Category: quotes

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form

Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this.
All our dignity then, consists in thought. By it we must elevate ourselves, and not by space and time which we cannot fill. Let us endavour then, to think well; this is the principle of morality.

Blaise Pascal Pensees 347

42 is not an anwser, it’s an error code. the universe is saying ‘Error 42: meaning to universe not found’

in the future,
looking up,
we’ll not be sure which are stars
and which are searchlights on other planets

Unknown (to me) poet from last night’s spoken word antics

This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth’s body that some spoiler had to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, p720

the cleaners are scrubbing the Institute lavatories
because women are supposed to do that.

the girls are typing in the Institute offices
because women are dedicated and careful

the women are assembling printed circuits
because woman are good at delicate work
and women’s eyes are expendable

the young men are doing their PhDs
because young men are obedient and ambitious
and someone wants warheads
laser rangefinders
hunt and destroy capabilities
multichannel night seeking radar
and science is neutral

back home the wives of the PhD students are having babies
because women are maternal and loving
and who else can have children but women?

at the top of the tower the old men and the middle aged men
and sometimes one woman professor
meet to form plans, cadge funds and run the place
because obedient young men turn into obedient old men
and it’s all for the good of the country
and defence funds are good for science
and science is neutral
and no one notices Moloch.

the woman bring them
clean toilets
cups of coffee
typescripts
micro circuits oh so neatly assembled
and children

and it’s hard to see Moloch because he is both far away
and everywhere
and no one asks to whom they are all obedient

and they say, “Who’s Moloch? Never heard of him”
as out in the dark Moloch belches
and grows redder and redder
and fatter and fatter
as he eats the children

Mary McCann (1992). First published by Pomegranate Women’s Writing Group
found in Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power

The famous mathematical sociologist Paul Lazarfeld once said, “You never understand a phenomenon unless you can make it go away.” We might add, “or unless you can reverse its direction.”
Psychologist William McGuire (1983, 1989) suggested as one of many ways to develop new hypotheses that you can take some seemingly obvious relationship and imagine conditions where its opposite would hold.

Robert P. Abelson (1995). Statistics as Principled Argument

There has been a myriad of sporadic cease-fires in the MidEast over the last sixty years. Indeed, over the last three millenia and each has proved but a tiny foyer opening onto yet another grand dark ballroom, whose weary dancers waltz endlessly to the dismal music of war. Still, I think this one’s going to last. Call it a hunch.

— Rob Corddry

In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. Everything in the world must have a design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition, it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.

John Steinbeck (in Travels With Charley: In Search of America, 1962)

It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never could—they are as foolish as shields of paper. They have lied to us. They can’t keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have They ever given us in return for the trust, the love—They actually say ‘love’—we’re supposed to owe Them. Can They even keep us from catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can’t believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I’ve always been slightly suspicious about the Freudian tendency to read meaning into everything. You see hidden meanings and get paid for it and you’re an analyst, you do it for free and you’re psychotic.

I suspect this is why there’s so little psychoanalytic work on psychosis, the infinite regress of hidden meanings would probably cause a dimensional rift and the universe would collapse.

Vaughan Bell on Mindhacks.com

I am very interested in words, and what we have words for and what we haven’t got words for. For instance, the word “paranoia.” It always seems very strange to me that we have this word which means, in effect, that someone feels that he is being persecuted when the people who are persecuting him don’t think that he is. But we haven’t got a word for the condition in which you are persecuting someone without realizing it, which I would have thought is as serious a condition as the other, and certainly no less common.

RD Laing

On this bridge, Lorca warns: Life is not a dream, beware, and beware, and beware. And so many think because then happened, now isn’t. But didn’t I mention? The ongoing WOW is happening right NOW. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns… An assumption developed that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely, which is to say, I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But, the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me, and on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember, because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting: Lorca, in that same poem, said that the Iguana will bite those who do not dream, and as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream… that is self-awareness!

Timothy ‘Speed’ Levich in Waking Life

There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes. No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic – fear or laziness?

Louis Mackey, in the same

It is a grave but not important error that I happen to be a woman … I would really have been a very something man, and as a woman I am truly only a nuisance, only a problem … I am going to make the most of it and not let this biological accident hamper me any more than is necessary. I can resign myself to anything on earth except dullness.

Martha Gellhorn – quoted in a review of her collected letters

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

– Buckminster Fuller

Now we must confront something even more perplexing: next to the Communist Manifesto, the whole body of capitalist apologetics, from Adam Ferguson to Milton Friedman is remarkably pale and empty of life. The celebrants of capitalism tell us surprisingly little of its infinite horizons, its revolutionary audacity, its dynamic creativity, its adventurousness and romance, its capacity to make men not only more comfortable but more alive.

Marshall Berman in ‘All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity’

It can be fun to feel exceptional – to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

Ariel Levy in ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
At midnight in some flaming town,

– Alan Seeger

Extract from Gary Younge’s new book Stranger in a Strange Land

I have always found America exciting; but, for better or worse, never exceptional. Its efforts at global domination seemed like a plot development in the narrative of European empire rather than a break from it. Even as the French lambasted secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council, protesters in Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, waved American flags and placards saying: “Bush please help Ivory Coast against French terrorism.” There was precious little moral high ground to go round. Yet everyone, it seemed, was making a stake on it.

So it was with great bemusement that I found myself having to absorb abuse from white, rightwing Americans, who harked back to the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the second world war to justify military aggression in Iraq. They badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation.

“If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,” they would say. “No, if it wasn’t for you,” I would tell them, “I would probably be speaking Yoruba.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The truth is that we are only potentially homo sapiens. We are set apart from the animals precisely by the fact that we are born without any clear guide as to how to deal adequately with the problems of our human condition. The great marvel and misery of humanity is this capacity for bewilderment. This is not, of course, to deny that human being have instincts; it is to affirm the fact that each of us is required to find our own non-instinctual answers to the problems of life, free and happiness (instinct is silent in the face of all the above questions). The sum total of answers we give to the problem of our relationship with the universe, we call religion

David Edwards, Free to be human – intellectual self-defence in an age of illusions, p12

Kurt Vonnergut talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Interview Public Broadcasting Service (2005)

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors – in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all…

‘On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,’ The Viking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl.

There are women who, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks. The man who associates with such almost spectral, necessarily unsatisfied beings is to be commiserated with, yet it is precisely they who are able to arouse the desire of the man most strongly: he seeks for her soul — and goes on seeking.

Nietzsche, in Human, all too Human R.J. Hollingdale tr

If the Christian dogmas of a revengeful God , universal sinfulness , election by divine grace and the danger of eternal damnation were true, it would be a sign of weak-mindedness and lack of character /not/ to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one’s own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of ones eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate /believed/ true, then the everyday Christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as Christianity promises to punish him.

from Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human R.J. Hollingdale transl.

For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are there, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible…

– Nietzsche, unpublished note from 1873

To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet, archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along

I care not if you bridge the seas
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue:
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

— James Elroy Flecker

This classic, finally properly sourced, thanks to Wikiquote

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Sometimes seen as:

All models are false but some models are useful.

Wikiquote continues: ‘The remark has two phrasings, both of which appear in George E.P. Box & Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (Wiley 1987) pp. 74 and 424: “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”; “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.’

Nothing I Can Lose

When I left my father’s house
the sun was halfway up,
my father held it to my chin
like a buttercup.

My father was a snake-oil man
a wizard, trickster, liar,
but this was his best trick,
we kissed goodbye in fire.

A mile above Niagara Falls
a dove gave me the news
of his death. I didn’t miss a step,
there’s nothing I can lose.

Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick
I do not know tonight,
the wind, the pole will tell me what
and the friendly blinding light.

– Leonard Cohen

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened

– Lawrence Durrell