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Abraham Joshua Heschel

Abraham Joshua Heschel l (11 January 1907 – 23 December 1972) was a Polish-born American rabbi, considered by many to be one of the most significant Jewish theologians of the 20th century.

Quotes

 * The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite.
 * "The Meaning of Jewish Existence" in The Torch (1950)

 * He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love, knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light. The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteria of vanity, the orgies of arrogance. For it is not the I that trembles alone, it is not a stir out of my soul but an eternal flutter that sweeps us all. No code, no law, even the law of God, can set a pattern for all of our living. It is not enough to have the right ideas. For the will, not reason, has the executive power in the realm of living. The will is stronger than reason and does not blindly submit to the dictates of rational principles. Reason may force the mind to accept intellectually its conclusions. Yet what is the power that will make me love to do what I ought to do?
 * Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 24 : The Great Yearning; The Yearning for Spiritual Living

 * The greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The call for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future but perpetual presence. He has planted in us the seed of eternal life. The world to come is not only a hereafter but also a here-now.
 * Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 26 : The Pious Man; Our Destiny is to Aid

 * We do not step out of the world when we pray; we merely see the world in a different setting. The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
 * Man's Quest For God : Studies In Prayer And Symbolism (1954), p. 7; Heschel would later use this analogy in several minor variations in other writings.

 * Pagans exalt sacred things, the Prophets extol sacred deeds.
 * The Earth Is The Lord's : And The Sabbath (1963), p. 14

 * We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes. … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
 * Telegram to President John F. Kennedy (16 June 1963)

 * The Biblical words about the genesis of heaven and earth are not words of information but words of appreciation. The story of creation is not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being.
 * The Wisdom of Heschel (1970), p. 150

The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the Prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
 * There is immense silent agony in the world, and the task of man is to be a voice for the plundered poor, to prevent the desecration of the soul and the violation of our dream of honesty.
 * "The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement" (1972); later included in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (1996)

 * Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.
 * As quoted in The World's Religions (1976) by Sir James Norman Dalrymple Anderson, p. 61

 * Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.
 * "The Light of God" in I Asked for Wonder : A Spiritual Anthology (1983) edited by Samuel H. Dresner, p. 20

 * The focus of prayer is not the self. … It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God. ... Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost.
 * As quoted in Judaism (1998) by Arthur Hertzberg, p. 300
 * Variant: "It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the act of prayer."

 * We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.
 * As quoted in SQ : Connecting with Our Spiritual Intelligence (2000) by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, p. 15

The Sabbath (1951)

 * There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.
 * Prologue p. 3

 * In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.
 * Prologue p. 5

 * The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments
 * Prologue p. 6

 * Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.
 * Prologue p. 6

 * Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn.
 * Prologue p. 8

 * The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.
 * Prologue p. 10

The Prophets (1962)

 * One must forget many clichés in order to behold a single image. Insight is the beginning of perceptions to come rather than the extension of perceptions gone by. Conventional seeing, operating as it does with patterns and coherences, is a way of seeing the present in the past tense. Insight is an attempt to think in the present. … Insight is knowledge at first sight.
 * Introduction

 * The striking surprise is that prophets of Israel were tolerated at all by their people. To the patriots, they seemed pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to the men in authority, seditious.
 * Volume 1, p. 19

 * To Hosea, marriage is the image of the relationship of God and Israel. ... Idolatry is adultery.
 * Volume 1, p. 50

 * Why were so few voices raised in the ancient world in protest against the ruthlessness of man? Why are human beings so obsequious, ready to kill and ready to die at the call of kings and chieftains? Perhaps it is because they worship might, venerate those who command might, and are convinced that it is by force that man prevails. The splendor and the pride of kings blind the people.
 * "The idolatry of might," Volume 1, p. 159

 * "The gods are on the side of the stronger," according to Tacitus. The prophets proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker. God's special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan.
 * Volume 1, p. 167

 * The prophets never taught that God and history are one, or that whatever happens below reflects the will of God above. Their vision is of man defying God, and God seeking man to reconcile with him.
 * p. 168

 * It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final.
 * Volume 1, p. 181

 * The opposite of freedom is not determinism, but hardness of heart. Freedom presupposes openness of heart, of mind, of eye and ear.
 * Volume 1, p. 191

 * Freedom is not a natural disposition, but God's precious gift to man. Those in whom viciousness becomes second-nature, those in whom brutality is linked with haughtiness, forfeit their ability and therefore their right to receive that gift. Hardening of the heart is the suspension of freedom.
 * Volume 1, p. 191

Who Is Man? (1965)

 * Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought, refusing to take anything for granted, to regard anything as final. It is our honest response to the grandeur and mystery of reality our confrontation with that which transcends the given.
 * Ch. 4

 * It would be a contradiction in terms to assume that the attainment of transcendent meaning consists in comprehending a notion. Transcendence can never be an object of possession or of comprehension. Yet man can relate himself and be engaged to it. He must know how to court meaning in order to be engaged in it. Love of ultimate meaning is not self-centered but rather a concern to transcend the self.
 * Ch. 4

 * Ultimate meaning is not grasped once and for all in the form of timeless idea, acquired once and for all, securely preserved in conviction. It is not simply given. It comes upon us as an intimation that comes and goes. What is left behind is a memory, and a commitment to that memory. Our words do not describe it, our tools do not wield it. But sometimes it seems as if our very being were its description, its secret tool.
 * Ch. 4

This may be the vocation of man: to say "Amen" to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.
 * The anchor of meaning resides in an abyss, deeper than the reach of despair. Yet the abyss is not not infinite; its bottom may suddenly be discovered within the confines of a human heart or under the debris of might doubts.
 * Ch. 4

Thought is not bred apart from experience or from inner surroundings. Thinking is living, and no thought is bred in an isolated cell in the brain. No thought is an island.
 * The sense of meaning is not born in ease and sloth. It comes after bitter trials, disappointments in the glitters, foundering, strandings. It is the marrow from the bone. There is no manna in our wilderness.
 * Ch. 5

 * Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
 * Ch. 5

 * Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one's role in relation to all other beings. For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving, depriving.
 * Ch. 5

 * There are two primary ways in which mans relates himself to the world that surround him: manipulation and appreciation. In the first way he sees in what surrounds him things to be handled, forces to be managed, objects to be put to use. In the second way he sees in what surrounds him things to be acknowledged, understood, valued or admired.
 * Ch. 5

 * Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence.
 * Ch. 5

 * Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.
 * Ch. 5

It is a submissive world that modern man is in the habit of sensing, and he seems content with the riches of thinghood.''' Space is the limit of his ambitions, and there is little he desires besides it. Correspondingly, mans consciousness recedes more and more in the process of reducing his status to that of a consumer and manipulator. He has enclosed himself in the availability of things, with the shutters down and no sight of what is beyond availability.
 * As a result of letting the drive for power dominate existence, man is bound to lose his sense for nature's otherness. Nature becomes a utensil, an object to be used. '''The world ceases to be that which is and becomes that which is available.
 * Ch. 5
 * Exclusive manipulation results in the dissolution of awareness of all transcendence. Promise becomes a pretext, God becomes a symbol, truth a fiction, loyalty tentative, the holy a mere convention. Mans very existence devours all transcendence. Instead of facing the grandeur of the cosmos, he explains it away; instead of beholding, he takes a picture; instead of hearing a voice, he tapes it. He does not see what he is able to face. There is a suspension of mans sense of the holy. His mind is becoming a wall instead of being a door open to what is larger than the scope of his comprehension. He locks himself out of the world by reducing all reality to mere things and all relationship to mere manipulation. Transcendence is not an article of faith. It is what we come upon immediately when standing face to face with reality.
 * Ch. 5

Things are both available and immune. We penetrate their physical givenness, we cannot intuit their secret. We measure what they exhibit, we know how they function, but we also know that we do not know what they are, what they stand for, what they imply.
 * The perceptibility of things is not the end of their being. Their surface is available to our tools, their depth is immune to our inquisitiveness.
 * Ch. 5

 * Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.
 * Ch. 5

 * The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
 * Ch. 5

Existence without transcendence is a way of living where things become idols and idols become monsters. Denial of transcendence contradicts the essential truth of being human. Its roots can be traced either to stolidity of self-contentment or to superciliousness of contempt, to moods rather than to comprehensive awareness of the totality and mystery of being. Denial of transcendence which claims to unveil the truth of being is an inner contradiction, since the truth of being is not within being or within our consciousness of being but rather a truth that transcends our being.
 * Authentic existence involves exaltation, sensitivity to the holy, awareness of indebtedness.
 * Ch. 5

'''Happiness is not a synonym for self-satisfaction, complacency, or smugness. Self-satisfaction breeds futility and despair.''' Self-satisfaction is the opiate of fools.
 * Essential to education for being human is to cultivate a sense for the inexpedient, to disclose the fallacy of absolute expediency. God's voice may sound feeble to our conscience. Yet there is a divine cunning in history which seems to prove that the wages of absolute expediency is disaster.
 * Ch. 5

 * New insight begins when satisfaction comes to an end, when all that has been seen, said, or done looks like a distortion. … Man's true fulfillment depends on communion with that which transcends him.
 * Ch. 5

Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.
 * In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being, faced with the marvel of the moment. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement.
 * Ch. 5

 * Being as we know it, the world as we come upon it, stands before us as otherness, remoteness. For all our efforts to exploit or comprehend it, it remains evasive, mysteriously immune. Being is unbelievable.
 * Ch. 5

 * Our concern with environment cannot be reduced to what can be used, to what can be grasped. Environment includes not only the inkstand and the blotting paper, but also the impenetrable stillness in the air, the stars, the clouds, the quiet passing of time, the wonder of my own being. I am an end as well as a means, and so is the world: an end as well as a means. My view of the world and my understanding of the self determine each other. The complete manipulation of the world results in the complete instrumentalization of the self.
 * Ch. 5

We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement. All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it.
 * The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face.
 * Ch. 5

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple: to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
 * Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
 * Ch. 5

'''Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith. ''' Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the world becomes a market place for you. '''The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.'''
 * Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition, faith is attachment to the meaning beyond the mystery.
 * Ch. 5

Holy, holy, holy — indicate the transcendence and distance of God. The whole earth is full of His glory — the immanence or presence of God. The outwardness of the world communicates something of the indwelling greatness of God. The glory is neither an aesthetic nor physical quality. It is sensed in grandeur, but it is more than grandeur. It is a presence or the effulgence of a presence. The whole earth is full of His glory, but we do not perceive it; it is within our reach but beyond our grasp. And still it is not entirely unknown to us.
 * In his great vision Isaiah perceives the voice of the seraphim even before he hears the voice of the Lord. What is it that the seraphim reveal? "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory."
 * Ch. 5

Standing face to face with the world, we often sense a presence which surpasses our ability to comprehend. The world is too much with us. It is crammed with marvel. There is a glory, an aura, that lies about all beings, a spiritual setting of reality. To the religious man it is as if things stood with their backs to him, their faces turned to God, as if the glory of things consisted in their being an object of divine care.
 * In English the phrase that a person has "a presence" is hard to define. There are people whose being here and now is felt, even though they do not display themselves in action and speech. They have a "presence." … Of a person whose outwardness communicates something of his indwelling power or greatness, whose soul is radiant and conveys itself without words, we say he has presence.
 * Ch. 5

 * Being is both presence and absence. God had to conceal His presence in order to bring the world into being. He had to make His absence possible in order to make room for the world's presence. Coming into being brought along denial and defiance, absence, oblivion and resistance.
 * Ch. 5

Accustomed to think in terms of space, the expression "being points beyond itself" may be taken to denote a higher point in space. What is meant, however, is a higher category than being: the power of maintaining being.
 * Being points beyond itself.
 * Ch. 5

Nature, the sum of its laws, may be sufficient to explain in its own terms how facts behave within nature; it does not explain why they behave at all. Some tacit assumptions of the theory of insufficiency remain problematic.
 * Being is either open to, or dependent on, what is more than being, namely, the care for being, or it is a cul-de-sac, to be explained in terms of self-sufficiency. The weakness of the first possibility is in its reference to a mystery; the weakness of the second possibility is in its pretension to offer a rational explanation.
 * Ch. 5

 * The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
 * Ch. 5

Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.
 * Being is transcended by a concern for being.
 * Ch. 5

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

 * The Torah has not imposed upon Israel a tyranny of the spirit. It does not violate human nature. On the contrary, the road to the sacred leads through the secular. The spiritual rests upon the carnal, like "the Spirit that hovers over the face of the water. " Jewish living means living according to a system of checks and balances. We are not asked anything that cannot be responded to. We are not told: Love thy enemy, but Do not hate him, and positively: "If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again." (Exodus 23:4).
 * "No TIme for Neutrality", p. 77

 * The issue of prayer is not prayer; the issue of prayer is God. One cannot pray unless he has faith in his own ability to accost the infinite, merciful, eternal God.
 * "No TIme for Neutrality", p. 107

 * Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
 * "No Religion is an Island", p. 264

The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster.' To pray is to recollect passionately'' the perpetual urgency of this vital question.
 * Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. '''To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be?
 * "No Religion is an Island", p. 264

Yet prayer can happen only when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. '''Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings. The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait.''' Uttered faith must come out as a surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy. Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility.
 * One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words.
 * "No Religion is an Island", p. 264

 * Religion is critique of all satisfaction. Its end is joy, but its beginning is discontent, detesting boasts, smashing idols. It began in Ur Kasdim, in the seat of a magnificent civilization. Yet Abraham said, "No," breaking the idols, breaking away. And so every one of us must begin by saying no to all visible, definable entities pretending to be triumphant, ultimate. The ultimate is a challenge, not an assertion. Dogmas are allusions, not descriptions.
 * "No Religion is an Island", p. 264

 * This is the predicament of man. All souls descend a ladder form heaven to the world. Then the ladders are taken away. Once they are in this world, they are called upon from heaven to rise, to come back. It is a call that goes out again and again. Each soul seeks the ladder in order to ascend above; but the ladder cannot be found. Most people make no effort to ascend, claiming, how can one rise to heaven without a ladder? However, there are souls which resolve to leap upwards without a ladder. So they jump and fall down. They jump and fall down, until they stop. Wise people think that since no ladder exists, there must be another way. We must face the challenge and act. Be what it may, one must leap until God, in His mercy, makes exultation come about.
 * "No Religion is an Island", p. 266

Primitive man's humble ear was alert to the inwardness of the world, while the modern man is presumptuous enough to claim that he has the sole monopoly over soul and spirit, that he is the only thing alive in the universe. … But there is a dawn of wonder and surprise in our souls, when the things that surround us suddenly slip off the triteness with which we have endowed them, and their strangeness opens like a gap between them and our mind, a gap that no words can fill. … What is the incense of self-esteem to him who tastes in all things the flavor of the utterly unknown, the fragrance of what is beyond our senses? There are neither skies nor oceans, neither birds nor trees — there are only signs of what can never be perceived. And all power and beauty are mere straws in the fire of a pure man's vision.
 * It seems as though we have arrived at a point in history, closest to the instincts and remotest from ideals, where the self stands like a wall between God and man. It is the period of a divine eclipse. We sail the seas, we count the stars, we split the atom, but never ask: Is there nothing but a dead universe and our reckless curiosity?
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 329

 * He who has ever been confronted with the ultimate and has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced, awaits a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for salvation. For things are not mute. The stillness is full of demands. Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 330

Such alertness grows from the sense for the meaningful, for the marvel of matter, for the core of thoughts. It is begotten in passionate love for the significance of all reality, in devotion to the ultimate meaning which is only God. By our very existence we are in dire need of meaning, and anything that calls for meaning is always an allusion to Him. We live by the certainty that we are not dust in the wind, that our life is related to the ultimate, the meaning of all meanings. And the system of meanings that permeates the universe is like an endless flight of stairs. Even when the upper stairs are beyond our sight, we constantly rise toward the distant goal.
 * Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 330

