Дании́л Хармс

Все люди любят деньги: и гладят их, и целуют, и к сердцу прижимают, и заворачивают их в красные тряпочки, и няньчат их, как куклу. А некоторые заключают деньзнак в рамку, вешают его на стену и поклоняяются ему как иконе.

Некоторые кормят свои деньги: открывают им рты и суют туда самые жирные куски своей пищи.

В жару несут деньги в холодный погреб, а зимой, в лютые морозы, бросают деньги в печку, в огонь.

Некоторые просто разговаривают со своими деньгами, или читают им вслух интересные книги, или поют им приятные песни.

Я же не отдаю деньгам особого внимания и просто ношу из в кошельке или в бумажнике и по мере надобности трачу их. Шибейя!

Padma Venkatraman

I am sitting in the library, watching the sky blur from pink to charcoal gray, remembering the many hours we spent together here. I miss you already, though it was just this morning that you left on the first leg of your journey to the United States. Periamma probably wants me downstairs, working on something or another, but she no longer has as much power over me as she once did. I suppose it's because we're engaged now and because I'm going to college. Returning to the house yesterday, I felt years older — no longer the child who had left Madras just a few months ago.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.

박태원

Siegfried Lenz

Ihre Bemerkung hatte etwas ausgelöst, worauf ich nicht vorbereitet war; ein unruhiges Verlangen, das in meiner Vorstellung immer heftiger zu werden begann, ließ mich sie berühren, ich streichelte ihre Schenkel, und dabei suchte ich ihren Blick, unsere Gesichter waren einander so nah, daß ich ihren Atem spürte.

崔承喜

Victor Lodato

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn′t slip, that′s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.

Victor Lodato

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn′t slip, that′s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.

Patricia McCormick

He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid working for a wealthy family in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi undertakes the long journey to India and arrives at "Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.

Creative Library Concepts, Inc.

• We know libraries…
• We know how libraries are changing…
• We have the right solutions...

... These new spaces combine the functions of the traditional library, technology and other services into a new environment that promotes collaboration, informal meetings, creativity and social interaction.

DELTA

Doug Floyd

You don't get harmony when everybody sings the same note.

Henry David Thoreau

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

Gregory J. P. Godek

Love is the harmony of two souls singing together.

井伏鱒二

W Dorsey Ln

John Einarsen

Kyoto Journal

A journal is primarily an ongoing means of looking afresh at the world, and one's place in it, and to recognize this as vital to the evolution of self and society.

Kyoto Journal

A journal is primarily an ongoing means of looking afresh at the world, and one's place in it, and to recognize this as vital to the evolution of self and society.

Kyoto Journal

A journal is primarily an ongoing means of looking afresh at the world, and one's place in it, and to recognize this as vital to the evolution of self and society.

Tawada Yoko

I had to smile when he spoke about tradition in Montana but actually what he said was not funny. Tradition is a fiction. It is always produced in hindsight. If it isn’t manufactured, it is not there. The Japanese tradition is no less fictive than that of Montana. When the Japanese government at the end of the 19th century opened the country to the outside world, it quickly re-activated ancient Shinto traditions that had not been practiced in over three hundred years. The cultural tradition was needed in order to form a national identity. It had not been necessary so long as the country had not had direct contact with the outside world.

Since tradition is fictive, there is no reason to feel genetically allied to a tradition. Everyone can freely choose the fictive tradition they wish to work with. Every artist may work with any of the elements found on the planet. Whether an artist can produce something new and exciting from that depends on not the origin of the artist but the artist’s ability.

