Dutch Motivation Quotes

Luck comes and goes; you have to seize it. Bad luck comes and goes; it must be overcome. But I will never, never sit at the side of the road showing my wounds and shouting, 'It's destiny'!

IN BERLIN, JOSEPH GOEBBELS contemplated the motivation behind Churchill’s broadcast, and its potential effect. He kept careful watch on the evolving relationship between America and Britain, weighing how his propagandists might best influence the outcome. “The battle over intervention or non-intervention continues to rage in the USA,” he wrote in his diary on Monday, April 28, the day after the broadcast. The outcome was hard to predict. “We are active to the best of our ability, but we can scarcely make ourselves heard against the deafening Jew-chorus. In London they are placing all their last hopes in the USA. If something does not happen soon, then London is faced with annihilation.” Goebbels sensed mounting anxiety. “Their great fear is of a knock-out blow during the next weeks and months. We shall do our best to justify these fears.” He instructed his operatives on how best to use Churchill’s own broadcast to discredit him. They were to mock him for saying that after he visited bombed areas, he came back to London “not merely reassured but even refreshed.” In particular, they were to seize on how Churchill had described the forces he had transferred from Egypt to Greece to confront the German invasion. Churchill had said: “It happened that the divisions available and best suited to this task were from New Zealand and Australia, and that only about half the troops who took part in this dangerous expedition came from the Mother Country.” Goebbels leapt on this with glee. “Indeed, it so happened! It invariably ‘so happens’ that the British are in the rear; it always so happens that they are in retreat. It so happened that the British had no share in the casualties. It so happened that the greatest sacrifices during the offensive in the West were made by the French, the Belgians and the Dutch. It so happened that the Norwegians had to provide cover for the British flooding back from Norway.

It's quite easy to assume that a multilingual person is stupid. When you know only one language, you become a specialist in that language. You make no mistakes. People listen to you with seriousness, and life is good. But you become a specialist because you are limited in your vocabulary. For example, English speakers use the word 'can' without making any mistakes. They are always confident that the right word is 'can'. As a result, they may be perceived as intelligent people. Because confidence can easily sway the masses. But in the case of a multilingual person, the vocabulary is expanded. When they speak, their brain has to consider the word 'can' in English, 'pouvez' in French, 'kan" in Afrikaans or Dutch, 'puede' in Spanish, and so on. So, while the brain is trying to go through each language memory box, taking into consideration its rules, the speaker could appear blank in their face, slow in the mind, or stuttering when they speak. Then, the society may start to reject them, or to label them as 'stupid.' Unfortunately, many people, especially foreigners, suffer because of this mistaken perception. The message here is that we need to broaden our views about other people. We need to consider them as equally intelligent as we often see ourselves.

summarized as follows: Sunday: Favor with God (spiritual revelation, anointing, holiness). Monday: Favor with others (congregations, ministry staff, unsaved). Tuesday: Increased vision (wisdom and enlightenment, motives, guidance). Wednesday: Spirit, Soul, Body (health, appearance, attitudes,

however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance – usually the expected duration of a voyage – after which the capital was repaid to investors.10 This business model could not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish allies* were to be supplanted. Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company – the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.11 The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects. True, like its predecessors, it was supposed to last for a fixed period, in this case twenty-one years; indeed, Article 7 of its charter stated that investors would be entitled to withdraw their money at the end of just ten years, when the first general balance was drawn up. But the scale of the enterprise was unprecedented. Subscription to the Company’s capital was open to all residents of the United Provinces and the charter set no upper limit on how much might be raised. Merchants, artisans and even servants rushed to acquire shares; in Amsterdam alone there were 1,143 subscribers, only eighty of whom invested more than 10,000 guilders, and 445 of whom invested less than 1,000. The amount raised, 6.45 million guilders, made the VOC much the biggest corporation of the era. The capital of its English rival, the East India Company, founded two years earlier, was just £68,373 – around 820,000 guilders – shared between a mere 219 subscribers.12 Because the VOC was a government-sponsored enterprise, every effort was made to overcome the rivalry between the different provinces (and particularly between Holland, the richest province, and Zeeland). The capital of the Company was divided (albeit unequally) between six regional chambers (Amsterdam, Zeeland, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn and Rotterdam). The seventy directors (bewindhebbers), who were each substantial investors, were also distributed between these chambers. One of their roles was to appoint seventeen people to act as the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Lords – as a kind of company board. Although Amsterdam accounted for 57.4 per cent of the VOC’s total capital, it nominated only eight out of the Seventeen Lords.

The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s motivated physicists to tackle all the unsolved problems of physics with the new methods and see if they worked (they mostly did). But what was the evidence for any of this new way of thinking? The evidence that was persuasive at the time was a number of rather abstract physics experiments concerning the nature of atomic spectra or the interaction between light and metal surfaces. Each was important in its own way, but what ought to have played an important role in retrospect was something far, far simpler: the observation that magnets work. The crucial step was made by an unknown Dutch scientist called Hendreka van Leeuwen, and what she showed was that magnets couldn’t exist if you just use classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics. Hendreka van Leeuwen’s doctoral work in Leiden was done under the supervision of Lenz and the work was published in the Journal de Physique et le Radium in 1921. Unfortunately, it subsequently transpired that her main result had been anticipated by Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, but as it had only appeared in his 1911 diploma thesis, written in Danish, it was unsurprising she hadn’t known about it. Their contribution, though conceived independently, is now known as the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem, which states that if you assume nothing more than classical physics, and then go on to model a material as a system of electrical charges, then you can show that the system can have no net magnetization; in other words, it will not be magnetic. Simply put, there are no lodestones in a purely classical Universe.

in September 2019, a parliamentarian named Pia Dijkstra announced that she would push forward an assisted-dying bill designed for elderly people with “completed lives.” When I asked Dijkstra about her motivations, she answered me with typically Dutch blasé: “We think that people have the right to decide, themselves, when their life is complete. They should not have to take actions that are nasty, like putting a plastic bag over your head so you suffocate.

Jews were not involved in the formation of the Company but were wholly in favor of it and quick to enlist. While the Company’s motives were wholly mercenary and political, the Jews had another, more pressing agenda. In Portugal in 1618, the Inquisition arrested more than a hundred wealthy converso traders who had agents in Amsterdam and seized their cargos from Brazil in transit to the Dutch port.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing, never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

The “elite” themselves of course don’t believe any such thing [amoral aristocratic radicalism], never professing such ideas publicly, nor in private, nor, I would say, is it in their minds, consciously or not, as their true motivation. Their motivation is humanitarian and egalitarian, just as they claim: to temper the excesses of the free market, to protect the weak, the minorities—especially blacks—and the poor from traditional oppressors; to fight everywhere emanations of distinction or “privilege,” to uplift the meek and the weak, to “make the last be the first.” To the extent they appear to be antidemocratic, it is in the name of a purer democracy and a more pure humanitariaism: thus they feel justified in crushing now the Dutch farmers who rise up against “climate restrictions” because they believe by doing so they are helping the far larger masses of poor in the Third World. It’s the same for all their behavior, the promotion of transsexualism, of the gays—it is part of protecting the weak. If they are cruel, authoritarian to some it’s because they believe they’re fighting bullies. If they often engage in corrupt behavior, hypocrisy and so on, well, that’s just human frailty and you can look the other way: “I still think I’m trying to do good, and that’s what matters.” In other words, they’re acting like almost any other ideological mandarin Party incompetent class in history, but, I would say, with less, far less self-conscious cynicism or nihilism than what you’d find among East Bloc apparatchiks. Not one embraces amoralism, Nietzscheanism, eugenicism, or any of the vampiric dark traits attributed to them by their political opponents. They are not gangsters or mad scientists. They are genuine moralists, and without that egalitarian moralism no one would accept their rule and none of their insanity would be possible.

Relationship with Jesus must be kept pure and simple. Introducing you to any facet of prayer without making this clear would set you up for frustration and eventual failure. Our motivation for prayer must be relationship—communing with God.

The French claimed they had begun to amass their Indochinese empire simply to protect the Christian faithful and professed always to be undertaking a “civilizing mission,” meant to bring material and cultural benefits to an allegedly benighted people. But their initial motives were less lofty. French Indochina was meant to provide a path for penetrating the Chinese market and create a buffer against the British and Dutch, who had already carved empires of their own from India, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia.

Of the two dozen spies or so deployed to Britain between September and November 1940, five were German, while the others were variously Dutch, Scandinavian, Cuban, Swiss, Belgian, Spanish, and Czechoslovak. These were far removed from the superspies imagined by a nervous British public. Most were poorly trained and petrified; some spoke no English at all and had only a sketchy notion of the country they were supposed to blend into. They did not look like your next-door neighbor—they looked like spies. Only a few were genuine Nazis. The rest were variously motivated by greed, adventure, fear, stupidity, and blackmail. Their number included several criminals, degenerates, and alcoholics. According to one MI5 report, “a high proportion suffered from venereal disease.” Some had opportunistically volunteered to spy against Britain, with the intention of defecting. Some were anti-Nazi from the outset. This motley collection of invasion spies had only this in common: not a single one escaped detection.