 * Instead of indulging in jealousy, greed, in relishing themselves, there are men who keep their hearts alert to the stillness in which time rolls on and leaves us behind. … those who are open to the wonder will not miss it. Faith is found in solicitude for faith, in an inner care for the wonder that is everywhere.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 331

 * Only straight discovering in the nearest stone or tree, sound or thought, the shelter of His often desecrated goodness, the treasury of His waiting form man's heart to affiliate with His will — this is the rapture of faith. It is an echo to a pleading voice, a reply to the inconceivable in all beauty.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 331

 * Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man. It is not a psychical quality, something that exists in the mind only, but a force from the beyond.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 331

 * Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but the endless, tameless pilgrimage of hearts.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 332

 * Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind's desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 332

'''Faith implies no denial of evil, no disregard of danger, no whitewashing of the abominable. He whose heart is given to faith is mindful of the obstructive and awry, of the sinister and pernicious. It is God's strange dominion over both good and evil on which he relies. … Faith is not a mechanical insurance but a dynamic, personal act, flowing between the heart of man and the love of God.
 * '''He whose soul is charged with awareness of God earns his inner livelihood by a passionate desire to pour his life into the eternal wells of love. … We do not live for our own sake. Life would be preposterous if not for the love it confers.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 333

 * Not the individual man nor a single generation by its own power can erect the bridge that leads to God. Faith is the achievement of many generations, and effort accumulated over many centuries. … There is a collective memory of God in the human spirit, and it is this memory which is the main source of our faith.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 333

 * Faith is not a thing that comes into being out of nothing. It originates in an event. In the spiritual vacancy of life something may suddenly occur that is like the lifting of a veil at the horizon of knowledge. A simple episode may open sight of the eternal. A shift of conceptions, boisterous like a tempest of soft as a breeze may swerve a mind for an instant or forever. For God is not wholly silent and man is not always deaf. God's willingness to call men to His service and man's responsiveness to the divine indications in things and events are for faith what sun and soil are for the plant.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 333

 * The riches of the soul are stored up in its memory. this is the test of character, not whether a man follows the daily fashion, but whether the past is alive in his present.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 333

 * Only those who are spiritually imitators, only people who are afraid to be grateful and too weak to be loyal, have nothing but the present moment. The mark of nobility is inherited possession. To a noble person it is a holy joy to remember, an overwhelming thrill to be grateful, while to a person whose character is neither rich nor strong, gratitude is a most painful sensation. The secret of wisdom is never to get lost in a momentary mood or passion, never to forget a friendship over a momentary grievance, never to lose sight of the lasting values over a transitory episode.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 334

 * Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 334

 * There are many creeds but only one faith. Creeds may change, develop, and grow flat, while the substance of faith remains the same in all ages. The overgrowth of creed may bring about the disintegration of that substance. The proper relation is a minimum of creed and a maximum of faith.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 335 - 336

 * In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men of faith He is the light.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 337.
 * Heschel made similar statements in earlier writings: The great insight is not attained when we ponder or infer the beyond from the here. In the realm of the ineffable, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.
 * Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy of Religion (1951)

 * Faith is something that comes out of the soul. It is not an information that is absorbed but an attitude, existing prior to the formulation of any creed.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 337

Faith is not the miniature of thinking but its model, not its shadow but its root.''' It is a spiritual force in man, not dealing with the given, concrete limited, but directed upon the transcendent. It is the spring of our creative actions.
 * Reason is not the measure of all things, not the all-inclusive power in the inner life of man. The powers of will and emotion, the realm of the subconscious lie beyond the scope of knowledge. '''The rush of reason is an effort of limited strength.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 337

 * All action is vicarious faith.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 338

 * Reality is not exhausted by knowledge. Inaccessible to research are the ultimate facts. All scientific conclusions are based on axioms, all reasoning depends ultimately upon faith. Faith is virgin thinking, preceding all transcendent knowledge. To believe is to abide at the extremities of spirit.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 338

There is no conspiracy against reason, no random obstinacy, no sluggish inertia of mind or smug self-assurance entrenched behind the walls of believing. Faith does not detach a man from thinking, it does not suspend reason. It is opposed not to knowledge but to backwardness and dullness, to indifferent aloofness to the essence of living. … '''It is a distortion to regard reason and faith as alternatives. Reason is a necessary coefficient of faith. Faith without explication by reason is mute, reason without faith is deaf.''' There can be a true symbiosis of reason and faith.
 * There is neither advance nor service without faith. Nobody can rationally explain why he should sacrifice his life and his happiness for the sake of the good. The conviction that I must obey the ethical imperatives is not derived from logical argument but originates from an intuitive certitude, in a certitude of faith.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 338

 * The account of our experiences, the record of debit and credit, is reflected in the amount of trust or distrust we display towards life and humanity.  There are those who maintain that the good is within our reach everywhere; you have but to stretch out your arms and you will grasp it. But there are others who, intimidated by fraud and ugliness, sense scorn and ambushes everywhere and misgive all things to come. Those who trust develop a finer sense for the good, even at the hight cost of blighted hopes. Charmed by the spell of love, faith is, as it were, imposed upon their heart.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 338

 * Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 339

 * Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 339

 * To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?
 * "The Holy Dimension", p. 341

(2008)

 * Quotes of Heschel from The Zookeeper's Wife : A War Story (2008) by Diane Ackerman

 * Man is a messenger who forgot the message.

 * The search of reason ends at the shore of the known.

 * The stone is broken, but the words are alive.

 * To be human is a problem, and the problem expresses itself in anguish.

 * I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.

 * In my youth, growing up in a Jewish milieu, there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique.

Quotes about Heschel

 * If there is one thing that captures popular understanding of the Jewish community’s relationship to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s an image from Selma, 1965. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel links arms with a line of activists that include Rev. King, a shoulder’s breadth away, on their historic march to Montgomery. Heschel’s comments afterward have taken on a similarly iconic status: “I felt my feet were praying.”
 * Eric Herschthal, in "King And The Jews — Beyond Heschel" in The Jewish Week (11 January 2011)

title: Abraham Joshua Heschel


text:
Henry Morton Stanley

Sir Henry Morton Stanley (28 January 1841 – 10 May 1904), a Welsh-born reporter for the New York Herald, went to Africa in search of missionary and explorer David Livingstone. He was later a British Member of Parliament. He is mainly known for his search for the source of the Nile, work he undertook as an agent of King Leopold II of Belgium, which enabled the occupation of the Congo Basin region.

Quotes

 * Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
 * Spoken on 10 November 1871 in Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. There were no other white men known to be in the vicinity. As the two had not been formally introduced, it was a proper way to address Livingstone without committing a breach of etiquette.

 * Only by proving that we are superior to the savages, not only through our power to kill them but through our entire way of life, can we control them as they are now, in their present stage; it is necessary for their own well-being, even more than ours.
 * Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 ISBN 9789463962094 Stanley writes this on his first expidition commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium after describing with horror the horrible scenes of atrocities and cannibalism that take place in Congo.

 * You can find it on almost any tree. As we made our way through the forest, it was literally raining rubber juice. Our clothes were full of it. The Congo has so many tributaries that a well-organized company can easily extract a few tons of rubber per year here. You only have to sail up such a river and the branches with rubber hang almost up to your ship.
 * Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 ISBN 9789463962094 Stanley Points out to King Leopold II Of Belgium that the Congo free State which was a loss-making endeavor at that time that rubber extraction has a possibility to make the colony profitable.

 * The barge was an invention of my own. It was 40 feet long, 6 feet beam, and 30 inches deep, of Spanish cedar 3/8 inches thick.
 * Trough the dark continent, Henry Morton Stanley, 1878 New York, Quoted from Robert G.Mc Gregor, Consul General of the USA in the Belgian Congo., Belgian Congo American Survey 1957-58, United States (1957).

