People From Veneto

"Lavare i nostri panni in casa."

"Ha due ali la vita : il gaudio e il duolo; L’amor la impenna, e Dio dirige il volo."

"I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor."

"Gerusalemme must not get into the hands of the Jews."

"The Jews are those who profess the Law of Moses; have not received baptism; and do not believe in Jesus Christ."

"Do not capitulate before this world, but recapitulate everything in Christ [instaurare omnia in Christo]."

"Outside the true Church are: Infidels, Jews, heretics, apostates, schismatics, and the excommunicated."

"Jesus Christ could have freed Himself from the hands of Pilate and the Jews, but knowing it was His Eternal Father's will that He should suffer and die for our salvation, He voluntarily submitted; nay, He Himself went forth to meet His enemies and freely permitted Himself to be taken and led to death."

"The lust of lucre has done much to make the minds of men so barbarous. But something also is due to the nature of the climate and the situation of these regions. For, as these places are subjected to burning southern sun, which casts a languor into the veins and as it were, destroys the vigor of virtue, and as they are far removed from the habits of religion and the vigilance of the State, and in a measure even from civil society, it easily comes to pass that those who have not already come there with evil morals soon begin to be corrupted, and then, when all bonds of right and duty are broken, they fall away into all hateful vices. Nor in this do they take any pity on the weakness of sex or age, so that we are ashamed to mention the crimes and outrages they commit in seeking out and selling women and children, wherein it may be truly said that they have surpassed the worst examples of pagan iniquity."

"We cannot prevent Jews from going to Jerusalem, but we can never sanction it. Jews have not recognized Our Lord, therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people. They had ample time to acknowledge Christ's divinity without pressure, but they didn't. Should the Jews manage to set foot on the once promised old-new land, the missionaries of the Church would stand prepared to baptize them. Jerusalem cannot be placed in Jewish hands."

"Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven. There are others: innocence, but that is for little children; penance, but we are afraid of it; generous endurance of trials of life, but when they come we weep and ask to be delivered. The surest, easiest, shortest way is the Eucharist."

"Truly we are passing through disastrous times, when we may well make our own the lamentation of the Prophet: "There is no truth, and there is no mercy, and there is no knowledge of God in the land" (Hosea 4:1). Yet in the midst of this tide of evil, the Virgin Most Merciful rises before our eyes like a rainbow, as the arbiter of peace between God and man."

"Recourse to God, so infinitely good, is all the more necessary because, far from abating, the struggle grows fiercer and expands unceasingly. It is no longer only the Christian faith that they would uproot at all costs from the hearts of the people; it is any belief which lifting man above the horizon of this world would supernaturally bring back his wearied eyes to heaven. Illusion on the subject is no longer possible. War has been declared against everything supernatural, because behind the supernatural stands God, and because it is God that they want to tear out of the mind and heart of man."

"Let the storm rage and the sky darken — not for that shall we be dismayed. If we trust as we should in Mary, we shall recognize in her, the Virgin Most Powerful "who with virginal foot did crush the head of the serpent."

"But since the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) employ a very clever artifice, namely, to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement into one whole, scattered and disjointed one from another, so as to appear to be in doubt and uncertainty, while they are in reality firm and steadfast, it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and to point out the connexion between them, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil."

"I shall spare myself neither care nor labour nor vigils for the salvation of souls. My hope is in Christ, who strengthens the weakest by His divine help; I can do all in Him who strengthened me! His power is infinite, and if I lean on Him it will be mine; His wisdom is infinite, and if I look to Him for counsel I shall not be deceived; His goodness is infinite, and if my trust is stayed on Him I shall not be abandoned. Hope unites me to my God and Him to me. Although I know I am not sufficient for the burden, my strength is in Him. For the salvation of others I must bear weariness, face dangers, suffer offences, confront storms, fight against evil. He is my Hope."

"God could have given us the Redeemer of the human race, and the Founder of the Faiths in another way than through the Virgin, but since Divine Providence has been pleased that we should have the Man-God through Mary, who conceived Him by the Holy Spirit and bore Him in her womb, it only remains for us to receive Christ from the hands of Mary."

"In the elementary equations of the world, the arrow of time appears only where there is heat. The link between time and heat is... fundamental: every time a difference is manifested between the past and the future, heat is involved."

"Don't trust your teachers."

"Listening to a cultivated person of today who jokes and almost boasts of his scientific ignorance is as sad as listening to a scientist who boasts of not having read any poem."

"Hawking was one of the good physicists of his generation, not the universal genius the popular press has depicted. It is a pity, because this confusion fogs the memory of a remarkable man."

"If we want to understand the past we must do so on its own terms, and disregard the future of that past, but if we want to understand the present we better not disregard the past steps that were essential for getting to the present. This is of importance especially for those of us engaged in trying to push ahead the scientific path of discovery today. We are not much interested in what scientists did wrong, there is too much of that. We are interested in what they did right, because we are trying to copy them in this, not in that."

"... theoretical physics is less clean than the way it's usually solved. You can always change parameters and save yourself. ... it's very rare that theories are ruled out by just an experiment or a group of experiments. Theories usually come with flexibility. Theoreticians can add flexibility. And so new experiments — you can just patch up your theory."

