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April 10, 2026
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"Hehn argued that, it was risky, in the attempts to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European culture, to depend too much on linguistic paleontology, whose methodological accuracy he doubted. How can we be sure, for example, that the Proto-Indo-Europeans owned tame horses simply because we can reconstruct the word for horse (*h1ekuos)? Did they perhaps only know about the animal, without having domesticated it? Or how do we know that *h3evis denoted "goat" and not some other similar animal, and that it has not acquired the meaning "goat" later? (Arvidsson 2006, p. 255)."
"In the Soviet Union, scholars even argued that ”it is absolutely necessary to make clear to everyone that the belief in the original homelands comes to the same thing as the belief in God’s sovereign authority.”287"
"For those who have approached the question of the origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages from the angle of philology, the great problem has been that there are no texts about migrations, much less about military invasions… From the Rigveda, people have taken passages that tell about the Aryans' attacks on cities and concluded that they then must have been a foreign, warlike, nomadic people. Nor does Roman, Hittite, Slavic, Celtic, or Germanic, written material mention migrations or conquests from the time when the Indo-Europeans supposedly emigrated from their original home. The philologists have, however, been able to pint to certain loanwords, especially topographic and hydrographic names, as evidence of migration. But the cornerstone of philologists' work has been linguistic paleontology, which tried to re-create, through comparisons, a vocabulary that indicates knowledge about certain objects and phenomena (Arvidsson 2006, p.295)."
"Renfrew bases his critique of linguistic paleontology particularly on an article by J. Fraser from 1926, but it is also in line with the criticism that Victor Hehn expressed. Several linguists, as well, have remained skeptical about the possibilities and axioms of linguistic paleontology. Most debated is the Russian structuralist Prince Niklaj Trubestkoj (1890-1938), who argues in the famous article "Gedanken uber das Indogermanenproblem" (1936) although it is possible that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are due to a common origin, this hypothesis is not necessary. He found that notion of an original language (the family tree model) more romantic than scientific and imagined that the genetic classification might be replaced with a structuralist one (Arvidsson 2006, p.296)."
"According to Lincoln, then, Indo-European research misses what is instructive about studying myths and religious texts in the first place, since it demand that the researchers leave the historically and socially determined place in which they were used in order to reach the imagined Ancient Arya., "the never-never land east of the asterisk," to use the expression of Lincoln's colleague Wendy Doniger (Arvidsson 2006, p. 303)."
"It is easy-as is evident from a critical reading of, for example. the foremost work about the Aryan discourse, Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth-to interpret all praise of the Aryan mentality as an expression of the naturalistic critique of the Semites, that is to say, as true anti-Semitism. But during the nineteenth century, especially, and even into the twentieth century, there did exist an Aryanist tradition that had very little in common with the naturalistic tradition and its Nazi anticlimax. This Aryanism had liberal and universalist overtones, and interpreted. the Semitic tradition as the incarnation of conservatism and antiquated. pluralistic chauvinism. Scholars such as Renan and Müller would probably have criticized. Nazism in the same way that they criticized traditionalistic Semitic religions: it stands in the way of the realization of universal humanity. From this perspective, the Aryan becomes the same as the consummate human being. 317"
"The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to represent an objective, scientific body of research that contrasts sharply with the Nazis' misuse of the Indo-Europeans. But as we have seen in this chapter, there is no reason to stop critically analyzing the ideology of Indo-European scholarship. If Dumezil and Gimbutas have each represented a constructive research tradition, Bruce Lincoln can represent the tradition of ideological critique among scholars of Indo-European heritage (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 301-302)."
"When I first heard, which is now six weeks ago, about different draconian measures that were taken, I asked myself "How are they gonna climb down from that one? When will they open the schools again? What should the criterion be to open the schools?". Did any of the strong and very decisive politicians even think about how to get out of this when they introduced it?"
"I think it's not very good. And the thing that they miss a little is... Models for infectious diseases are popular, many people do them, they're good for teaching, but they seldom tell you the truth because... I'll make an exemple: Which model could have assumed that the outbreak would start in northern Italy in Europe? Difficult to model that one. And any such model, it looks complicated, there are strange mathematical formulas, and integral science and stuff, but it rests on the assumptions, and the assumptions in that article have been very criticized... I won't go through that, it would take the rest of your day to go through it all. The paper was never published scientifically, it's not peer-reviewed, which a scientific paper should be, it's just an internal departmental report from Imperial. And it's fascinating, I don't think any other scientific endeavour has made such an impression on the world as that rather... debatable paper."
"We, or the Swedish government, decided early, in January, that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. And when you start looking around at the measures being taken now by different countries, you'll find that very few of them have a shred of 'evidence-based'. But we know of one that has been known for 150 years or more, that washing your hands is good for you and good for others when you're in an epidemic. But the rest, border closures, school closings, social distancing... there's almost no science behind most of this."
"We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria — so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation and biodiversity loss. A clear-water lake can become a murky, biodiversity-low anoxic lake. Unfortunately, the science is increasingly showing that even large systems can tip."