 * I was received with an overwhelming display of military and civilian tributes, all the way to the royal palace where I was to stay, troops were lined up behind which enthusiastic people were chanting their viva, it seemed to me that a major change had come in the Belgian public opinion on the importance of the Congo, when I first went there, the Belgian newspapers spouted nothing but criticism, they were completely dumbfounded, the king was recognized as the great benefactor of the nation.
 * Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 ISBN 9789463962094, Stanley returns from his first trans-Africa exploration in 1877.

 * We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns, and 3 or 4 score villages.
 * King Leopold's Ghost diary 1875.

 * I desire some generous and opulent philanthropist, who shall permit me a force for commerce in central Africa.
 * King Leopold's Ghost diary 1875.

 * As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded one that, apart from God, my life was but a bubble of air, and it bade me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and loneliness.
 * (Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley 1909, p. 254)

 * Religion acts as a moral gardener, to weed out, or suppress, evil tendencies, which, like weeds: grow.
 * (Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley 1909, p. 254)

 * Though many illusions are of a character we should gladly cherish, yet the sooner we lose some of them, the sooner we gain the power of seeing clearly into things. The one who possesses least has the best chance of becoming wise. The man who travels, and reflects, loses illusions faster than he who stays at home.
 * (Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley 1909, p. 523)

 * Socialism is a return to primitive conditions.
 * (Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley 1909, p. 530)

 * [The whole Congo without—the lower Congo] isn't worth a penny.
 * Quoted by Rolf Italiaander,The new leaders of Africa Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall 1961, p. 150.

 * I do not believe in the accusations made in England against King Leopold II, the Congo and I do not share the feelings of those who inspire them. No state would be willing to spend the money spent by the King of the Belgians and Belgium in the most dark places of darkest Africa. When I consider the few years that have passed since the Congo became a state, I believe that the work accomplished is a great honor to Belgium. You can be sure that the King of the Belgians is interested in every detail of his administration. I do not claim that he can monitor all the actions of each individual, what Government could? The stories of the atrocities that have been spread are almost all gossip. The English note of month of August is based on biased reports. I am convinced that Leopold II has been doing his best to prevent any crime in the Congo, he is not responsible for the crimes anymore that could be committed there than those that are sometimes committed in Belgium. The reason of all these slanders? Jealousy! The Congo is doing better than any other African state. Those stories of atrocities will not stop, they will persist with the little basis they had, this was never anything but pure invention.
 * Pierre Vercauteren: A king unjustly maligned. (Page 19) Sir Henry Morton Stanley in an interview given to  Petit Bleu  on 13 November 1903.

 * I am certain that not one of the countries who are invited by the newspapers to put itself in its (Belgium's) place would have been able to do better.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * The recitals of atrocities and bad administrations which have of late been spread about are almost all, if not all, pure reports.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * To-day, with its forests pierced and open, its routes, its stations, it is in advance of all other African States. Take the French Congo, the German East Africa, Portuguese West Africa, and compare them. The Congo State prospers in a greater degree than any other part of the black continent.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * When I was on the Congo and accused a tribe of cannibalism, it replied : "We are not cannibals, but our neighbors are." The neighboring tribe said : "It is not we, it is the next tribe that you will meet" ; and that tribe referred us on to the next, and so on continually. They seemed to be ashamed of their cannibalism. They concealed it. Yet there was no doubt as to the existence of the practice. It was very seldom that I could discover the guilty. How, then, in recruiting its troops, was the Congo to distinguish the black cannibals from those who were not cannibals?
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * They discharge their mission under the most difficult conditions, and I Relieve that I may assert that, from the Governor-General down to the humblest official, there is not one guilty of cruelty.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * I had on the Congo under my orders three hundred men, English, Germans, Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians. I found no difference between them. All did their best according to their means. All were in the course of duty the object of some charge. I examined the charges minutely and always found them to be without foundation. That did not prevent these stories reaching Banana, and from there, Europe.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * England would not have managed the Congo better than King Leopold has done if she had been mistress of it, as she might have become in 1877.
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * I crossed Africa from East to West and from West to East, and I never saw any excesses committed. I do not think that from this point of view there is a single sovereign living who has done so much for humanity as Leopold II."
 * Brief of Henry I. Kowalsky, of the New York bar, attorney and counsellor to Leopold II.

 * I regret to inform you that Baruti, the black boy who was with me in England, deserted here the night before last, taking with him two Winchester rifles, my little pocket revolver, and pedometer. With him went Mburra and Feruzi, boys belonging respectively to the captain and engineer of the ' Stanley.' They took with them a couple of Remingtons and ammunition pouches. You will have fifty-three guns with you when you come up. If you had ah interpreter — if he is a boy from Upper Congo, secure him — you might be able by menace to get those guns back. I do not care for the lads. Of course the natives will strenuously deny — they always do so — but it is an ab- solute certainty that the boys took a canoe from our landing place. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence proving this has been collected after their departure. Your people are not first class, yet, if these guns are not delivered consult with Captain Schogestrom what you had best do. Do not act precipitately or rashly. Offer to purchase the guns for anything they need. But do not land your people in the village, nor do not camp opposite. There is nice camping ground above the Baroko village at the confluence of a creek. Put the creek between your camp and the natives. Keep a good look out, that is all. Give my compliments to Bonny, and believe me anxious for your early arrival here as my lieutenant.
 * My life with stanley's rear guard, By Herbert Ward Charles L. Webster company. 1981.

 * Last came the famous Hamed bin Mohammed, alias Tippu Tib, or, as it is variously pronounced by the natives, Tipo Tib, or Tibbu Tib. He was a tall, black-bearded man, of negro complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick in his movements, a picture of energy and strength. He had a fine, intelligent face, with a nervous twitching of the eyes, and gleaming white and perfectly formed teeth. lie was attended by a large retinue of young Arabs, who looked up to him as chief, and a score of Wangwana and Wanyamwezi followers, whom he had led over thousands of miles through Africa. With the air of a well bred Arab, and almost courtier-like in his man- ner, ho welcomed me to Mwana Mamba*s village, and his slaves being ready at hand with mat and bolster, we reclined vis-a-vis, while a buzz of admiration of his style was perceptible from the on-lookers. After regarding him for a few minutes, I came to the conclusion that this Arab was a remarkable man — the most remarkable man I had met among Arabs, Wa-Swahili, and half-castes in Africa. He was neat in his person; his clothes were of spotless white; his fez cap brand new; his waist was incircled by a rich dowle; his dagger was splendid with silver filagree work; and his tout ensemhle was that of an Arab gentleman in very comfortable circumstances.
 * Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, Page 171 Stanley, in October 1876, on his journey through the Dark Continent on page 95 of the second volume.

 * I was interested the other day in making a curious calculation, which was, supposing that all the inhabitants of the Congo basin were simply to have one Sunday dress each, how many yards of Manchester cloth would be required, and the amazing number was 320,000,000 yards, just for one Sunday dress. Proceeding still further with these figures, I found that two Sunday dresses and four everyday dresses would in one year amount to 3,840,000,000 yards, which, at 2d. per yard, would be of the value of £16,000,000. The more I pondered upon these things, I discovered that I could not limit these stores of cotton cloth to day dresses. I would have to provide for night dresses also, and these would consume 160,000,000 yards. Then the grave clothes come into mind, and, as a poor lunatic who burned Bolobo Station destroyed 30,000 yards of cloth in order that he should not be cheated out of a respectable burial, I really feared for a time that the millions would get beyond measurable calculation. However, putting such accidents aside, I estimate that, if my figures of population are approximately correct, 2,000,000 die every year, and to bury these decently, and according to the custom of those who possess cloth, 16,000,000 yards will be required, while the 40,000 chiefs will require an average of 100 yards each, or 4,000,000 yards. I regarded these figures with great satisfaction, and I was about to close my remarks upon the millions of yards of cloth that Manchester would perhaps be required to produce, when I discovered that I had neglected to provide for the family wardrobe or currency chest, for you must know that in Lower Congo there is scarcely a family that has not a cloth fund of about a dozen pieces of about 24 yards each. This is a very important institution; otherwise how are the family necessities to be provided for? How are the fathers and mothers of families to go to market to buy greens, bread, oil, ground nuts, chickens, fish, and goats, and how is the petty trade to be conducted? How is ivory to be purchased, the gums, rubber, dye powders, gunpowder, copper slugs, guns, trinkets, knives, and swords to be bought without a supply of cloth? Now, 8,000,000 families at 300 yards each will require 2,400,000,000. You all know how perishable such currency must be; but if you sum up these several millions of yards, and value all of them at the average price of 2d. per yard, you will find that it will be possible for Manchester to create a trade, in the course of time, in cottons in the Congo basin, amounting in value to about £26,000,000 annually. I have said nothing about Rochdale savelist, or your own superior prints, your gorgeous handkerchiefs with their variegated patterns, your checks and striped cloths, your ticking and twills. I must satisfy myself with suggesting them; your own imagination will no doubt carry you to the limbo of immeasurable and incalculable millions.
 * Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, transmitted to congress, with the annual message of the President, December 8, 1885. Mr. Tisdel to Mr. Frelinghuysen, London, 23 November 1884. (Received 9 December.) Mr. Tisdel quotes Stanley's Address recently delivered before the members of the chamber of commerce in Manchester.

 * The Portuguese provinces are governed by men whom I hold to be animated with as sincere a hatred against the slave trade as any English or American philanthropist has shown. It would really be one of the riskiest undertakings for any slave trader to attempt to revive the slave trade on Portuguese territory today, either by sea or by land. It cannot be denied that there is some traffic on the frontiers of the colonies of Portugal by Portuguese subjects, when they succeed in escaping the surveillance of the authorities; however, it is essential to make a clear distinction between the African Portuguese and the European Portuguese.
 * International Conference of Brussels: 18 November 1889-2 July 1890, protocols and final act / Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Page 41. Finally, Mr. Stanley, the well-known traveller, on May 11, 1878, after crossing Africa, wrote from London to the secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in these terms:

 * What does the greatness of a monarch consist in? I fit is the extent of his territory, then the Emperor of Russia is the greatest of all. I fit is the splendour and power of military organization, then William II [of Germany] takes first place. But if royal greatness consists in the wisdom and goodness of a sovereign leading his people with the solicitude of a shepherd watching over his flock, then the greatest sovereign is your own.
 * Hochschild, A. (1998). King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. While the conference was still in session, Leopold invited Stanley to Belgium for a week. Stanley spoke to the delegates, and Leopold presented him with the Grand Cross of the Congo, arranged a banquet and a gala opera performance in his honor, and put him up in the gilt and scarlet rooms at the Royal Palace normally reserved for visiting royalty. In return, Stanley praised his host to the Belgians in a speech.

Quotes About Henry Morton Stanley

 * And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.
 * Colin Wilson in The Essential Colin Wilson, p. 216

 * Stanley shoots negroes as if they where monkeys.
 * King Leopold's Ghost Richard Burton, explorer 1887.

 * The terms of the treaties Stanley has made with native chiefs do not satisfy me. There must at least be an added article to the effect that they delegate to us their sovereign rights, the treaties must be as brief as possible and in a couple of articles must grant us everything.
 * Quote by King Leopold II of Belgium in: Maurice, Albert (1957). H.M. Stanley Unpublished Letters. London. p. 161.

 * His conduct will very soon give rise to a very lively debate; or it will justify itself and it will be very good to use; or he will fail to do so and, in this case, we will be glad to have no connection or relationship of any kind with a compromising ally.
 * All the King's Men' A search for the colonial ideas of some advisers and "accomplices" of Leopold II (1853-1892). (Hannes Vanhauwaert), 8. The Short Colonial Careers of Jules Greindl, Eugène père Beyens, Eugène Napoléon Beyens and Maximilien Strauch, A Skeptical Jules Greindl (1835-1917) Jules Greindl had heard rumors in Britain and Germany of Stanley's looting and killing in the interior of the African continent. ROEYKENS, A. The beginnings of African work, op citaat, 287. Zie ook: GUEBELS, L. Report on the case J. Greindl, 16.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Henry Morton Stanley


text:
Matsuo Bashō

Matsuo Bashō (松尾芭蕉, 1644 – 28 November 1694) was a major Japanese poet, primarily known for his achievements in the haikai no renga and haiku (as it would become known later) forms, and his poetic diaries.

Oku no Hosomichi (1702)
岩に滲み入る 蝉の声 iwa ni shimiiru semi no koe'' Stinging into the stones, The locusts' trill.'''
 * Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
 * Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and other writings, Boston, 2000, p. 3 (Translation: Sam Hamill)
 * 行く春や 鳥啼き魚の 目は泪
 * yuku haru ya tori naki uo no me wa namida
 * Spring passes and the birds cry out—tears in the eyes of fishes
 * Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and other writings, Boston, 2000, p. 4 (Translation: Sam Hamill)
 * Spring is passing by! Birds are weeping and the eyes Of fish fill with tears.
 * Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 23 (Translation: Donald Keene)
 * The passing; The birds weep and in the eyes Of fish there are tears.
 * Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 310 (Translation: Donald Keene)
 * 夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡
 * natsukusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato
 * The summer grasses— For many brave warriors The aftermath of dreams.
 * Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 316 (Translation: Donald Keene)
 * The summer grasses— Of brave soldiers' dreams The aftermath.
 * Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 87 (Translation: Donald Keene)
 * Also: Classical Japanese Database, Translation #222
 * 静けさや
 * ''shizukesaya
 * '''How still it is!
 * Donald Keene, World Within Walls: Japanese Literature of the Pre-Modern Era, 1600-1867, New York, 1999, p. 89 (Translation: Donald Keene)

Individual poems
我は飯食ふ 男かな ware wa meshi kû otoko kana'' Who eats his breakfast, Gazing at morning nothing.'''
 * 朝顔に
 * ''asagao ni
 * '''I am that one person
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #174 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth)

京なつかしや 時鳥 kyou natsukashi ya hototogisu''
 * 京にても
 * ''kyou nitemo
 * Even in Kyōto— hearing the cuckoo's cry— I long for Kyōto
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #55 (Translation: Robert Hass)
 * Bird of time – in Kyoto, pining for Kyoto.
 * Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 43 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)

蛙飛び込む 水の音 kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto'' the frog plunges into the sound of water
 * 古池や
 * ''furu ike ya
 * The old pond: A frog jumps in,— The sound of the water.
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #64 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth)
 * '''At the ancient pond

 * (Translation: Sam Hamill)
 * Old pond, leap-splash – a frog.
 * Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 58 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
 * Breaking the silence Of an ancient pond, A frog jumped into water – A deep resonance.
 * Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, London, 1966, p. 9 (Translation: Nobuyuki Yuasa)

keshiki wa miezu semi no koe''
 * やがて死ぬ けしきは見えず 蝉の声
 * ''yagate shinu
 * Soon to die yet showing no sign the cicada's voice
 *

夢は枯野を かけ廻る yume wa kareno wo kake-meguru'' my dreams wander the withered fields.''' My dreams roam On a withered moor.'''
 * 旅に病で
 * ''tabi ni yande
 * '''Sick on a journey,
 * Bashō's last poem, written while he was dying of a stomach illness. (Translation: Robert Hass)
 * Sick on a journey – over parched fields dreams wander on.
 * Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 81 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
 * '''Travelling, sick
 * (Unknown translator)
 * Reported as Basho's death poem.