梶山恵司、戸矢晃一

日本は「木の国」「木の文化」と言われ、誰もがそう信じてきた。神社仏閣や古民家などの木造建築は、まさに日本の木の文化の象徴そのものである。これに対し欧州では基本的に歴史的建造物は石造りであり、日本と対比させれば、石の文化ということができるだろう。

---

日本の過去は確かに木の文化だったと言えるが、果たしてそれが現代にも継承されているかどうかは別問題である。

---

日本の住宅の平均寿命は30年に過ぎず、このような木の使い方と、数百年も続く建造物を作ってきた伝統的な木の文化とを同列に置くことはできない。また、最近では伝統的な木造工法とは言いながら、木質ボードで壁を張って柱を隠す大壁工法の普及によって、木の家を直接感じることができる家が少なくなっている。

日本では、戦後、森づくり・木材利用ともに単純化しており、木の文化はむしろ衰退してしまったのではないだろうか。

Wieden + Kennedy

Delta’s brand campaign, “Keep Climbing” is a declaration of the company’s commitment to making flying better and a celebration of where the brand is and where it is heading.

Walot

木村政雄

美しさと、滅びいく者の哀れさは表裏一体でなければならない。

三島由紀夫

どんな事柄も、終末の側から眺めれば、許しうるものになる。その終末の側から眺める目をわがものにし、しかもその終末を与える決断がわが手にかかっていると感じること、それこそ私の自由の根拠であった。

Confucius

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

金子正次

花の都に憧れて

飛んで来ました一羽鳥

ちりめん三尺パラリと散って

花の都は大東京です

金波銀波のネオンの下で

男ばかりがやくざではありません

女ばかりが花でもありません

六尺足らずの五尺の身体

今日もゴロゴロ明日もゴロゴロ

寝さまよう私にも

たったひとりのガキがいました

そのガキも今は無情に離れ離れ

独り寂しくメリケンアパート暮らしよ

今日も降りますドスの雨

刺せば監獄　刺されば地獄

私は本日ここに力尽き引退致しますが

やくざもんは永遠に不滅です

Ellsworth Torrey Carrington

The monstrous truth is that the timing of the Okinawa campaign was exclusively related to the early August timetable of the atomic bomb. J'accuse! I accuse Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman of deliberately committing war crimes against the American people for the sole purpose of helping set the stage for the criminally unnecessary use of atomic weapons on Japan."

...

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagaski was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."

...

Truman's wanton use of atomic weapons left the American people feeling dramatically less secure after winning World War II than they had ever felt before, and these feelings of insecurity have been exploited by unscrupulous Cold War Machine Politicians ever since.

Albert Einstein

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I have seen war.

I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded...

I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed...

I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives.

I hate war.

佛学大词典

【洒洒落落】 禅林用语。洒洒，形容心不迷惑；落落，谓不停滞于物。即心不执着，远离所有束缚与染污，不拘泥于物之自在境地。

Norman Rockwell

Georgia O'Keeffe

I would rather have Stieglitz like something - anything I had done - than anyone else I know.

I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality...

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

... that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

Starbucks

Organization of American States

World War II Memorial

Victory on Land

Victory at Sea

Victory in the Air

Abraham Lincoln

George Mason

I...look'd forward to...Independence,...and will risque the last Penny of my Fortune, & the last Drop of my Blood upon the Issue.

Thomas Jefferson

The last hope of human liberty in this world rests on us.

Tsebym

François de La Rochefoucauld

L'absence diminue les médiocres passions, et augmente les grandes, comme le vent éteint les bougies et allume le feu.

William Trevor

My stories have an awful lot to do with feelings, they aren't to do with other realities. All kinds of feelings seem to me to be worth going on about in print, exploring and wondering about and being curious about.

---

I write out of curiosity more than anything else. That's why I write about women, because I'm not a woman and I don't know what it's like. The excitement of it is to know more about something that I'm not and can't be.

Jon Stewart

The first thing you may have noticed on your way in was the color. Deep pools of greens and blues, unique within our galaxy, beckon amongst ethereal swirls of white clound. As you get closer you're struck by the topological diversity. Vast oceans give way to lush green forest and jungles, which seamlessly taper off into sandy desert ridges stretching towards meticulously water-carved canyons. In the distance snow-covered mountains rise up to seemingly touch the sky. Of course, for an oblate spheroid, she's certainly not perfect. But despite a pronounced equatorial bulge and receding polar iceline, she still stubbornly maintains a jaunty 23.4° axial tilt that belies her 4.5 billion years.

Hwa-Wei Lee

The development of knowledge management in recent years has become the key concern for librarians and libraries.

In the business world, knowledge management has been regarded as strategically important for organizations to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors, to add value to their products, and to win greater satisfaction from their customers. In the library world, there is a lesson to be learned from the business world. Knowledge management is as important for libraries as for the businesses minus the competitive, proprietary, and moneymaking concerns.

William Shockley III

It is not the computer system that makes knowledge. The critical links are the organization’s human resources. They are the links that provide, collect, disseminate and interpret the information. They are the links that decide on the correct application for the present situation. They, the people, are the links that will make the organization survive or fail.

Patricia Galagan

Collecting knowledge is the easy part of knowledge management. We’re not constrained by information, we are constrained by sense making ... what to do with the information.

---

Knowledge management processes:

• Generating new knowledge.
• Accessing knowledge from external sources.
• Representing knowledge in documents, databases, software and so forth.
• Embedding knowledge in processes, products, or services.
• Transferring existing knowledge around an organization.
• Using accessible knowledge in decision-making.
• Facilitating knowledge growth through culture and incentives.
• Measuring the value of knowledge assets and the impact of knowledge management.

Daniel Bell

Knowledge is a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form.

Marc Porat

Information is data that has been organized and communicated.

Yogesh Malhotra

The ides of "knowledge management technologies deliver the right information to the right person at the right time" applies to an outdated business model. The new business model of the information age is marked by fundamental, not incremental, change. Businesses can't plan long-term; instead, they must shift to a more flexible "anticipation-of-surprise" model.

Technologies such as databases and groupware applications store bits and pixels of data. But they can't store the rich schemas that people possess for making sense of data bits. Information is context-sensitive. The same assemblage of data can evoke different responses from different people. Many information textbooks say that while people come and go their experience can be stored in databases. But unless you can scan a person's mind and store it directly into a database, you cannot put bits into a database and assume that somebody else can get back the experience of the first person.

The fact of information in a database doesn't ensure that people will see or use the information. Most of our knowledge management technology concentrates on efficiency and creating a consensus-oriented view. The data therein is rational, static and without context. And such systems do not account for renewal of existing knowledge and creation of new knowledge.

Google Blog

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

UNESCO

New book titles published in the world per year: 1,004,725

Mathew Ingram

If you’ve been following the newspaper industry at all over the past year or so, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that 2009 was the worst year in decades as far as advertising revenues are concerned. But the sheer scale of the declines over the past few years is staggering. Last year saw a drop of 28 percent from 2008 –- and that year was already the worst for the industry since the Depression. Over the past four years, print advertising revenue has plummeted by more than 47 percent, to $24 billion from $47 billion. Online advertising has been growing (except for last year, when it shrank by 11 percent), but it still amounts to just 10 percent of what papers make from print.

Veronis Suhler Stevenson

The segments where advertising will decline most rapidly in 2009 are newspapers (down 18.7 percent, to $35.5 billion); consumer magazines (down 14.8 percent, to $11 billion); radio (down 11.7 percent, to $15.8 billion); and broadcast television (down 10.1 percent, to $43.0 billion). A few sectors to increase their advertising dollars this year are mobile (up 18.1 percent, to $1.3 billion) and the Internet (up 9.2 percent, to $23.8 billion).

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 16 million articles (over 3.4 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranked 7th among all websites on Alexa.

The term Internet meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/) is used to describe a concept that spreads swiftly via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although this concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.

Alexa

Top Sites on the web:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. yahoo.com
5. live.com
6. baidu.com
7. wikipedia.org
8. blogspot.com
9. qq.com
10. twitter.com
11. msn.com
12. yahoo.co.jp
13. taobao.com
14. google.co.in
15. sina.com.cn
16. amazon.com
17. google.de
18. google.com.hk
19. wordpress.com
20. google.co.uk
21. linkedin.com
22. microsoft.com
23. ebay.com
24. bing.com
25. yandex.ru
26. google.fr
27. google.co.jp
28. 163.com
29. google.com.br
30. fc2.com
31. conduit.com
32. google.it
33. Почта@Mail.ru
34. craigslist.org
35. vkontakte.ru
36. flickr.com
37. sohu.com
38. myspace.com
39. googleusercontent.com
40. go.com

Kate Holton

Legitimate digital music sales grew by an estimated 25 percent to $3.7 billion in trade value, to account for about 20 percent of the industry's global recorded music sales.

But about 95 percent of the music downloaded in 2008, or more than 40 billion files, was illegal and not paid for.

As part of its response, the music industry has launched a host of alternative ways to sell music, such as through subscription models on mobile phones and Internet service providers (ISPs), and on advertising-supported models.

Katie Hafner

And that’s just fine with her, until she finds herself among friends whose iPhones are studded with icons. When a fellow iPhone owner asked recently to see her apps, she grew self-conscious. “I said to him, ‘O.K., now I’m officially feeling like a loser,’ ” she recalled.

---

But that doesn’t mean that people will change their habits. Actually, it may just make them feel a tad more overwhelmed. The next generation of gadget users might prove different, but for now it is clear that people prefer fewer choices, and that they gravitate consistently toward the same small number of things that they like. Owners of iPhones are no different from cable TV subscribers with hundreds of channels to choose from who end up watching the same half-dozen.

---

A study last year by Pinch Media found that most people stop using their applications pretty quickly, particularly if those apps are free. And three out of every four applications people download are free, even though analysts say that Apple and its developers receive $1 billion a year in revenue from selling applications (Apple itself won’t say).

Harris Interactive

• Nearly 4 out of 5 U.S. adults receive bills from cell phone and credit card companies, and the majority trust credit cards companies more than cell phone companies when it comes to accurately billing them for a payment
• Older adults are significantly more likely than their younger counterparts to trust credit card companies more than cell phone companies
• 93% of U.S. adults own a cell phone, and nearly half of these adults think it's at least somewhat safe to make a purchase through their cell phone with 26% saying they think it's fairly or very safe to do so
• Assuming it was safe to make purchases through cell phones, nearly half of cell phone owners would be willing to make purchases this way
• Of those who would be willing to make purchases through their cellphone, three-fourth would be willing to buy entertainment items
• Many would also purchase food/drink items and over half would be willing to purchase hotel rooms and/or tickets for travel this way
• Men who own a cell phone are more likely than their female counterparts to think it is safe to make purchases through their cell phones
• Younger cell phone owning adults are also more likely than older counterparts to think it's at least somewhat safe to make purchases
• Those who own a cell phone and have a college degree or higher are more likely than those who own a cell phone and have a high school degree or less to think it's at least somewhat safe
• Adults who receive bills from both cell phone and credit cards companies and make $75,000 per year or more are more likely than their counterparts who make less than $35,000 per year to trust credit cards companies more than cell phone companies when it comes to accurately billing them for payment

Claire Cain Miller

  The other day, Facebook suggested that I make a new friend: myself.

  It’s a little odd to see your own photo in the “people you may know” box, but I have two Facebook profiles, for work (Claire Cain Miller), and for my personal life (Claire Miller Cain).

  Having two accounts allows my friends to see my wedding pictures but not the pitches I get from publicists, and my boss to see links to articles I find interesting but not the photos my friend posted after our vacation in Mexico.

  That need to put up a digital wall between work and life is an obvious reason that Facebook recently introduced an easier way to make posts and photos visible only to certain groups. Concern about privacy was one of Facebook’s motivations, but it was also reflecting the way we live our lives offline.

Kao

SonicWALL

Inbound spam volume continues to increase significantly, with no signs of abating. (e.g. in 2005, an average of 30 billion spam email messages were sent daily; by 2007, that average had quadrupled to 120 billion daily spam messages.)

