Leading Quotes - page 42
Jefferson instead recognizes that the multitude will act at times on the basis of ignorance, and yet he still affirms not only their right to rebel but also the benefits of their rebellion. His thinking in this regard runs parallel to that of Spinoza, and, in fact, Spinoza's thought can help carry this line of democratic thinking further. The two thinkers share a pair of basic assumptions: one on the virtue of disobedience, since freedom can never result from obedience to authority; and another on the capacities of the multitude, even though it is born ignorant, to become intelligent and rule itself autonomously. The process leading the multitude from ignorance to wisdom is indeed the steep path that runs throughout Spinoza's work.
Baruch Spinoza
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
John Galt
It's strange-you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It's the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that's why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that's where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.
Terence McKenna
Google Translate: From here I am going to meet with 60 foreign ministers and representatives of countries around the world against Iran. What is important is the encounter, and a meeting not secretly or secretly, because there are many. This is in fact an open meeting with representatives of leading Arab countries that sit with Israel to advance the common interest of a war in Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu
If in war, from the beginning of the operations, everything is uncertain except such will and energy as the commander carries in himself, there cannot possibly be practical value for strategy in general principles, rules derived from them and systems built up upon the rules. ... Strategy is a system of expedients. It is more than science, it is the translation of science into practical life, the development of an original leading thought in accordance with the ever-changing circumstances.
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
It's difficult to separate the Uygurs from the barrage of anti-China denunciations coming from the US, most of which have a script familiar to those who follow America's 'soft' campaigns against its strategic enemies... The leading US media are invariably the cipher. 'In China, every day is Kristallnacht', declared The Washington Post [last November], likening China's treatment of the Uygurs to that of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.... That's not untypical; it reads as if it has been written by the US Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy, which fills in for the CIA. No one doubts the ruthless reaction of Beijing to separatists, but as a reporter, I would like to see for myself.
John Pilger
The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate. The great white hope meets the great black hole; the mission to the heathen blends with the comforting myth of Florence Nightingale. As ever, the true address of the missionary is to the self-satisfaction of the sponsor and the donor, and not to the needs of the downtrodden. Helpless infants, abandoned derelicts, lepers and the terminally ill are the raw material for demonstrations of compassion. They are in no position to complain, and their passivity and abjection is considered a sterling trait. It is time to recognize that the world's leading exponent of this false consolation is herself a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers.
Christopher Hitchens
China's first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster and Commentator's article on it in Renmin Ribao (People's Daily) are indeed superbly written! Comrades, please read them again. But in the last fifty days or so some leading comrades from the central down to the local levels have acted in a diametrically opposite way. Adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, they have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great cultural revolution of the proletariat. They have stood facts on their head and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves. They have puffed up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflated the morale of the proletariat. How poisonous! Viewed in connection with the Right deviation in 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 which was "Left” in form but Right in essence, shouldn't this make one wide awake?
Mao Zedong
Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case. Wishing to point out this type of misconception, we quote P. T. Mora, an American biochemist, who writes about polysaccharides contained in the cell membrane:.
Pierre-Paul Grassé
We believe strongly in the need to feed the world. That's why the United States is the world's largest supporter of the World Food Programme, with more than 40 percent of its budget.
We're leading support - we're leading support of the UNICEF efforts to feed children around the world.
And to take on the larger challenge of food insecurity, the United States introduced a Call to Action: a roadmap eliminating global food insecurity - to eliminating global food insecurity that more than 100 nation member states have already supported.
Joe Biden
No. 1, I believe strongly that we have to get back to leading on issues like health care and education and women's rights around the world. I have introduced legislation called The Education for All Act. And it's bipartisan. I introduced it first in '04 and then we reintroduced it on a bipartisan basis in '07.
Hillary Clinton
What has come to be called the balance of terror may seem less frightful to fanatics leading a country with a population of 600 millions. Even a war directed explicitly against centers of population may seem to it tolerable and perhaps the best means of dominating the world. Chou En-lai is reported to have told a Yugoslav diplomat that an all-out nuclear war would leave 10 million Americans, 20 million Russians, and 350 million Chinese.
Henry Kissinger
Dick Stuart took a look at Roberto Clemente slashing line drives one day and made a pertinent observation. "There must be the best 169-pound slugger in baseball,” Stuart said of the Pirate right fielder. Clemente lost some weight during the winter in his native Puerto Rico and never has been able to regain it. But he hasn't lost his fierce swing... He was leading the Pirates not only in batting but also in RBIs with 23, and of his three homers, two went to right field, indicating his power to all fields. Clemente slammed a homer into the right field stands in Pittsburgh [on May 9th] and also performed the novel feat of drilling one over the right field wall in Philadelphia [on May 19th].
Roberto Clemente
The key books about object-oriented graphical modeling languages appeared between 1988 and 1992. Leading figures included Grady Booch [Booch,OOAD]; Peter Coad [Coad, OOA], [Coad, OOD]; Ivar Jacobson (Objectory) [Jacobson, OOSE]; Jim Odell [Odell]; Jim Rumbaugh (OMT) [Rumbaugh, insights], [Rumbaugh, OMT]; Sally Shlaer and Steve Mellor [Shlaer and Mellor, data], [Shlaer and Mellor, states] ; and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Responsibility Driven Design) [Wirfs-Brock].
Martin Fowler
Experience does not err; only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power. Men wrongly complain of Experience; with great abuse they accuse her of leading them astray but they set Experience aside, turning from it with complaints as to our ignorance causing us to be carried away by vain and foolish desires to promise ourselves, in her name, things that are not in her power; saying that she is fallacious. Men are unjust in complaining of innocent Experience, constantly accusing her of error and of false evidence.
Leonardo da Vinci
The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument hitherto unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity; but national education, since at least it presupposes the selection and appointment of some one instructor, must always promote a definite form of development, however careful to avoid such an error. And hence it is attended with all those disadvantages which we before observed to flow from such a positive policy; and it only remains to be added, that every restriction becomes more directly fatal, when it operates on the moral part of our nature,-that if there is one thing more than another which absolutely requires free activity on the part of the individual, it is precisely education, whose object it is to develop the individual.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.
Winston Churchill
On The Awful Truth we just clicked. She'd been a weepie star and comedy was strange to her. She'd do a bit and whisper to me, "Funny?" She was the sweetest smelling of my leading ladies and such a lady. If one of the crew cussed, she'd blush. She claims she was out shopping at Bullocks for a present for her husband and the saleslady said, "I don't think Mr. Grant would like that." In the minds of the public, we were married. Reunions became impossible because we both liked first billing. It's ladies first in rowboats but not in movies, I'm afraid. But I still see her at the races and she still smells wonderful, although it's not Fabergé.
Cary Grant
One of the interesting WikiLeaks exposures was from Anne W. Patterson, the American ambassador in Pakistan, who supports U.S. policy in Pakistan but pointed out that it carries with it the danger of "destabilizing the Pakistani state," maybe even leading to a coup, which could bring about the leaking of radioactive materials into the jihadi network.
Noam Chomsky