Statements

 * 見るところ花にあらずと云ふことなし、 思ふところ月にあらずと云ふことなし.
 * Miru tokoro hana ni arazu to iu koto nashi, omou tokoro tsuki ni arazu to iu koto nashi
 * There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; There is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #172 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth)

 * 古人の跡を求めず、 古人の求めたるの所を求めよ.
 * kojin no ato wo motomezu, kojin no motometaru no tokoro wo motome yo
 * Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought.
 * from 「柴門の辞」"Words by a Brushwood Gate" (also translated as "The Rustic Gate") (Unknown translator)

 * さびは句の色なり. 閑寂なる句をいふにあらず. たとへば、老人の甲冑をたいし戦場に働き、錦繍をかざり御宴に侍りても、老の姿有るがごとし.
 * sabi wa ku no iro nari. kanjaku naru ku wo iu ni arazu. tatoeba, roujin no katchuu wo taishi senjou ni hataraki, kinshuu wo kazari goen ni haberitemo, oi no sugata aru ga gotoshi.
 * Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #42 (Translation: Robert Hass)

 * It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words: Who mourns makes grief his master. Who drinks makes pleasure his master.
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #41 of a Saga Diary excerpt (Translation: Robert Hass)

 * The fact that Saigyo composed a poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master.
 * Classical Japanese Database, Translation #41 of a Saga Diary excerpt (Translation: Robert Hass)

 * My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.
 * Genjūan no Fu ("Prose Poem on the Unreal Dwelling") in Donald Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, p. 374 (Translation: Donald Keene)

 * The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.
 * Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)

 * He who creates three to five haiku poems during a lifetime is a haiku poet. He who attains to completes ten is a master.
 * Matsuo Bashō, Collected Haiku Theory, eds. T. Komiya & S. Yokozawa, Iwanami, 1951 (Unknown translator)

title: Matsuo Bashō


text:
Arthur Ransome

Arthur Michell Ransome (January 18, 1884 – June 3, 1967) was a British children's author and journalist. Ransome is most famous for his Swallows and Amazons series of novels named after the first book in the series.

Quotes

 * Houses, are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.
 * Racundra's First Cruise (Chapter 1), 1923

 * BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.
 * Swallows and Amazons (Chapter 1), 1930

 * They found, like many explorers before them, that somehow, in their absence, they had got into trouble at home.
 * Swallowdale (Chapter 4), 1931

 * When a thing's done, it's done, and if it's not done right, do it differently next time.
 * Swallowdale (Chapter 8), 1931

 * "Only, the beastly Arctic won't freeze,"
 * Winter Holiday (Chapter 3), 1933

 * Softly, at first, as if it hardly meant it, the snow began to fall.
 * Winter Holiday (Chapter 5), 1933

 * A pigeon a day keeps the natives away
 * Pigeon Post Title page and Chapter 4), 1936

 * Grab a chance and you won't be sorry for a might-have-been.
 * We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (Title page and Chapter 2), 1937

 * A lot of things were lucky," said Daddy, and suddenly, while they were walking along, brought his hand down on John's shoulder and gave it a bit of a squeeze. "You'll be a seaman yet, my son."   And John, for one dreadful moment, felt that something was going wrong with his eyes. A sort of wetness, and hotness... Partly salt... Pleased though he was, he found himself biting his lower lip pretty hard, and looking the other way.
 * We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (Chapter 23), 1937

 * She's got a rum job, but she knows how to do it, and to have a job and know how to do it is one of the best things in this life. And if only she stops hankering after Cambridge...
 * Missee Lee (Chapter 26), 1941

 * Dorothea blew out her candle and settled down in the middle of the big spare room bed. An owl called in the woods. 'Not a barn owl, but a tawny,' thought Dick, listening to the sharp 'Gewick! Gewick!' as he fell asleep. A smell of new-mown hay drifted from the meadows on the further side of the river. 'There isn't a lovelier place in all the world,' thought Dorothea. London last night, and now Beckfoot. The summer holidays had begun.
 * The Picts and the Martyrs (Chapter 2), 1943

 * What's hit's history: what's missed's mystery.
 * Great Northern? (Chapter 9), 1947

title: Arthur Ransome


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Robin Morgan

Robin Morgan (born January 3, 1941) is an American poet, writer, activist, journalist, lecturer and former child actor. Since the early 1960s, she has been a key radical feminist member of the American Women's Movement, and a leader in the international feminist movement.

Quotes

 * Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human.
 * Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (1977). New York: Random House. ISBN 0394482271. (1978 ed, ISBN 039472612X.), p 70. (possibly also published as Going Too Far: The Personal Documents of a Feminist) ("there is no 'too far,'" id., p. 8, "Introduction: Rights of Passage")

 * Woman is [...] — finally screwing and your groin and buttocks and thighs ache like hell and you're all wet and maybe bloody and it wasn't like a Hollywood movie at all but jesus at least you're not a virgin any more but is this what it's all about?—And meanwhile he's asking, "Did you come?"
 * "Barbarous Rituals", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 110.

 * Let's run it on down. White males are most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today. Yet who is controlling the supposed revolution to change all that? White males (yes, yes, even with their pasty fingers back in black and brown pies again). It just could make one a bit uneasy. It seems obvious that a legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, and white women–with men relating to that as best they can. A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant, or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom (and functioning as objectified prizes or "coin" as well). Goodbye to all that.
 * "Goodbye to All That", 1970 in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 123.

 * And let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism--the lie that there can be such a thing as 'men's liberation groups.' Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a 'threatening' characteristic shared by the latter group--skin color or sex or age, etc. The oppressors are indeed FUCKED UP by being masters (racism hurts whites, sexual stereotypes are harmful to men) but those masters are not OPPRESSED. Any master has the alternative of divesting himself of sexism or racism—the oppressed have no alternative—for they have no power—but to fight. In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men—but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily. Sexism is NOT the fault of women—kill your fathers, not your mothers.
 * "Goodbye to All That", 1970 in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 126.

 * I feel that "man-hating" is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them. And although there are exceptions (as in everything), i.e., men who are trying to be traitors to their own male class, most men cheerfully affirm their deadly class privileges and power. And I hate that class.
 * "Lesbianism and Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?", spring 1973, keynote address to West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference, printed in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 178.

 * I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.
 * "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" (1974) in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist.

 * Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice. And what a practice. The violation of an individual woman is the metaphor for man's forcing himself on whole nations (rape as the crux of war), on nonhuman creatures (rape as the lust behind hunting and related carnage), and on the planet itself (reflected even in our language—carving up "virgin territory," with strip mining often referred to as a "rape of the land").
 * "Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape" (1974) in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist.

 * [N]o one appeared to wonder whether this S-M proliferation was a lesbian copy of a faggot imitation of patriarchal backlash against feminism.
 * "The Politics of Sado-Masochistic Fantasies", in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, p 235.

 * Biological determinism has for years struck me as a failure of intellectual nerve. So I don't mean to counter sexist theories along those lines with a mirror-image feminist version. We have as yet no truly value-free science, uninfluenced by masculinist (among other biases) prejudice. Consequently — although on certain bleak days I am sorely tempted to agreement with what we feminists have termed the "acute terminal testosterone-poisoning" theory of patriarchal history — I do not make the argument that women are inherently more peaceable, nurturing, or altruistic than men. (For one thing, this permits men the laziest of justifications for their own behavior.) Yet it is undeniable that history is a record of most women acting peaceably and of most men acting belligerently — to a point where the capacity for belligerence is regarded as an essential ingredient of manhood and the proclivity for conciliation is thought largely a quality of women.
 * The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (1989). New York: WW Norton & Co. 395 p. ISBN 0393306771. (2000 revised ed, ISBN 0743452933.)

 * If we can open ourselves to ourselves and each other, as women, only then can we begin to fight for and create, in fact reclaim, not "Lesbian Nation" or "Amazon Nation"—let alone some false state of equality—but a real Feminist Revolution, a proud gynocratic world that runs on the power of women. Not in the male sense of power, but in the sense of a power plant—producing energy. And to each, that longing for, that right to, a great love filled in reality, for all women, and children and men and animals and trees and water and all life, an exquisite diversity in unity. That world breathed and exulted on this planet some twelve thousand years ago, before the patriarchy arose to crush it.
 * Going Too Far, p. 187.