The incentive driving this global spam industry is profit. Despite its catastrophic impact on business productivity and network performance, and despite even high-profile prosecutions of spammers, spam still works.

Spam is constantly getting more sophisticated because spammers are typically technically savvy and early adopters of innovative technology.

Outbound threats are also becoming a top priority, based upon fears of regulatory non-compliance and the leakage of sensitive intellectual property or confidential information.

Data leaks are not limited to malicious acts; most confidential data leaks are likely due to employee carelessness. Additionally, as much as 25% of computers on the Internet are estimated to be infected with botnets or zombies, which can infect corporate mail servers and generate outbound attacks.

田中一村

Ray Kurzweil

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand times smaller (than the one computer at MIT in 1965) and so that's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar or per euro that we've actually seen in the last 40 years.

The rate is actually speeding up a little bit, so we will see another billion-fold increase in the next 25 years--and another hundred-thousand-fold shrinking. So what used to fit in a building now fits in your pocket, what fits in your pocket now will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.

Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations.
• Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

Shift Happens

高橋智隆

Jean Daniel Nicolas

Kokoro Shirai, Hiroyasu Iso, Tetsuya Ohira, Ai Ikeda, Hiroyuki Noda, Kaori Honjo, Manami Inoue, Shoichiro Tsugane

A lower perceived level of life enjoyment was found to be associated with higher risks of cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality among middle-aged men, suggesting a protective role of positive psychological conditions on cardiovascular disease.

コンスタンス

もし、現在の人類統計比率をきちんと盛り込んで、全世界を１００人の村に縮小するとどうなるでしょう。その村には、

• ５７人のアジア人、２１人のヨーロッパ人、１４人の南北アメリカ人、８人のアフリカ人がいます。
• ５２人が女性で、４８人が男性です。
• ７０人が有色人種で、３０人が白人。
• ７０人がキリスト教以外の人で、３０人がキリスト教。
• ８９人が異性愛者で、１１人が同性愛者。
• ６人が全世界の富の５９％を所有し、その６人ともがアメリカ国籍。
• ８０人は標準以下の居住環境に住み、７０人は文字が読めません。
• ５０人は栄養失調に苦しみ、1人が瀕死の状態にあり、1人はいま、生まれようとしています。
• １人は（そうたった１人）は大学の教育を受け、そしてたった１人だけがコンピューターを所有しています。

Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, Wallace V. Friesen

Statistically significant inverse associations were found between the percentile ranking of the number of positive sentences in the early-life autobiographies and the risk of mortality in late-life within each of the convents and in both convents combined. For example, for every 1.0% increase in the number of positive-emotion sentences there was a 1.4% decrease in the mortality rate (i.e., the hazard function from the Cox regression model). In contrast, there were no statistically significant associations between the risk of mortality and the percentile rankings of the number of negative emotion sentences or the number of nonemotion sentences.

James H. Fowler, Nicholas A. Christakis

Objectives: To evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks.

Design: Longitudinal social network analysis.
Setting: Framingham Heart Study social network.
Participants: 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003.
Main outcome measures: Happiness measured with validated four item scale; broad array of attributes of social networks and diverse social ties.
Results: Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals.
Conclusions: People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

What is already known on this topic

• Previous work on happiness and wellbeing has focused on socioeconomic and genetic factors
• Research on emotional contagion has shown that one person’s mood might fleetingly determine the mood of others
• Whether happiness spreads broadly and more permanently across social networks is unknown

What this study adds

• Happiness is a network phenomenon, clustering in groups of people that extend up to three degrees of separation (for example, to one’s friends’ friends’ friends)
• Happiness spreads across a diverse array of social ties
• Network characteristics independently predict which individuals will be happy years into the future

