thus it accounted for the perihelion movement of Mercury, then a crucial test for Einstein's theory, by the change of the metric corresponding to a corrective force."
"In differential geometry conditions of integrability frequently occur, but in the cases usually investigated only the first of these conditions has to be considered. In 1922 ... Eisenhart and Veblen gave a necessary and sufficient condition that a geometry of paths be a Riemann geometry by using a new method of treating the conditions of integrability of higher order."
"The West suffers from an autoimmune disease. A part of our organism — an important part: our immune system, which ought to protect us — has turned itself against us. At every level, we are being weakened, undermined, and surrendered. Malicious, aggressive elements are led into our social bodies in unheard numbers, and the actual circumstances and consequences are obscured."
"Like all the other countries of our boreal world, we are being destroyed by the very people who should protect us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists. By the people who receive our art grants and who design our buildings. And above all, we are undermined by our directors."
"We have survived multiple ice ages, we have knocked down mammoths, we are carriers, we are heirs to the greatest civilization that ever existed."
"How long are the party cartel and the job carousel going to abuse our patience, when the flagship of renaissance is ready to set sail?"
"I do not want Europe to Africanize, I want Europa to stay dominantly white and remain culturally the way it is."
"Thierry Baudet I met him once. A very likeable man. He wants the Netherlands to remain the Netherlands. Just as France has to remain France."
"It is a masochistic heresy, this secularized Flood belief, which has taken hold of the hearts and minds of our rulers today. A mania, similar to the death cult that once ravaged Easter Island."
"We have been called to the front. Because we have to, because our country needs us."
"Minerva's owl spreads its wings at nightfall."
"The EU was founded to wage war and reduce free trade. Since the thought behind it was that the Soviet Union had to be countered and that this could only be done with a command economy behind the facade of a fake national democracy. So the EU has nothing to do with peace and prosperity."
"I oppose contemporary art's fundamental point of departure - namely alienation, political "statements", oikophobia, self-hatred, and the deconstruction of our identity."
"Those who are fleeing war and violence are entitled to protection and shelter. [...] We want to govern, but not at any price. We want to create change. And to always continue seeing the people behind the policy."
"What I would say to all my leftwing friends in Europe: don’t try to fake the populace. Stand for your principles. Be straight. Be pro-refugee. Be pro-European. We’re gaining momentum in the polls. And I think that’s the message we have to send to Europe. You can stop populism."
"I am only an Aryan."
"There’s a war criminal coming to this country. ... The occupation and expansion … building of settlements, of occupied territory, this is according to the Rome Statute, which is… the setup… the statute on which the is based, in so many words, a . ... So why should we receive someone who continues with such things, we could have sent him right away to the international criminal court, that would have been better"
"Polak (1973) has argued that yesterday's utopia often becomes today's social philosophy."
"During the mid-20th century the Dutch Futurist Fred Polak despaired of the loss of the cultural ability to retain sustaining images of futures. In his view, viable images of futures were the key to real progress. And, it is true, that the latter half of that century was dominated by Dystopian views. Many of Polak’s detailed observations remain pertinent. But it is not the case that the ability to envisage different and better futures has vanished forever. Rather, the powers involved have been malnourished over recent decades. They have slipped from sight, as it were, but have most certainly not been lost."
"Among the founders of the futures studies field, the Dutch sociologist Fred Polak is one of the least known. Although he is still mentioned by several renowned futurists, very little has been written about the evolution of Polak’s ideas and as far as we have been able to trace back, no retrospective work has been published. Today, Polak is mostly known for his opus magnum The Image of the Future, an impressive cultural-historic study of the relation between imagined futures and the dynamics of culture. He was an original thinker, but his work was remarkably uneven: his encyclopaedic and erudite style has led to both very deep and very shallow analyses. Especially his earlier contributions in the 1950s and 1960s still prove a very valuable resource, although many of his ideas should be handled with care. However, his later works in the 1970s are out of tune with the rise of a more critical approach to the study of the future."
"My first acquaintance with the work of Dr. Fred Polak came in the year 1954—5, when we were both fellows at the new Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Dr. and Mrs. Polak lived in a little house at the back of the garden of the house that the Bouldings rented and participated very cheerfully in the life of the Bouldings and their four young children. Many exciting things came out of that year at Stanford, such as the Society for General Systems Research and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. But looking back on the expérience after nearly twenty years, I think the most important impact on the thought of both Elise Boulding and myself were the many conversations that we had with the Polaks around the dining table and in the garden."
"The brain attempts to recognize this odor image by scanning and resolving it into previously stored patterns"
"Polak (1973) notes that when the dominant images of a culture are anticipated, they "head" social change"
"The trends in modem technology reveal most clearly the contrasting modes of development in thinking about the future. Technology offers an unprecedented confirmation of the possibilities of the utopia, often far exceeding the utopian fantasies in its concrete achievements. Through technology, Homo sapiens can transform ail things; at last man appears to be master of his own fate."
"The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society's image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive."
"Utopism is the forerunner of all modem conceptions concerning social policy, social organization, and social peace. All the art of social engineering could not place one stone upon another in the social edifice if the broad outlines of the system as an idea had not been projected long before, and if the seeds of the motivating ideals had not early been sowed in the hearts of men."
"Values, means and ends... [that drive this process in current societies; mean that we now] stagger under the double load of not only having to construct (his) own future but having to create the values that will determine its design."
"All kinds of separate, fragmented portions of the jigsaw puzzle are of little avail, unless they are fitted together in the best possible way, to form an image of the future depicting a number of main areas of development."
"Social change will be viewed as a push-pull process in which a Society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past."
"Awareness of ideal values is the first step in the conscious creation of images of the future and therefore the creation of culture, for a value is by definition that which guides toward a 'valued' future.....Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures....In the end, the future may well be decided by the image which carries the greatest spiritual power."
"The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. The image of the future can act not only as a barometer, but as a regulative mechanism which alternately opens and shuts the dampers on the mighty blast-furnace of culture. It not only indicates alternative choices and possibilities, but actively promotes certain choices and in effect puts them to work in determining the future. A close examination of prevailing images, then, puts us in a position to forecast the probable future. Any culture which finds itself in the condition of our present culture, turning aside from its own heritage of positive visions of the future, or actively at work in changing these positive visions into negative ones, has no future..."
"Every great thinker who has concerned himself with the historical process has speculated about the meaning of time and its flow in history. Marx, Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, each with his own variation on the theme of time-flow as mechanically patterned fluctuation, predict the future but ignore its dynamic interaction with the past and the present."
"Once he (man) became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future."
":(6) For this purpose everyone, choosing in complete freedom and on his own responsibility, must be able and permitted to utilize all the philosophical and scientific thought models useful for this vital choice;"
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.