"We are on average, moving towards four degrees warming this century. And we haven’t been in a four-degree warmer world for the past four million years. So it’s not as if it’s a place we know very well."
"Meat plays a disproportionately large role in causing this overuse of freshwater. Twenty-five percent of the rivers in the world no longer reach the ocean, because we're taking out so much water to produce animal feed. … Agriculture is not only the biggest culprit threatening the future for humanity on Earth, it is also the biggest and most important silver bullet to a solution."
"It is the important task of the chemist to reproduce faithfully in his own way the elaborate constructions which we call chemical compounds, in the erection of which the atoms serve as building stones, and to determine the number and relative positions of the points of attack at which any atom attaches itself to any other; in short, to determine the distribution of the atoms in space."
"Chemical signs ought to be letters, for the greater facility of writing, and not to disfigure a printed book ... I shall take therefore for the chemical sign, the initial letter of the Latin name of each elementary substance: but as several have the same initial letter, I shall distinguish them in the following manner:— 1. In the class which I s hall call metalloids, I shall employ the initial letter only, even when this letter is common to the metalloid and to some metal. 2. In the class of metals, I shall distinguish those that have the same initials with another metal, or a metalloid, by writing the first two letters of the word. 3. If the first two letters be common to two metals, I shall, in that case, add to the initial letter the first consonant which they have not in common: for example, S = sulphur, Si = silicium, St = stibium (antimony), Sn = stannum (tin), C = carbonicum, Co = colbaltum (colbalt), Cu = cuprum (copper), O = oxygen, Os = osmium, &c."
"Every chemical combination is wholly and solely dependent on two opposing forces, positive and negative electricity, and every chemical compound must be composed of two parts combined by the agency of their electrochemical reaction, since there is no third force. Hence it follows that every compound body, whatever the number of its constituents, can be divided into two parts, one of which is positively and the other negatively electrical."
"A tidy laboratory means a lazy chemist."
"As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient."
"In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry."
"The devil may write textbooks of chemistry, for every few years the whole thing changes."
"God's Agape is a love that makes a mockery of all attempts at rational motivation. But if the rationalising tendency will not allow even God's love to retain spontaneity, but insists on finding a motive for it in the value of its object, then it is only to be expected that it should insist even more strongly on treating the Christian's love for his neighbour in a similar way. For Jesus, on the other hand, it is beyond question that God's love is unmotivated and spontaneous; and therefore it also also beyond question for Him that a man's love for his neighbour should be spontaneous and unmotivated. There is no occasion to look behind our neighbor's actual condition for any hidden valuable quality that will explain and justify our love for him. God's love is explanation and sanction enough."
"God does not love that which is already in itself worthy of love, but on the contrary, that which in itself has no worth acquires worth just by becoming the object of God's love. Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object. Agape does not recognize value, but creates it. Agape loves, and imparts value by loving. The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him. Agape is a value-creating principle."
"In industrial marketing settings, the relationship between buyer and seller is frequently long term, close and involving a complex pattern of interaction between and within each company. The marketers' and buyers' task in this case may have more to do with maintaining these relationships than with making a straightforward sale or purchase."
"We find support for the contingency logic, suggesting that effective organization design has to take into account the underlying characteristics of the firm's knowledge base."
"Gallery visitors did not tell Picasso to invent cubism. Jazz fanatics did not suggest that should work with hip-hoppers. Moviegoers did not propose to Lars von Trier, the Danish film director, that he make Breaking the Waves. And customers sure as hell did not come up with the idea for CDNow or Amazon.com. If you want to do something really interesting and revolutionary, learn to ignore your customers."
"Some bodies of knowledge emerge over time in a process of coevolution with the location in which they are embedded."
"While few customer offerings have a life, all great products and services have a soul."
"It is also worth noting that it is extremely difficult to be a great buyer of complementary competencies if you do not have any knowledge about the stuff you are acquiring. Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out that a man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access. We need knowledge to be able to outsource knowledge."
"Women can do nothing that has permanence."
"If you have learned anything at all from us, Tummetott, you no longer think that the humans should have the whole earth to themselves."
"I started [in 1921] to write on the foundations of an approach to international trade theory that was to some extent new and for which I received the inspiration during a stroll on [the popular promenade] Unter den Linden in Berlin in 1920."
"Nutrition seems to mock the achievements of economic development,"
"The economic history of the last half century offers two cases of serious international depressions in countries with an essential orientation towards a market economy: In the first half of the 1930ies and in the middle of the 1970ies. With some simplification one can say that in the former case recovery started after a few years without the aid of much conscious expansionist policy."
"To me it is a riddle that , who for most of his life was a fanatical representative of extreme opinions in the social debate, could present a completely different personality in the scholarly context. During the period when I knew him he was the diffident seeker after scientific truth."
"The origin of this research was an attempt to extend Cassel’s system of equations of price determination in one market to that of several trading countries. Although the point of departure is totally different, the results of that attempt (presented in chapter III) exhibit important similarities to Heckscher’s treatment in ‘‘The Effect of Foreign Trade on the Distribution of Income,’’ published one year earlier in Ekonomisk Tidskrift, 1920. There is no doubt that the author was unconsciously influenced by Heckscher’s paper both at this and at later stages of the work. The influence of this pathbreaking paper, both conscious and unconscious, has surely been particularly decisive in the development of the material in chapters I–III."
"No authors propounded the ideas of economic liberalism in Sweden during the 1920s as vigorously as did Cassel and Heckscher, and in addition they certainly helped in no mean degree to give actual policy a liberal stamp during that decade."
"The productive factors enter into the production of different commodities in very different proportions."
"Economics is in high degree a pedagogical discipline, and an economist must be in close touch with popular psychology in order to know what ought to be said at any particular moment."
"If my theoretical studies have contained any subjective value judgment, then this has amounted at most to a preference for freedom and progress rather than state control of the economy and distribution of such scanty prosperity as may be available for distribution at a given moment. I have wanted to make it clear that this preference is a great common interest of all parties, both in the management of the world economy and in every individual nation. Such a position may be attacked, but it cannot be denominated as party-politics in the ordinary sense."
"The further away a scholarly opinion is from direct observation and the more abstract and ‘theoretical’ it is, the more defenseless it becomes against insidious opportunist errors of judgment. In economics, model thinking in particular creates scope for systematic biases... But of course all social studies must nevertheless aim at generalization. It is thus important to be able to think concretely at the same time, as I learnt from Gustav Cassel."
"Curiously enough, John Stuart Mill, although he must have been familiar with Longfield's writings, seems never to have touched upon this line of reasoning."
"I am presently at work on a dissertation dealing with the theory of international trade and foreign exchange rates. In dealing with this, studies of the intervention of recent years in the area of trade and exchange rates of different countries is of the greatest importance. I therefore hope to be able to begin a six month study tour to Switzerland, France and England at the end of May this year. After having collected the necessary material I intend — if the economic side can be arranged — during a stay of 6–12 months in England (probably Cambridge) or possibly the United States (in that case probably Harvard University) — to work out the above mentioned dissertation as a specimen for the doctoral degree in philosophy and pursue studies in general. I have not yet any detailed study plan. That should appropriately be set up after the arrival."
"International trade theory has, in my opinion, given far too much attention to the effects of certain variations, for example, in duties, on the national incomes, and too little to the effects on individual incomes. In many cases, changes in the sums count for very little, while changes in the individual incomes are distinctly relevant."
"It seems beyond doubt that the tariff policy pursued during the last half century has not raised the standard of living of the labouring classes. It is doubtful if agricultural duties increase the relative scarcity of manual labour compared with other factors, and they certainly raise the cost of living for the working classes. It is, however, true that manufacturing duties tend to depress the rent of farm land... It is on the whole not at all unlikely that the sum total of rent is reduced in countries with high manufacturing duties... In most countries, however, the sum of rents is small compared with the sum of wages to manual workers. Even a substantial reduction of the former brings only a slight increase in the latter."
"It is a special privilege for me on this occasion to have my name associated with that of Professor Bertil Ohlin. By the younger generation of economists we are no doubt both regarded as what in my country are now known as 'senior citizens'; but I am just that much younger than Professor Ohlin to have regarded him as one of the already established figures when I was first trying to understand international economics. His great work on International and Interregional Trade opened up new insights into the complex of relationships between factor supplies, costs of movement of products and factors, price relationships, and the actual international trade in products, migration of persons, and flows of capital. Of the two volumes which I later wrote on International Economic Policy - namely, The Balance of Payments and Trade and Welfare - it is in the latter that the influence of this work by Professor Ohlin is most clearly marked. But Professor Ohlin also made an important contribution to what now might be called the macro-economic aspects of a country's balance of payments. In 1929 in the Economic Journal he engaged in a famous controversy with Keynes on the problem of transferring payments from one country to another across the foreign exchanges. In this he laid stress upon the income-expenditure effects of the reduced spending power in the paying country and of the increased spending power in the recipient country. In doing so he made use of the usual distinction between a country's imports and exports; but in addition he emphasised the importance of the less usual distinction between a country's domestic non-tradeable goods and services and its tradeable, exportable and importable, goods. I made some use of this latter distinction in my Balance of Payments; but looking back I regret that I did not let it play a much more central role in that book"
"Ohlin will live forever as one of the great innovators in the theory of international trade. He was also a pioneer in the development of modern macroeconomics. For fifty years he advanced the banner of the vintage second generation of notable Scandinavian economists — a worthy follower of the Swedish giants, , David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, ; a companion in arms of Gunnar Myrdal, , , Gustav and Johan Akerman; the teacher and mentor of , , and so many names that I dare not enumerate."
"Myrdalian ex ante language would have saved the General Theory from describing the flow of investment and the flow of saving as identically, tautologically equal, and within the same discourse, treating their equality as a condition which may, or not, be fulfilled"