"The landscape is magic, the trip is far from being over."

"I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains."

"The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence."

"An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive in the long run."

"I argue that the best strategy for understanding quantum gravity is to build a picture of the physical world where the notion of time plays no role at all."

"[I]n a fundamental description of nature we must "forget time"... this can be done in the classical and in the quantum theory."

"I... interpret mechanics as a theory of relations between variables, rather than the theory of the evolution of variables in time."

"General relativity has changed our understanding of space and time. ...The spacetime of general relativity ...is likely to be just a classical approximation that loses its meaning in the quantum theory, for the same reason the trajectory of a particle does."

"The notion of time familiar to us may... be reconstructed in special physical situations, or within an approximation, as... the "surface of a liquid" disappears ...[at] the atomic level, or "temperature" ...makes sense only in certain physical situations and when there are enough degrees of freedom."

"I am aware that ...[this] answer ...is only one among many possibilities. Other authors have argued that the notion of time is irreducible... Until our theoretical and experimental investigations tell us otherwise... what is important is to put the alternatives clearly on the table..."

"[I]n pre-relativistic mechanics, time is a special physical quantity, whose value is measured by physical clocks, that plays the role of the independent variable of physical evolution."

"While non-relativistic time is the observable quantity measured (or approximated) by physical clocks, in general relativity clocks measure s along their worldline, not t. The relativistic... t is a freely chosen label with no direct physical interpretation. ...The physical content of a solution of Einstein's equations is not in its dependence on t, but ...in what remains once the dependence on t (and x) has been factored away."

"What is then the physical content of a solution of Einstein's equations..? ...[C]onsider what is actually measured in general relativistic experiments. ...Consider a clock at rest on ...Earth and a clock on a satellite in orbit around the Earth. ...Call T1 and T2 the readings... Each measures the along its own worldline, in the Earth gravitational field. ...the theory predicts the value of T2 that will be associated to each value of T1. Or vice versa."

"[I]n general relativistic observations there is no preferred independent time variable. What we measure are a number of variables, all on equal footing, and their relative evolution. ...[I]t can be equally read it as the evolution of the variable T1 as a function of the variable T2, or viceversa. Which of the two is the independent variable here?"

"The way evolution is treated in general relativity, is... subtle... Change is not described as evolution of physical variables as a function of a preferred independent observable time variable. Instead, it is described in terms of a functional relation among equal footing variables... as... (T1,T2)... In general relativity, there isn’t a preferred and observable quantity that plays the role of independent parameter of the evolution... General relativity describes the relative evolution of observable quantities, not the evolution of quantities as functions of a preferred one. ...[w]ith general relativity we have understood that the Newtonian "big clock" ticking away the "true universal time" is not there."

"If we formulate the fundamental theory of nature in a timeless language, we have then the problem of recovering the familiar notion of time."

"Intuitively (and imprecisely) speaking, time "flows", we can never "go back in time", we remember the past but not the future, and so on. Where do all these very peculiar features of the time variable come from? ...[T]hese features... emerge at the thermodynamical level. ...[T]hese are all features that emerge when we give an approximate statistical description of a system with a large number of ."

"Whatever the statistical state ρ is, there exists always a variable tρ, measured by the thermal clock, with respect to which the system is in equilibrium and physics is the same as in the conventional nonrelativistic statistical case! This observation leads us to the following hypothesis."

"The thermal time hypothesis. In nature, there is no preferred physical time variable t. There are no equilibrium states ρ0 preferred a priori. Rather, all variables are equivalent; we can find the system in an arbitrary state ρ; if the system is in a state ρ, then a preferred variable is singled out by the state of the system. This variable is what we call time."

"[I]t is the statistical state that determines which variable is physical time, and not any a priori hypothetical "flow" that drives the system to a preferred statistical state. When we say that a certain variable is “the time”, we are not making a statement concerning the fundamental mechanical structure of reality. Rather, we are making a statement about the statistical distribution we use to describe the... properties of the system... The "thermal time hypothesis" is the idea that what we call "time" is the thermal time of the statistical state in which the world happens to be, when described in terms of the macroscopic parameters we have chosen."

"Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate."

"In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aim- lessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, which the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget."

"A handful of types of elementary particles, which vibrate and fluctuate constantly between existence and non-existence and swarm in space even when it seems that there is nothing there, combine together to infinity like the letters of a cosmic alphabet to tell the immense history of galaxies, of the innumerable stars, of sunlight, of mountains, woods and fields of grain, of the smiling faces of the young at parties, and of the night sky studded with stars."

"Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same."

"The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience"

"When two friends meet... after one has lived in the mountains and the other at sea level, the watches... will show different times. ...Neither is truer than the other. ...Times are legion: a different one for every point in space. ...there is a vast multitude of them. ...Every clock has its proper time. ...Einstein has shown how to calculate the difference... The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It is a network of events affecting each other. ...Physics does not describe how things evolve "in time" but how things evolve in their own times, and how "times" evolve relative to each other. Time has lost... its unity."

"The difference between past and future... cause and effect... memory and hope... regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference."