Harmony Quotes - page 9
Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect. And it is particularly pleasing to observe in the good citizenship of such as have been most distrusted and oppressed elsewhere, a happy illustration of the safety and success of this experiment of a just and benignant policy. Equal laws protecting equal rights, are found as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty, and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony and most favorable to the advancement of truth.
James Madison
The truth is that the mathematical sciences are growing in complete security and harmony. The ideas of Dedekind, Poincare, and Hilbert have been systematically developed with great success, without any conflict in the results. It is only from the philosophical point of view that objections have been raised. They bear on certain ways of reasoning peculiar to analysis and set theory. These modes of reasoning were first systematically applied in giving a rigorous form to the methods of the calculus. [According to them, ] the objects of a theory are viewed as elements of a totality such that one can reason as follows: For each property expressible using the notions of the theory, it is [an] objectively determinate [fact] whether there is or there is not an element of the totality which possesses this property. Similarly, it follows from this point of view that either all the elements of a set possess a given property, or there is at least one element which does not possess it.
Paul Bernays
I wondered aloud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provision of commonplace material goods. ... I told Renae that our robots and engines were delivering the lion's share of their benefits at the base of our pyramid of needs, that we were evident experts at swiftly assembling confectionery and yet we were still searching for reliable means of generating emotional stability or marital harmony.
Alain de Botton
This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, - knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
[Ramsay MacDonald was] a man of great stature, capable of inspiring massive affection and massive attack-a man who created and led a great party and who has become a legend in that party equally for the manner of his leaving it as for the years he gave its creation. ... They drew their inspiration from Merrie England and dry statistics, they sang their widely differing battle songs, and Ramsay MacDonald had to fashion from the strains of Edward Carpenter's 'England Arise', from the 'Internationale', from 'Jerusalem', from the 'Red Flag', from 'These Things Shall Be', a new harmony. In 1906 in MacDonald's fortieth year, he saw the victory-the dawn of the new era.
Harold Wilson
In the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran, I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with the conviction that change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work.
Shirin Ebadi
...observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists-amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for 'harmony with nature'-there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision-i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears...
Ayn Rand
One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.
Haruki Murakami