Daniel Kahneman

Neil Young

He came dancing across the water, with his galleons and guns
looking for the new world, in that palace in the sun
on the shore lay Montezuma with his cocoa leaves and pearls
in his halls, he often wandered, with the secrets of the worlds
And his subjects gathered round him, like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colors, For the angry gods to see
And the women all were beautiful and the men stood straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice, so that others could go on
Hate was just a legend, and war was never known
The people worked together, and they lifted many stones
They carried them to the flatlands, and they died along the way
But they built up with their bare hands, what we still cant build today
And I know shes living there, and she loves me to this day
I still cant remember when, or how I lost my way
Cortez, Cortez, He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez

Warren Haynes, Dave Matthews Band

Ron

木村敏

われわれが「いま」と言うとき、それはつねに「いまはもう…でない」および「いまはまだ…でない」の両方向に向かって開かれている。このことは、時間において数えられる運動や変化が「…から…へ」という拡がりの性格をもっているということと同じことである。

雨滴聲

Henri Matisse

When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.

Arne Næss

Life is fundamentally one. ... The deep ecology movement is the ecology movement which questions deeper. ..The adjective 'deep' stresses that we ask why and how, where others do not.

Herbert Andrew Deane

The kingdom is larger than the robber band both in numbers and in territory occupied, and it has a fixed abode. As the robber band increases in size and settles down, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, not because its cupidity has been taken away but because it now possesses the priceless advantage of the "impunity" of a "sovereign state. Kingdoms are no less avaricious than robber bands, but whereas the band of robbers may be punished by the state, there is no super-state or international police force to punish the state for its misdeeds or its depredations.

Thomas Hobbes

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition which man by mere nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the passions, partly in his reason.

Peter Kropotkin

Going next over to man, we found him living in clans and tribes at the very dawn of the stone age; we saw a wide series of social institutions developed already in the lower savage stage, in the clan and the tribe; and we found that the earliest tribal customs and habits gave to mankind the embryo of all the institutions which made later on the leading aspects of further progress. Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial units (village communities), connected with guilds these latter arising out ofthe common prosecution of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.

Bhikhu Parekh

Human beings, then, do seem to have a nature in the sense defined earlier - that is, capacities, emotions and dispositions which are universal, relatively permanent, acquired as part of their species-heritage or by nature, and which tend to generate certain kinds of actions. Since human beings have a certain physical and mental structure with in-built tendencies and limits, and since they go through common life experiences and life-cycles, it would be odd if they did not have a nature. If we encountered a 'human being' who was six inches or six meters tall, immortal, had unusual sense organs, never felt an emotion or fluctuations of moods, spoke a refined language at birth, never made a mistake or faced a temptation throughout his or her life, or possessed no sense of selfhood or subjectivity, we would feel profoundly disorientated in their presence and would consider that person either an aberrant member of our species or, more likely, that of another. To have a nature is to have a nature is to have a potency for action, a tendency to behave in a certain way, and to be subject to certain constitutional limitations. All these are true of human beings.

James Madison

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

Robert Alan Dahl

Whatever form it takes, the democracy of our successors will not and cannot be the democracy of our predecessors. Nor should it be. For the limits and possibilities of democracy in a world we can already dimly foresee are certain to be radically unlike the limits and possibilities of democracy in any previous time or place. We can be confident that in the future as in the past the exacting requirements of the democratic process will not be fully met and many of the theoretical and practical problems in the democratic proces explored here will not be completely solved.

John Rawls

They give priority to the basic liberties, regard individuals as free and responsible masters of their aims and desires, and all are to share equally in the means for the attainment of ends unless the situation of everyone can be improved, taking equal division as the starting point.

American Political Science Association

Giving money to politicians is a form of citizen activity that is, in practical terms, reserved for a select group of Americans. As wealth and income have become more concentrated and the flow of money into elections has grown, campaign contributions give the affluent a means to express their voice that is unavailable to most citizens. This undoubtedly aggravates inequalities of political voice.

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The nation’s current campaign to expand democracy abroad should be a bugle call at home to make the birthright of all Americans — equal voice and influence in the affairs of government — more of a reality than it is today.

Irving Kristol

But the truth is that, while I admired the essay immensely, I didn't really like it. Which is but another way of saying that I disagreed with it. Today, looking back over the past forty years, I can see why. I was American, Michael was English.

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In short, Oakeshott's ideal conservative society is a society without religion, since all religions bind us as securely to past and future as to the present.

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Oakeshott's conservative disposition runs squarely against the American grain. Oh, Americans possess such a disposition all right. Despite all one reads about the frustrations of American life, it is the rare American who dreams of moving to another land, and hardly any do.

Robert Nozick

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen.

Richard Rorty

To give up on modernism, we shall have to start thinking about the similarities, rather than the differences, between where we are now, where we were before Auschwitz, and where we were before the French Revolution. We are still trying to think of ways to minimize injustice and maximize equality. We are still trying to create beauty—thought of, with Stendhal, as “the promise of happiness.” But in trying to create both ordinary human happiness and promises of new sorts of happiness, we are not engaged in a process of emancipation or enlightenment. For there is neither a true humanity to be emancipated nor a built-in natural light (called “reason” or “conscience”) by which such emancipation is made possible. Instead of taking our cue from Hegel, we should take it from Darwin and Mendel, and say that History or Humanity no more has an immanent teleology than does Life. The evolution of Western society has been, and will continue to be, as jerky, hit-or-miss, and unpredictable as was the evolution of the primates.

Mohammad abd al-Salam Faraj

With regard to the lands of Islam, the enemy lives right in the middle of them. The enemy even has got hold of the reins of power, for this enemy is (none other than) these rulers who have (illegally) seized the Leadership of the Muslims. Therefore, waging jihad against them is an individual duty. ...

Know that when jihad is an individual duty, there is no (need to) ask permission of (your) parents to leave to wage jihad, as the jurists have said; it is thus similar to prayer and fasting.

Albert Camus

Mais je dois à Nietzsche une partie de ce que je suis, comme à Tolstoï et à Melville.

Theodore J. Lowi

The United States is a child of the Industrial Revolution. Its godfather is capitalism and its guardian Providence, otherwise known as the “invisible hand."

Capitalism is an ideology because it is a source of principles and a means of justifying behavior; that is, it is something Americans believe in. It is a liberal ideology because it has always participated in positive attitudes toward progress, individualism, rationality, and nationalism. It is capitalism because its foundation is a capitalistic economic theory and because its standards of legitimacy are capitalistic. It was the public philosophy during the nineteenth century because it dominated all other sources of belief in the formulation of public policy. It is the old public philosophy because it no longer dominates other sources of belief.

In a very important sense, of course, capitalism is not an ideology at all. It is a bundle of economic and technological processes. In this sense capitalism is not something one believes in but rather something one does.

John Fiske

Images are neither the bearers of ideology, nor the representations of the real, but what Baudrillard calls "the hyperreal": the television image, the advertisement, the pop song become more "real" than "reality", their sensuous imperative is so strong that they are our experience, they are our pleasure. Denying the narrative domain of these objects dislocates them from the ideological one as well. The pleasure here is not in resisting ideology, nor in challenging it with a "better" one, but in evading it, in liberating oneself from it.

Tim Woods

The necessity of articulating a credible construction of identity, democracy, community, responsibility or security without the presupposition of the presence of territorial space, a distinct boundary of demarcation between here and there, has become one of the most imperative considerations of the late twentieth century.

Norman Mailer

The trouble with reality is that it isn't realistic anymore.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

To attempt to understand how the events of September 2008 occurred is, of course, an im- portant exercise, but only if its lessons are used to help strengthen the system and protect it from future crises. Washington now has a rare opportunity to examine and introduce reforms to the fundamental regulatory structure, but it appears there is a danger that this once-in-a-generation opportunity may be squandered.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Crises have happened in a broad range of nations because when finance becomes unregulated it becomes vastly too large and too powerful and uses its power to corrupt or evade restraints on its power. This means that crony capitalism is a severe danger and will often occur.

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They even had an argument: deregulation had led them to make more money, and money was the mark of success. Q.E.D.

Walter Mehring