Scale Quotes - page 35
The history of nations is a melancholy chapter, that is, the history of their Governments. I am sorrowfully of opinion that, though virtue of splendid quality dwells in high regions with individuals, it is chiefly to be found on a large scale with the masses; and the history of nations is one of the most immoral parts of human history.
William Ewart Gladstone
Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: "Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."
That has happened on a grand scale. Jesus cared for none of these things. And for nineteen centuries he has led many people to see how poor they are with only a collection of things to show for their journey through life, and no spiritual resources.
Halford E. Luccock
Reality, at first glance, is a simple thing: the television speaking to you now is real. Your body sunk into that chair in the approach to midnight, a clock ticking at the threshold of awareness. All the endless detail of a solid and material world surrounding you. These things exist. They can be measured with a yardstick, a voltammeter, a weighing scale. These things are real.
Alan Moore
For those too young to recall that clear September day, it is hard to describe the mix of feelings we experienced. There was horror at the scale -- there was horror at the scale of destruction, and awe at the bravery and kindness that rose to meet it. There was shock at the audacity -- audacity of evil -- and gratitude for the heroism and decency that opposed it. In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.
George W. Bush
Aristarchos of Samos... was able to use trigonometry to figure out... the distance between the Earth and the Sun. His conclusion... the Sun was about twenty times farther... than the Moon and therefore twenty times bigger than the Moon. In other words, the Sun was... over five times bigger than the Earth in diameter. This insight prompted Aristarchos to propose the heliocentric hypothesis long before Nicolaus Copernicus... It turned out to be quite difficult to tell precisely when the Moon was 50% illuminated, and the correct Sun-Moon angle... isn't 87 degrees but about 89.85 degrees... This makes... the Sun... almost twenty times further away... and about 109 times larger than the Earth... [T]his wasn't corrected until almost two thousand years later, so when Copernicus came along... the overall scale of his Solar System model was about twenty times too small...
Max Tegmark
Let it not be forgotten, however, that there is another side to the picture. The inflow of this energy has brought many hundreds of people into a new and deeper spiritual realisation; it has opened a door through which many will pass before long and take their second initiation, and it has let a flood of light into the world-a light which will go on increasing... bringing assurance of immortality and a fresh revelation of the divine potencies in the human being. Thus is the New Age dawning. Access to levels of inspiration, hitherto untouched, has been facilitated. The stimulation of the higher faculties (and this on a large scale) is now possible, and the coordination of the personality with the soul and the right use of energy can go forward with renewed understanding and enterprise. Ever the race is to the strong, and always the many are called and the few chosen. This is the occult law.
Alice Bailey
At the core of the notion of a superhuman intelligence - particularly the view that this intelligence will keep improving itself - is the essential belief that intelligence has an infinite scale. I find no evidence for this. Again, mistaking intelligence as a single dimension helps this belief, but we should understand it as a belief. There is no other physical dimension in the universe that is infinite, as far as science knows so far. Temperature is not infinite - there is finite cold and finite heat. There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Perhaps the mathematical number line is infinite, but all other physical attributes are finite.It stands to reason that reason itself is finite, and not infinite.
Kevin Kelly (editor)
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.
George Orwell
Abuse of Germany for doing what we ourselves did, and for cherishing ambitions which every powerful nation at every stage of the world's history has entertained, is childish, irrelevant, and futile. History laughs at such criticisms. Lord Roberts made no such mistake. With penetrating instinct he stated his admiration of German temper and German discipline. Every virile citizen of any nationality, and, indeed, every person whose judgment is not debauched by a sentimentalism wholly out of contact with facts, will echo Lord Roberts' tribute. Abuse, disapproval, and pious exhortations are all utterly useless. Only one thing is useful. This country, if it means to survive, must develop its preparations upon the same scale and in the same spirit as does the great nation whose ambitions and development we are examining.
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
He also deals with the role of Marxism is recent negationist efforts: "Marxists have taken to rewriting Indian history on a large scale and it has meant its systematic falsification... The Marxists' contempt for India, particularly the India of religion, culture and philosophy, is deep and theoretically fortified. It exceeds the contempt ever shown by the most die-hard imperialists... Marx ruled out self-rule for India altogether and in this matter gave her no choice... Marxism idealizes old imperialisms and prepares a people for a new one. Its moving power is deep-rooted self-alienation and its greatest ally is cultural and spiritual illiteracy... No true history of India is possible without countering their philosophy, ideas and influence."
Ram Swarup
We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important scale. I have no doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves. I have no doubt he would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well. I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.
Theodore Roosevelt
Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it's taken me so many years to reach. Got that?
Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we're going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that.
Charles Stross
Marx's ideas became the doctrines inspiring the labour and socialist movements of most of Europe. Mainly via Lenin and the Russian Revolution they became the quintessential international doctrine of twentieth-century social revolution, equally welcomes as such from China to Peru. Through the triumph of parties identified with these doctrines, versions of these ideas became the official ideology of the states in which, at their peak, something like a third of the human race lived, not to mention political movements of varying size an importance in the rest of the world. The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none have triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity. No secular thinker can be named beside him in this respect.
Eric Hobsbawm
The old murals came from the heart,” Zima said. "I painted on a huge scale because that was what the subject matter seemed to demand.”
"It was good work,” I said.
"It was hack work. Huge, loud, demanding, popular, but ultimately soulless. Just because it came from the heart didn't make it good.
Alastair Reynolds
It was a moment of the kind that changes lives. At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn't it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims? [...] Softer aims might be politically realistic, but they are physically unrealistic. Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.
George Monbiot
[W]hen you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, then even space itself can pop into existence from nothing. Space and time can spontaneously pop into existence... Whole universes can pop into existence and most of them will disappear in a time scale so short you wouldn't know about it. The ones that can survive for a long time have zero total energy...
Lawrence M. Krauss
All, we see, is done by certain laws of matter, so that it becomes a question of extreme interest, what are such laws? All that can yet be said, in answer, is, that we see certain natural events proceeding in an invariable order under certain conditions, and thence infer the existence of some fundamental arrangement which, for the bringing about of these events, has a force and certainty of action similar to, but more precise and unerring than those arrangements which human society makes for its own benefit, and calls laws. It is remarkable of physical laws, that we see them operating on every kind of scale as to magnitude, with the same regularity and perseverance.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
I've been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world - how it's never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet's course...
Rivers Solomon
The word 'campaigning' makes me uncomfortable. At the time I was writing things on my hand, we were definitely campaigning (Make Trade Fair). Now we do it more subtly. You can see who we support at a concert or on our website, but we don't like to shove it down people's throats. I want to scale it back. I'd rather it's like, if you want to know what we think, then you can find it, rather than, 'Here's what I think!'. source.
Chris Martin
