1859 1947 Quotes

The secret of spiritual success is a hunger that persists ... It is an awful condition to be satisfied with one's spiritual attainments ... God was and is looking for hungry, thirsty people. ~ Smith Wigglesworth

If there is to be no ceiling on the amount of money a man can take out of our economy, then concomitantly there can be no foundation below which a human being cannot sink. What capitalists must realize is that you are fighting to make capitalism survive, not destroy it; you are fighting to eliminate the seeds of destruction inherent in the status quo."
~Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's letter to Don Matchan, 27 April 1947 ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Inflation had risen to the unimaginable figure of just over 100,000 percent by the end of 1947
and it was to go to 2,870,000 percent by the end of 1948 ... ~ Jung Chang

Sometimes he comes to me in my dreams, and I wonder if ironically all our stories were written on his skin back there in Texas City in 1947. Or maybe that's just poetic illusion purchased by time. But even in the middle of an Indian summer's day, when the sugarcane is beaten with purple and gold light in the fields and the sun is both warm and cool on your skin at the same time, when I know that the earth is a fine place after all, I have to mourn just a moment for those people of years ago who lived lives they did not choose, who carried burdens that were not their own, whose invisible scars were as private as the scarlet beads of Sister Roberta's rosary wrapped across the back of her small hand, as bright as drops of blood ringed round the souls of little people. ~ James Lee Burke

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head
everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

With Partition, in 1947, Roy writes, "God's carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbours turned on each other as though they'd never known each other, never been to each other's weddings, never sung each other's songs." The consequences of that terrible event form the main story of "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. ~ Arundhati Roy

There's a picture in When the Lights Go Down: A Short Illustrated History of Film of Alec Matto smoking in a chair in a room with a slice of light blaring over his head toward a screen we can't see. 'Alec Matto reviewing dailies for Where Has Julia Gone? (1947) in his private screening room.' Joan had to tell me what dailies are, it's when the director takes sometime in the evening, while smoking, to see all the footage that was filmed that day, maybe just one scene, a man opening a door over and over, a woman pointing out the window, pointing out the window, pointing out the window. That's dailies, and it took seven or eight matches on the roof over the garage for me to go over our breathless dailies that night, the nervous wait with the tickets in my hand, Lottie Carson heading north on those trains, kissing you, kissing you, the strange conversation in A-Post Novelties that had me all nerve-wracky after I talked to Al about it, even though he said he had no opinion. The matches were little he loves me, he loves me not, but then I saw right on the box that I had twenty-four, which would end the game at not, so I just let the small handful sparkle and puff for a bit, each one a thrill, a tiny delicious jolt for each part I remembered, until I burned my finger and went back in still thinking of all we did together. ~ Daniel Handler

The 1911 pistol remains the service pistol of choice in the eyes of those who understand the problem. Back when we audited the FBI academy in 1947, I was told that I ought not to use my pistol in their training program because it was not fair. Maybe the first thing one should demand of his sidearm is that it be unfair. ~ Jeff Cooper

This report has been difficult to write because it involves something that doesn't officially exist. It is well known that ever since the first flying saucer was reported in June 1947 the Air Force has officially said that there is no proof that such a thing as an interplanetary spaceship exists. But what is not well known is that this conclusion is far from being unanimous among the military and their scientific advisors because of the one word, proof; so the UFO investigations continue. ~ Edward J. Ruppelt

The classic formulation of the materialist conception of history is that of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written in 1859. ~ Anonymous

There was too much opinion in this country, too many sob stories. Nobody wanted to put a lid on anything; everyone wanted to say it all, about everything. If you as much as said hello to someone on a train or a plane, you were in for the unexpurgated memoirs. Nehru in 1947 had declared us a nation finding utterance - but in fifty years the utterance had become a mad clamour, a crazed babble, an unending howl. We were a nation of Scheherzades, afraid we'd die if, for a moment, we shut up. For myself, I'd mastered a face of steel, and an inscrutable nod. It did not always shut everyone up, but it did to some extent dam the ghastly flow. ~ Tarun J. Tejpal

The other gift - a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" - Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more."
She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night.
[...]
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.'
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.
- The Inverted Forest (1947) ~ J.D. Salinger

If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up. ' (Mill, 1859:37) ~ Anonymous

I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.
[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859] ~ Joseph Dalton Hooker

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956):

Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict. ~ Kay Boyle

The more I get into it the more isolated I feel vis-à-vis the writers whom I consider to be of any serious mind... I am enclosing this article entitled New Heroes by Simone de Beauvoir...It is what I have been thinking at the bottom of my mind all this time and God knows it is difficult to write the way I do and yet think their way. This problem you will never have to face because you have always been a truly isolated person so that whatever you write will be good because it will be true which is not so in my case... You immediately receive recognition because what you write is in true relation to yourself which is always recognizable to the world outside... With me who knows? When you are capable only of a serious approach to writing as I am it is almost more than one can bear to be continually doubting one's sincerity... (citing Jane Bowles, 1947) ~ Chris Kraus

Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered. ~ Aanchal Malhotra

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland's contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast.
Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson's first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and st ~ Marina Lewycka

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there. ~ David Bowie

The Supreme Court's 1947 decision which introduced the wall of separation between church and state 'has fueled a movement to sterilize anything in American public life from religion.' ~ Mickey Edwards

Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899 - )
Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947

On registration day at taxidermy school
I distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed moose
Move. ~ Gordon Korman

The V-2's directional system was notoriously erratic. In May 1947, a V-2 launched from White Sands Proving Ground headed south instead of north, missing downtown Juarez, Mexico, by 3 miles. The Mexican government's response to the American bombing was admirably laid back. General Enrique Diaz Gonzales and Consul General Raul Michel met with United States officials, who issued apologies and an invitation to come to "the next rocket shoot" at White Sands. The Mexican citizenry was similarly nonchalant. "Bomb Blast Fails to Halt Spring Fiesta," said the El Paso Times headline, noting that "many thought the explosion was a cannon fired for the opening of the fiesta. ~ Mary Roach

Public spending on infrastructure has fallen to its lowest level since 1947. And the U.S., which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked 16th according to the World Economic Forum, behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates. ~ Ray LaHood

Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at ourselves at night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides, and a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from plankton in the water. The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars. ~ Thor Heyerdahl

Yesterday a very interesting, beautifully photografed english picture about a nun convent in India, "Black Narcissus," with Deborah Kerr who is quite lovely. They are away ahead of Hollywood, better ideas, better scripts, better color, and much better acting.

Kurt Weill, London, May 8, 1947 ~ Kurt Weill

Silver mining in the United States didn't start, like hard-core, until the mid-1850s," Louis said. "And only really got big when the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in California."

"It was bad work. Dangerous. Like any mining. But silver also lets out fumes when it's mined. Even Pliny the Elder wrote about how harmful the fumes were, especially to animals. You know Pliny the Elder?"

"The problem with the silver fumes," Louis continued, "is that, over time, they gave the miners delusions. Bad enough that they had to stop mining. Their health deteriorated. And a bunch of them even died." Hard to make fun of something like that, so Pepper didn't. "Do you know what people would say, in these mining towns, when they saw one of these miners falling apart? Walking through town muttering and swinging at phantoms? They said the Devil in Silver got them. It became shorthand. Like someone might say, 'What happened to Mike?' And the answer was always the same. 'The Devil in Silver got him.' " Louis sat straight and crossed his arms and surveyed the table. "Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?" "You're saying we're just making this thing up," Pepper said quietly. Louis seemed disappointed. He dropped his hands into his lap and folded them there. He looked at his sister and Pepper. He turned his head to take in the other patients gathered with their family members there in the hospital. "I'm saying they were dying," Louis said. "They definitely weren't ~ Victor LaValle

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Israel Regardie (November 17th, 1907 – March 10th, 1985) met with the Golden Dawn magician Aleister Crowley (October 12th, 1875 – December 1st, 1947) in Paris, France on October 12th, 1928 to become his personal secretary and student (he also became Crowley's Confidential Agent and a IX° member of Crowley's O.T.O.). On October 28th, 1930, Regardie took the Oath of the Probationer in Crowley's Order of the A.·. A.·. (Astron Argon). The Order of the A.·. A.·. was Crowley's reformulated and advanced version of the system of the Golden Dawn. He even maintained the name of the Golden Dawn (Aurora Aurea) for the Outer Order. ~ David Cherubim

There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carother McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds' great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. . .But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all––that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only. . .put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment. ~ William Faulkner

I am against the planned political assassinations by our intelligence and defense agents.The CIA-FBI-DIA and DISC (Defense Industry Security Command) were set up originally to protect citizens of the USA. They became their own judges and juries, private servants of corporations with investments at home and abroad. I am against the constant destruction of evidence in criminal matters and political assassinations. Prime witnesses are murdered before or after testifying. Diaries are forged and planted in obvious places. Doubles are created to confuse. The Police Departments manipulate facts in cooperation with conspirators. I am outraged that our judicial system since 1947 has been patterned after Nazi Germany. Patsies are dead or locked away. The assassins walk the streets or leave the country - "home free". I am against using the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to cover up the assassination of President Kennedy. When the highest court is corrupt, there is no hope at local levels. ~ Mae Brussell

He'd always been willing to confess his faults, for, by admitting them, it was as if he made them no longer exist. ~ Truman Capote

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
(Speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947) ~ Winston S. Churchill

Oh, nice one, honey. Yes. Clever. That's becoming quite a familiar quotation in its own right, isn't it? Maybe I should just add it to the next edition. 'Mother was right.' Author: Mrs. Bartlett, world-renowned nag. Year: 1859. Attribution: A short play entitled Every Goddamn Weekend! ~ John Bartlett

