Primary Quotes - page 31
For all their focusing on the all-purpose bogey of Hindu nationalism (or worse isms), it is remarkable that Indian Marxists and their Western disciples have completely failed to study this ideology. During my Ph.D. research on this very topic, I found that practically all secondary publications in the field, including some influential ones, dispensed almost completely with the reading of primary sources. Typically, a few embarrassing quotations, selected by Indian critics of Hindutva from some old pamphlets (mostly Golwalkar 1939), are repeated endlessly and in unabashedly polemical fashion.
Koenraad Elst
We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults-and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds. (In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.)
Stephen Jay Gould
The primary issue is how seriously we take our chosen obligations to people in the developing world who do not have Internet connections. ... Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so..
Jimmy Wales
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness.
The primary, or earliest, class of human pleasure is the pleasures of external senses.
In addition to these, man is susceptible of certain secondary pleasures, as the pleasures of intellectual feeling, the pleasures of sympathy, and the pleasures of self-approbation.
The secondary pleasures are probably more exquisite than the primary;
Or, at least,
The most desirable state of man is that in which he has access to all these sources of pleasure, and is in possession of a happiness the most varied and uninterrupted.
This state is a state of high civilization.
William Godwin
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature - whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation - Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Thomas Henry Huxley
In the book, the appeal is to their fear glands... the fear of not getting re-elected. The fear of being challenged in a primary inside their own party... The greed glands were approached by the lobbyists, who tried to turn this mass movement of the people of our country to take control of Congress... They poured campaign money into their stalwarts...
Ralph Nader
It is not true, that the granting of the independence of America was "an advantage to England.” It was, on the contrary, the greatest evil that ever befell her. It was the primary cause of the present war, and of all the calamities which it has brought upon England and upon Europe. If England and the American States had continued united, they would have prevented France from disturbing the peace of the world. That fatal measure, though it has not curtailed our commerce, has created a power who will be capable of assisting France in any of her future projects against us, and whose neutrality, when France recovers her marine, must be purchased by us at the expense, first of commercial concessions, and, finally, by much more important sacrifices. In short, it laid the foundation of the ruin of the British empire, which can be prevented by nothing but a wisdom, and an energy, which have never yet marked the councils of our Government, in its transactions with the American States.
William Cobbett
I have a very one-track mind that needs to concentrate. I asked myself which issue is more important: whether mental states are more left- or right-hemispheric, or whether they are causal in brain function. From weighing the pros and cons, I decided that the left-brain, right-brain work was well in orbit and that it would be more important to shift my primary focus to consciousness.
The mind-brain issues are intrinsically more compelling. They carry strong humanistic as well as scientific implications. I could foresee changes in our world view, guiding beliefs, and social values. In the context of today's worsening world conditions and our imperiled future, this work seemed far more important than whether you can find a brain theory enabling people to learn faster, draw better, make better medical diagnoses, and so on.
We're beginning to learn the hard way that today's global ills are not cured by more and more science and technology.
Roger Wolcott Sperry
We are convinced that racial regeneration like individual regeneration, must come "from within." That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without. In other words, every potential parent, and especially every potential mother, must be brought to an acute realization of the primary and central importance of bringing children into this world. ... Not until the parents of the world are thus given control over their reproductive faculties will it ever be possible ... to improve the quality of the generations of the future, [or] even to maintain civilization even at its present level. ... An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from above, a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take into account the living conditions and desires of the submerged masses, can never be of the slightest value in effecting any changes in the mores of the people.
Margaret Sanger
The new and wonderful results of the late Dr. Boole's mathematical system of Logic appear to develop themselves as most plain and evident consequences of the self-same process of substitution, when applied to the Primary Laws of Thought. Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.
William Stanley Jevons
My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That's your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let's do something together.”
"There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. "I've been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don't pay any attention. Unless there's an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.
Robert Sheckley
But these were mere passing irritants. Deeper were the systemic troubles. She stressed the many unknowns; the media wanted sharp answers to huge questions, preferably in a compact one-liner. She tried to emphasize the progressive questioning of her method and how all answers were provisional, awaiting confirmation; reporters liked zippy adventure and exciting guesses with, of course, striking visuals in primary colors.
Gregory Benford
Patriarchy cannot be destroyed overnight, but it can be gradually overcome by groups that work to destroy it. Activists must recognize patriarchy as a primary enemy and open spaces within revolutionary movements for women, queer people, and transgender people to be creative forces in directing, assessing, and reformulating the struggle (while also supporting men's efforts to understand and counter our own socialization). An honest evaluation shows that no matter our intentions, more work remains to be done to free control of the movement from the hands of men and to find healthy, restorative ways to deal with abusive patterns in relationships, social or romantic, among members of the movement.
Peter Gelderloos
Companies form confusopolies to make it impossible for the average Induhvidual to determine who has the lowest price. This way each major company gets a share of the pie, the size of which depends on how skillfully they can dupe customers with advertisements. That will be the primary job of marketing professionals in the future-- disguising the true cost of your product in order to be a successful confusopolist.
Scott Adams
What grew from from that discussion was the realization that in order for him to create an authentic alliance with me, he must deal with the primary source of his own sense of oppression. He must, first, emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim. If he-or anyone-were to truly do this, it would be impossible to discount the oppression of others, except by again forgetting how we have been hurt. And yet, oppressed groups are forgetting all the time. There are instances of this in the rising Black middle class, and certainly an obvious trend of such "unconsciousness" among white gay men. Because to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality.
Cherríe Moraga
Well the voices, for me especially in first person story-telling, the voice is of primary importance. And the voice reflects and articulates that particular character and what that particular character is interested in and troubled by, and so the voices are different because the people are different. It seems to be an obvious thing to say but it has to be said...
Chang-rae Lee
I disclosed that I had been involved in discussions "regarding the formation of a new organization designed to support independent journalists and groups such as WikiLeaks under attack by the US and other governments."... Its name is Freedom of the Press Foundation...The primary impetus for the formation of this group was to block the US government from ever again being able to attack and suffocate an independent journalistic enterprise the way it did with WikiLeaks. Government pressure and the eager compliance of large financial corporations (such as Visa, Master Card, Bank of America, etc.) has - by design - made it extremely difficult for anyone to donate to WikiLeaks, while many people are simply afraid to directly support the group (for reasons I explained here).
Glenn Greenwald
2. Change the payoffs
A common reaction of someone caught in a Prisoner's Dilemma is that "there ought to be a law against this sort of thing." In fact, getting out of Prisoner's Dilemmas is one of the primary functions of government: to make sure that when individuals do not have private incentives to cooperate, they will be required to do the socially useful thing anyway. Laws are passed to cause people to pay their taxes, not to steal, and to honor contracts with strangers. Each of these activities could be regarded as a giant Prisoner's Dilemma game with many players.
Robert Axelrod
These steps will enhance our productivity - raising wages without raising prices. That won't increase inflation. It will take the pressure off of inflation, give a boost to our workforce, which leads to lower prices in the years ahead. So, if your primary concern right now is inflation, you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan. And as we promote - as we promote fair competition in our economy through the executive order I mentioned, it will drive down prices even further.
Joe Biden
It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism-that between vital impulse and vital control-and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Hence Rousseau's novelistic works, Emile, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Confessions―each of which is much longer than his primary political treatise, the two Discourses and the Social Contract, put together―constitute an attempt to establish what was missing in earlier democratic thinkers, a democratic art. He does for democracy what Socrates did for aristocracy in the Republic.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
