Victor Hugo – Critical Romantic

French poet, touted as the most influential romantic writer of the 19th Century, Victor Marie Hugo, and his thoughts on:

Religion

These two haves of God, the Pope and the emperor.

God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.

Obstacles to Fame

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do no bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear.

Death Penalty

You insist on the example [of the death penalty]. Why? For what it teaches. What do you want to teach with your example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach thou shalt not kill? By killing.

Progress

A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France.

Ideas

One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.

Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.

Balance

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

Humanity

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. Of that divine tear and that human smile is composed the sweetness of the present civilization.

Tolerance

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

Revolution

I represent a party which does not yet exist: the party of revolution, civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it first the United States of Europe, then the United States of the World.

Life

To love is to act.

Foundation

 The need of the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.

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Steve Jobs – Critical Innovator

American entrepreneur, inventor, founder of Apple, Steven Paul Jobs, and his thoughts on:

Life

I want to put a ding in the universe.

Key Differences

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.

It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.

Customers

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

Excellence

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Definition of Design

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Market Share

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

Innovation

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

Work

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better.

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Hugh Hefner – Critical Hedonist

Some interesting quotes from the arguably the most famous hedonist of our times:

On dreams:

Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.

On fantasies:

The interesting thing is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people.

On civilization:

The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex.

On colors:

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

On age:

The big surprise for me is that age is just a number, … It’s a number without meaning. A person who dies at 40 — through cancer, a car accident, what have you — how old is that person, really, at 38? He’s near the end of his life, whether he knows it or not. And what about a person who dies at 100? How old is that person, really, at 78?

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Sagan, Hawking, Clarke: God, The Universe & Everything Else

British journalist Magnus Magnusson brings together an interesting panel: theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, astronomer Carl Sagan and science author Arthur C. Clarke. The panel tackles big questions about the origin of our universe and life and the existence of creation myths that religions pose to explain the origin of the universe. A rare talk with the great thinkers of our time.

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Three Sentiments In Reaction To The Church’s Initiative On Reproductive Health

Part of our ongoing discussion on reproductive health.

One of our friends, Pinoy Law Student (p.l.s.), reported on an initiative by the Catholic Church to write its own reproductive health bill. p.l.s. offered three sentiments surrounding this issue which we partially quote:

First point. With all due respect to our prelates, there is this little provision in the Constitution also known as  separation of church and the state.

Second point. Again, with all due respect, the Catholic church – singing praises for natural family planning – has not even lifted a finger in disseminating the information that about the method that they sacrosanctly uphold.

Third point: I don’t know, but refusal of communion and other sacraments to politicians who support the bill is such a childish tactic in my opinion.

Read the rest of p.l.s. excellent critique here.

Just recently we blogged about the Vatican’s reaction to the removal of life support from a coma patient and this ongoing debate on population issue is within the same spheres of thought. The first being the definition of “life”, and the ethical approach to that definition, which covers actions such as contraception, abortion, and euthanasia. The second being the consideration of moral and social implications of those definitions and actions.

We can argue about the justice to a father by insisting that his vegetative daugther continue to live and bleed precious resources from her already cash-strapped family as much as we can argue why it is objectionable to allow sex education to be taught and guided in schools instead of children picking up their knowledge from unknown sources.

At the risk of sounding like a moral relativist, I really have to ask: in the end, what are we really arguing against if not simply tradition?

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