Misattributed

 * We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.
 * Actually from 1969 leaflet by The Feminists, "Women: Do You Know the Facts About Marriage?". Its text was reprinted in the anthology Sisterhood is Powerful edited by Robin Morgan.

Quotes about Robin Morgan

 * Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention.
 * Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)

 * The cultural-political perspectives of Jewish feminists interacted with the ideas of many other pioneering women's liberationists in the city, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Irene Peslikis, Peggy Dobbins, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Ann Snitow, and Vivian Gornick. Acting within a communal context, innovative theory and practice emerged from group interaction.
 * Joyce Antler Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement (2020)

title: Robin Morgan


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David Icke

David Icke (born 29 April 1952) is an English conspiracy theorist and writer. After a short career as a goalkeeper in the English football league (retiring due to rheumatism), he became a football commentator on television for the BBC. He was briefly the presenter of the Corporation's Grandstand programme, had longer stints as a presenter of snooker and indoor bowls on the BBC. For a few years, he was an activist in the Green Party of England and Wales. Icke was sacked from the BBC in 1990 for failing to pay the poll tax and resigned from the Green Party in 1991.

His apocalyptic announcements in the spring of 1991, including an appearance on Terry Wogan's television chat show, led to his rejection by both the Green Party and the mainstream media. Icke has since become a lecturer on such subjects as the New World Order, and has written many books on such subjects.

1990s

 * Well what a turn-up. From professional footballer to television presenter to green politician. Whatever next?
 * Source: It Doesn't Have to Be Like This: Green Politics Explained 1990

 * People would have said the same thing to Jesus, 'Who the heck are you? You're a carpenter's son.'
 * Icke: The best way of removing negativity is to laugh and be joyous, Terry, so I'm glad that there's been so much laughter in the audience tonight. Wogan: But they're laughing at you. They're not laughing with you. Icke: I don't care.
 * We/I am a son/daughter of God. In fact, we are all expressions/projections of the Infinite Conciousness, which is love, that is what I mean when I say "I am a son of god "GOD"!"
 * Interview with Terry Wogan, Wogan (1991).

 * The most explosive book of the twentieth century... I'm not kidding, it explodes!!
 * Subtitle of book And the truth shall set you free (1995).

 * Dogmatic religion any form of mind control actually, has been used, and refined to fantastic effect over thousands of years since the "restart" of Modern civilisation-Sumeria/Sumer according to Official history. To incite and exploit emotions like fear, guilt, frustration, anger, and the feeling of 'Emptiness'. Which has assisted our prison warders, who've encouraged the "masses" to hand over their Responsibilty, and right to think and feel to a politician, book, media presenter, priest, experts because they feel and are encouraged to perpetuate the consensus reality, therefore subconcious belief that we/they don't have the ability or confidence for that matter to establish truth for themselves regardless of any external influences and without fear of being "crucified" for doing so. You and I have the right, to take control of our minds and therefore of lives, which is the first step on the road to infinite, now is a good time as any to start to make your own decisions.
 * And the truth shall set you free (1995).

 * Official history has been tampered with in the most extraordinary way, so that we continue to see the world in the child-like simplicity of good and evil, heroes and villains. The world is rarely like that. Therefore the need to create opposing "sides" and encourage conflict becomes essential.
 * And the truth shall set you free (1995) p. 127

 * We are reflections of one another, therefore I know that you are part of me and I am part of you because we are all projections of the universal principles of creation/destruction polarities of the same infinite consciousness that we call God.
 * And the truth shall set you free, chap. 19

 * I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel (for which, given the genetic history of most Jewish people, there is absolutely no justification on historical grounds or any other). They then dominated the Versailles Peace Conference and created the circumstances which made the Second World War inevitable. They financed Hitler to power in 1933 and made the funds available for his rearmament.
 * And the truth shall set you free p. 130

 * How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler's List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events. And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.
 * And the truth shall set you free p. 135

 * "I stress that I am not attacking Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the environmental movement in general. They have done some good work overall. I am merely pointing out that they can, and are, used to promote the New World Order, mostly (though certainly not in every case), without their knowledge.
 * And the truth shall set you free p. 267

 * My use of extracts from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was too much for political purity to take. It didn't matter that I had emphasised, as I do in this book, that this is not a plot by Jewish people; it didn't matter that I renamed them the "Illuminati Protocols" for the specific reason of getting away from their association with Jewish people; it didn't matter that these Protocols, which came to light in the late-1800s, contain details of the very plan of manipulation which has provably unfolded through the twentieth century.
 * And the truth shall set you free p. 453
 * "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion is a fabricated antisemitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax was plagiarized from several earlier sources ... It played a key part in popularizing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy." (Wikipedia).

 * Dogmas take endless forms, and when you can persuade different people to hold opposing dogmas, the manipulation of conflict and control through "divide and rule" becomes easy. It is happening today in the same way - more so, in fact - as it has throughout human history.
 * The members of this Elite are either direct incarnations of the fourth-dimensional Prison Warders or have their minds controlled by them. The aim of the Brotherhood and its interdimensional controllers has been to centralise power in the hands of the few. This process is now very advanced and it is happening on a global scale today thanks to modern technology. The game-plan is known as the Great Work of Ages or the New World Order, and it presently seeks to introduce a world government to which all nations would be colonies; a world central bank and currency; a world army; and a micro-chipped population connected to a global computer. What is happening today is the culmination of the manipulation which has been unfolding for thousands of years.
 * "The New World Order" in And the truth shall set you free

 * Some of my friends have urged me to tell people the basic story, but "for God’s sake don’t mention the reptiles."
 * The Biggest Secret (1999) ch. 1

 * I wish I didn't have to introduce the following information, [on reptilian shapeshifting] because it complicates the story and opens me up to mass ridicule. But I'm not afraid to go where information leads me
 * The Biggest Secret (1999) ch. 2

 * Credo Mutwa, the most knowledgeable man i have ever had the honor of knowing.
 * The Biggest Secret (1999)

 * Hitler's Europe Yes, welcome to Hitler's Europe... Come on, human race - for our children's sake if not our own. This is wakey, wakey time.
 * Source The European Spider's Web, in Bridge of Love Magazine (May 1997).

 * Today, the stranglehold of the controlling negative forces upon Earth is extremely advanced and is choking the very life from our planet. The effects of this are evident everywhere in the form of fear, separation, war, disease and multifarious kinds of disharmony on all levels.
 * The Veil of Tears

 * I have positively identified this group as what I call the Black Nobility, which includes the Queen and Prince Phillip. By the time I get to Vancouver, I'll be able to reveal the true role of the Queen of England and the real facts around Lady Diana's death.
 * Source: Who's Controlling Who? An Interview With David Icke by Joseph W. Duggan in Shared-Vision Magazine

 * I believe that the human race has developed a form of collective schizophrenia in which we are not only the slaves to this imposed thought behavior, but we are also the police force of it. The reason most people don't express their individuality and actually deny it, is not fear of what prime ministers think of us or the head of the federal reserve, It's what their families and their friends down at the bar are going to think of them.
 * Source: Leading Edge Newspaper, July/August 1996

2000s
Ronson: Because they are twelve-foot lizards? Icke: Yes! [...] Exactly!
 * Icke: Come on, Ted Heath! Sue me if you've got nothing to hide! Come on, George Bush! I'm ready! Sue me! I'm naming names! Come on, Jon? Why are they refusing to sue me?
 * Jon Ronson "Beset by lizards" The Guardian (17 March 2001)

2010s

 * Every now and again I get approached by "celebrities" [saying] "oh, you're doing a great job mate, I think it's wonderful what you're doing". Ok, and what you're gonna do? You're gonna make a freaking film now, aren't you? You're gonna make another bloody record! You're gonna stand in front of tens of thousands of people, you're gonna go on chat shows watched by millions of people! Are you gonna bring this subject up yourself? No! Why? "Me, me, me!" "I don't wanna affect my carrer!" I tell you... anyone in the public eye - come nowhere near me unless you are prepared to put your-bloody-self when your mouth is. Walk the talk or walk the other way!
 * Remember Who You Are event, 2012