In 1947 I married Rowena Palmer, and we have two daughters, Alison and Claire, and a son, John. ~ Martin Ryle

Migration is often accompanied by a feeling of unavoidable disorientation, and the circumstances of 1947 would have pronounced this feeling. In most cases, it would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the Partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out their identity sparsely over the expanse of this distance. As a result, somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence – strangely malleable. ~ Aanchal Malhotra

I know the constitution in Oregon was passed in 1859. Free expression of opinion. ~ Bill O'Reilly

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. ~ Michele Bachmann

She felt exhausted: her energy first spent wanting so sorely to return and then accepting the loss as final. As her old life in Okara was fast becoming just a story to be told, she too was becoming irrelevant, like an out-of-use currency, or an old train route, defunct. Her body became slightly bent over and the folds of her skin began to hang loose, like they had lost interest in life. And all like a misunderstanding, like someone your own, someone very close, had tricked you, surreptitiously moved the very roof from over your head. ~ Sakoon Singh

At the beginning of the World Series of 1947, I experienced a completely new emotion when the National Anthem was played. This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else. ~ Jackie Robinson

At the beginning of the year 1859 it was estimated that more than 120,000 native officers and soldiers had perished, and more than 200,000 civilian natives, who paid with their lives for their participation - often doubtful - in this insurrection. Terrible reprisals these; and perhaps, on that occasion, Mr. Gladstone had some reason on his side when he protested so energetically against them in Parliament. It was important, for the better understanding of our story, that the death-list on both sides should be given as above, to make the reader comprehend the unsatiated hatred which still remained in the hearts of the conquered, thirsting for vengeance, as well as in those of the conquerors, who, ten years afterwards, were still mourning the victims of Cawnpore and Lucknow. As ~ Jules Verne

Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries
slave of prejudice ... slave of religious fanaticism ... slave of barbarity and inhumanity. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

But the history of independent India has remained a field mostly untilled. If history is 'formally constituted knowledge of the past', then for the period since 1947 this knowledge practically does not exist. ~ Ramachandra Guha

Until the first petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil *was* oil. In Leviathan, a fine history of whaling, Eric Jay Dolin enumerates whale Phil's manifold applications: 'It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution.' In fact, its use as a lubricant impervious to extremes in temperature persisted well into the space age
NASA lubed its moon landers and other remotely operated vehicles with sperm whale oil until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986. ~ Sarah Vowell

In any case, Klossowski, mentioned again during Acéphale's sessional meeting of 25 July 1938, would later return to his opposition between Nietzsche and Bataille in a lecture given in 1941 at the end of a retreat in a Dominican monastery, 'Le Corps du néant', later printed in the first edition of his book Sade my Neighbour (1947) and which Bataille later told him he 'does not like'. Here Klossowski recapitulated the two stages in the evolution of Nietzsche's thought outlined in Löwith's essay 'Nietzsche and the doctrine of the Eternal Return', which he had reviewed in Acéphale 2:
1. Liberation from the Christian YOU MUST to achieve the I WANT of supra-nihilism;
2. Liberation from the I WANT to attain the I AM of superhumanity in the eternal return.
It is precisely in this 'cyclical movement', according to Klossowski, that man 'takes on the immeasurable responsibility of the death of God'. Furthermore, he associates Bataille's negation of God with the negation of utility upon which the notion of expenditure was founded, and hence the source of his 'absolute political nihilism'. His conclusion, however, was a little more ambiguous: 'In his desire to relive the Nietzschean experience of the death of God [...] he did not have the privilege [...] of suffering Nietzsche's punishment: the delirium that transfigures the executioner into a victim [...] To be guilty or not to be, that is his dilemma. His acephality expresses only the unease of a guilt in which conscience ~ Georges Bataille

Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter's clothes. Or it'll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don't want to be here and they don't want to be there. They can't be here and I can't be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood. ~ Sakoon Singh

Since 1857 we know what we are capable of,
And Since 1947 we know what is at Stake. ~ Ankit Mishra

...Showing that they descend from common parents, and consequently must be ranked as varieties. ~ Charles Darwin

At Columbia University, the semester had already started in the first week of September and here I was, in the middle of October. I arrived in New York on October 17, 1947. Crossing the Atlantic took one week. Most of the passengers were Americans of English, Irish or Scottish descent, who had visited their families, for the first time after the war. The food on the boat consisted mostly of fish, all kinds of seafood that I had never eaten before, that I knew only from reading and from dictionaries. Whether it was turbot or cod or hake or even salmon - everything was boiled and tasteless. ~ Pearl Fichman

illustrated magazine: Nekrasov, 'the people's poet' (see note 15), was a contributor to Spark, an illustrated satirical journal published in Petersburg from 1859 to 1873. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky