Category: quotes

On Reagan:

A senile cowboy actor has his finger on the nuclear trigger and I’m supposed to go to sleep without drugs?

The Minister glosses
a point from the Chair.
He is on form, selling dummies;
splitting the opposition
with unexpected tangents.
He manages the language
without effort. His smile
is simply the place in his face
where the bone shows through.
By a programming fluke
the whole nation is watching.
The boom-mike dips
into the fidgety audience,
and, just this once
the woman in the third row
does not try to say everything;
does not panic, or glance
at the notes in her lap.
It just so happens
that small corners
of the vast fields of knowledge,
rhetoric and experience
overlap with such precision,
such economy,
in this one person, that it occurs to her,
off the top of her head,
to speak a sequence of sentences
which not only render
the Minister’s immediate remarks
laughable and shabby,
but expose the first principles
of his reason, proving
as a necessary truth
the structural conspiracy
of maintained advantage
which intends his policies.
In the moments before
the Chair restores normality
with “You should be in politics, Madam”,
there is a functioning democracy,
and the Viewers at Home
blink, and partially rise from their sofas.

Alan Dewar

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand –
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha …
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you’ll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she’ll ask:
my god, what’s the matter?
and you’ll answer: I don’t know,
I don’t know …

charles bukowski

The mind is not a vessel to be filled,
but a fire to be lighted!

Plutarch

Letters in the Guardian on the situation in New Orleans, here. Including this one:

Donald Rumsfeld declared the looting in Iraq following “liberation” to be the consequence of “the pent-up feelings that result from decades of oppression”. We await his wisdom on New Orleans.
Chris Mazeika
London

Narrator: I want you to listen to me very carefully, Tyler.
Tyler Durden: Okay…
Narrator: My eyes are open.
[the Narrator puts the gun into his mouth and pulls trigger]

Fight Club

And do you sometimes lust
For the grace that others have inside
The simple peace they make with life
Yet filled up like some summer’s night?

‘I see the light’, Cracker, as heard not as sung

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes.
The second step is to disregard that which can?t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what can?t be measured easily really isn?t important. This is blindness.
The fourth step is to say that what can?t be easily measured really doesn?t exist. This is suicide.

Charles Handy, ‘The Empty Raincoat’, page 219.

The important thing is not to be in the know, but to be in the now

Overheard at Crooked Timber:

I can only pass on my tip; there is an easy way and a hard way to learn linear algebra and the easy way doesn?t work.

(dammit)

“I’ve got a few men I respect very much and one would be Frank Gehry. He said to me, ‘If you know where it’s going, it’s not worth doing.’ That’s become like a mantra for me. That’s the life of the artist.”

– Brad Pitt

To study history one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one

Hermann Hesse, ‘The Glass Bead Game’ (1943)

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that

– John von Neumann

“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”

“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

“Everyone?” said Arthur. “Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know …”

“Maybe. Who cares?” said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. “Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway….Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“And are you?”

“No. That’s where it all falls down of course.”

– Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 30 (there’s something similar in the film)

Dorothy Sayers provides an awesome introduction to Dante’s Divine Comedy (in the Penguin Classics edition). Talking about the Black Wind of Canto 5, Lust (‘The infernal whirlwind, which never rests, drives the spirits before its violence; turning and striking, it tortures them….And as their winds carry off the starlings in the cold season, in large full flocks, so does that breath carry the evil spirits here, there, down, up; no hope ever comforts them, not of lessened suffering, much less of rest.‘) she says:

As the lovers drifted into self-indulgence and were carried away by their passions, so now they drift forever. The bright, voluptuous sin is now seen as it is – a howling darkness of helpless discomfort. (The ‘punishment’ for sin is simply the sin itself, experienced without the illusion…)

If you want to become whole,
first let yourself become broken.
If you want to become straight,
first let yourself become twisted.
If you want to become full,
first let yourself become empty.
If you want to become new,
first let yourself become old.
Those whose desires are few gets them,
those whose desires are great go astray.

For this reason the Master embraces the Tao,
as an example for the world to follow.
Because she isn’t self centered,
people can see the light in her.
Because she does not boast of herself,
she becomes a shining example.
Because she does not glorify herself,
she becomes a person of merit.
Because she wants nothing from the world,
the world cannot overcome her.

When the ancient Masters said,
“If you want to become whole,
then first let yourself be broken,”
they weren’t using empty words.
All who do this will be made complete.

– Lao Tzu, from J.M. MacDonald’s public domain translation of the Tao Te Ching

I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi’s and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.

I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall, picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I

skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone’s inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.

I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.

And I guess that the lightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.

.

Simon Armitage

Steven Pinker has this to say about why ‘counter-culture’ dress and habits is so common amount the youth of the privilaged:

Aggressive nonconformity is an advertisement that one is so confident in one’s station or abilities that one can jeopardise the good will of others without ending up ostracized and destitute.

(‘How The Mind Works’, 1997, Penguin – p501 my edition)

Looking on the bright side, let us remind ourselves of what has happened in the wake of earlier demystifications. We find no diminution of wonder; on the contrary, we find deeper beauties and more dazzling visions of the complexity of the universe than the protectors of mystery ever conceived. The “magic” of earlier visions was, for the most part, a cover-up for frank failures of imagination, a boring dodge enshrined in the concept of a deus ex machina. Fiery gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comic-book fare compared with the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the recursive intricacies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make ?lan vital about as interesting as Superman’s dread kryptonite. When we understand consciousness – when there is no more mystery – consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe.

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained.

We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

G. K. Chesterton

The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has. However, there are not enough genes to determine the detailed shape and structure of that nervous system nor of the consciousness that is an aspect of that structure. Yet it is consciousness that creates our environment, its history and the direction of its future. This then provides us with a correct understanding of the relation between our genes and the shape of our lives.

Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible. In Simone de Beauvoir’s clever but deep apothegm, a human being is “l’etre dont l’etre est de n’etre pas,” the being whose essence is in not having an essence.

History far transcends any narrow limitations that are claimed for either the power of genes or the power of the environment to circumscribe us. Like the House of Lords that destroyed its own power to limit the political development of Britain in the successive Reform Acts to which it assented, so the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine the individual and its environment. They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action.

R.C. Lewontin (1991). The doctrine of DNA: Biology as Ideology

A good story is something with an interesting premise that builds logically to a satisfying and suprising conclusion

William Goldman, ‘Which Lie Did I Tell? More Adventures In The Screen Trade’

Jefferson advised his nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one, he must approve the homage of reason rather than of blindfolded fear”

found in Francis Wheen’s “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World” (2004, p106)

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume, The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Section xii, part III)

Dear Toby
Jon told me this quote, and it made us think of you.
Tom

“Before you criticise someone first walk a mile in their shoes.”

“Then when you criticise them you will be a mile away. And have their
shoes…”

Studies of hunter-gatherers have shown that some only need to work for 2
hours a day to support themselves. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t
emulated neighbouring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should
we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, by Jared Diamond

It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.

Philip Pullman in the Guardian about the basics of teaching writing