"OK, you’re a repeater," he nods. "I’ve not seen scientific papers about shape-shifters," I say. "You’re a left brain prisoner, mate," he says. "What’s your evidence for the lizards?" "You’ve not come with an open mind." "How do you know it’s true, David?" "Twenty-five years of putting endless information together and concluding that from the info. End of story." "You can’t just say 'end of story'!" "I can," he says. "I just said it." "No, it doesn’t," he says. "Does it not?" "No," he says. "It’s bollocks." "Right," I say, slightly startled. "It’s bollocks?" I wonder, if science is bollocks, how his TV came to exist. "It’s not that all science is bollocks," he decides. "The basis of the way science judges reality is bollocks."
 * Science has shown us many things, I agree, "but it hasn’t shown us anything about reptilian shape-shifters."
 * "Because the scientific method tells us what’s true," I say.
 * Interview with Will Storr "It's a jungle out there" The Sunday Times (16 June 2013)

 * Years ago, I had an experience with a playground bully. (...) This bully was after me and he was gonna do this, he was gonna do that, all the other kids were terrified of this bully. And he came to me one night, just before immediately the school was over, and he said to me "Icke, I'm beating you up tonight, you're gonna meet me here." And he expected me to run. And I said "alright", and I took him on. I never threw a punch! He was trying to hit me and trying to hit me, and I was just, you know, a bit like Neo in The Matrix, only at normal speed. Cause he was all front! He was all front! His power in that playground perception of his power. Look him in the eye, "come on then, let's have ya", gone. Finished! Over! And that night, his power of that playground disappeared, cause people realized he was a fraud as the word got out.
 * Source: Icke's 2016 interview on the Richie Allen Show (starts at 01:39:49)

Undated

 * Infinite love is the only truth. Everything else is illusion.
 * Source: Davidicke.com

 * The following list has been compiled from the wealth of research I have put together over the last ten years. I would suggest that all of these are reptilian bloodline, but I only mention shapeshifting where it has been witnessed. It is only an initial list and will be added to. If you can add names, and give the supporting evidence, that would be most helpful in exposing these horrors. By "Satanists", of course, I mean those involved in human sacrifice.... George Bush: U.S. President and Vice President, head of the CIA, and a stream of other roles in the Illuminati. Satanist, mind controller, torturer of children and adults, paedophile, shapeshifting reptilian, and major drug runner. Serial killer. Nice man.... Queen Elizabeth II of the U.K.: Satanist, child sacrificer, shapeshifting reptilian. Major Illuminati figure.
 * Source: List of Famous Satanists, Paedophiles And Mind Controllers, davidicke.com

 * You don't comb the mirror, you comb your own hair and the mirror changes.
 * Source: http://www.davidicke.com/content/view/13588/82/

 * It got to the point where I sat on the side of the bed in a hotel room in London in early-1990 and said to whoever or whatever: 'If you are there will you please contact or leave me because you are driving me up the wall'.
 * About David Icke: The Man, His Philosophy, and His Work by Icke himself. He claimed to have felt a subtle entities presence in the room.

 * Former US president, drug baron and pedophile, George Herbert Walker Bush, incidentally, is mentioned more than any other person in my experience in relation to shape-shifting.
 * Davidicke.com

 * Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut, that held its ground.
 * Source: Davidicke.com

 * I hope I can pass on a few thoughts and ideas to the Sci-Fi channel to encourage people to see that they are living in a conditioned illusion and we can change it any time we want. We can be people and not sheeple.
 * Source: Ananova, sm_618781

 * Mad, Bad, or just prepared to go where others fear to tread? The most controversial author and speaker in the world
 * Source: davidicke.com cf lifts quote from "where angels fear to tread"

 * In the Atlantean period there were many energies being used and information and knowledge being used which were, for particular reasons of safety, withdrawn, shall we say, to prevent complete catastrophe, to prevent total destruction of your planet. One could say these were sort of emergency measures, if you like, to prevent the inhabitants of this planet from an untimely destruction.
 * Truth Vibrations

 * It's amazing how everything fits together in the world of the Illuminati if you are prepared to dig deep enough.
 * The Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses are the same Organisation, ibid.

 * You won't be surprised to know, therefore, that the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses are the same organisation at the top level where the Elders of the Mormons and the leaders of the Watchtower Society operate a very different agenda to the one their followers believe.
 * ibid.

 * How much did Jim Morrison know?
 * article title, ibid.

 * The Earth needs rebels!
 * article title, ibid

 * Have you ever wondered what your subconscious mind looks like? Well today, I can show you.
 * Source: You want to change your life? Then change the way you think! in Bridge of love magazine

 * Don't let them tell you what to think, no matter how "different" your own views may be in relation to the official line. If you are not different in this world of stunning uniformity what on earth are you doing? Baaaaaaa.
 * Oxford University the illuminati breeding ground

About Icke
In alphabetical order by author or source.
 * Icke is the former professional footballer who declared himself the Messiah, has endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories including the Protocols and, in the words of Wikipedia, believes that "many prominent figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood, a group of shape-shifting reptilian humanoids". One of whom, I seem to recall, is me.
 * David Aaronovitch "Corbynite left is hooked on conspiracy theories", The Times (28 March 2018)

His book And the Truth Shall Set you Free calls Judaism an "incredibly racist" religion which preaches "racial superiority" claims that a "Jewish clique" fomented World War I and World War II as well as the Russian Revolution, and draws heavily on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for inspiration. He even casts doubt on the Holocaust and condemns the Nuremberg Trials. He has a long history of scapegoating Jews and Times readers should be aware of this before considering his work.
 * We’re deeply disappointed that The New York Times Book Review would print author Alice Walker’s unqualified endorsement of a book by notorious British anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke.
 * Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League cited by Rosa Doherty in "Alice Walker recommends book by notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke" The Jewish Chronicle (17 December 2018)

 * I had entered the room knowing that Icke thought he was the son of God and that humanoid reptiles were the incarnation of evil, but not a lot more. I'd love to say I gained an insight, listening to him preach, without notes, laser pen in hand and an incomprehensible presentation beamed on to the wall behind him. I'm afraid I can't. He claims people mock him for leaving school at 15, when I – with my university degree – was left flummoxed because, try as I might, I couldn't understand what he was saying.
 * Susie Mesure "David Icke is not the Messiah. Or even that naughty. But boy, can he drone on", The Independent on Sunday (27 October 2012)

 * [E]very individual accused of reptilian paedophilia by David Icke had so far failed to sue, including Bob Hope, George Bush, George Bush Jr, Ted Heath, the Rothschild family, Boxcar Willie, the Queen of England, the Queen Mother, Prince Philip, Kris Kristofferson, Al Gore and the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group.
 * Jon Ronson "Beset by lizards", The Guardian (17 March 2001)
 * Extract from Jon Ronson's book Them: Adventures With Extremists (Picador, 2001).

 * He's got his racket, talking for nine hours at a clip. People must walk out of there so exhausted that they believe that they're green reptiles. (...) How cynical are we? How fed up can we be? That we decide that our leaders are powerful aliens, and that it's useless to fight back?
 * Jesse Ventura in Conspiracy Theory S03E01 "Reptilian" (starts at 42:18)

title: David Icke


text:
Mika Waltari

Mika Waltari (19 September 1908 – 26 August 1979) was a Finnish author, best known for the historical novel The Egyptian.

Sourced

 * Life is a hot day, perhaps death is a cool night. Life is a shallow bay, perhaps death is a clear, deep sea.
 * Sinuhe, my friend, we have been born into strange times. Everything is melting - changing its shape - like clay on a potter's wheel. Dress is changing, words, customs are changing, and people no longer believe in the gods - though they may fear them. Sinuhe, my friend, perhaps we were born to see the sunset of the world, for the world is already old, and twelve hundred years have passed since the building of the pyramids. When I think of this, I want to bury my head in my hands and cry like a child.
 * The Egyptian

title: Mika Waltari