// 3x5x1985.txt

// last content edits 2022.01.19, 2022.07.14

// quotations collected on 3 inch by 5 inch cards by Jerry Van Polen while in graduate school

// citations omitted, for which the original cards are far from complete

// checked against originals in 2022, but no assurance of complete accuracy

// spelling checked in 2024

=wcenter= =sp=1=

=wcenter= =sp=1= 

=wcenter= =sp=1=

=wcenter= =sp=1= 

=wcenter=   3 x 5 x 1985 

=wcenter= =sp=1=

=wcenter=    --  

=wcenter= =sp=1= 

=wcenter=   Jerry Van Polen   

=wcenter= =sp=1=

=wcenter= =sp=1=




=pagebreak=


=wcenter=  Collection copyright 1985-1988 Jerry Van Polen  

=wcenter=  This version date:  2024-05-08  




=pagebreak=


RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Is his ambition pure? Then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things will tell none. ... Dear to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life; -- but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

E.D. HIRSCH, JR. :: Estimable cultures exist that are ignorant of Shakespeare and the First Amendment. Indeed, estimable cultures exist that are entirely ignorant of reading and writing. On the other hand, no culture exists that is ignorant of its own traditions. 

LEWIS MUMFORD :: Despite the foreboding that every intelligent mind felt when it contemplated the barbarism of the industrial age, inimical to any culture except that which grew out of its own inhuman absorption in abstract matter and abstract power, the dominant note of the period was hope.








=pagebreak=


=wcenter=      CONTENTS   



=placeholderTOC=      // insertion point for TOC //





=h2= Introduction


In graduate school my evening-reading choices went opposite of undergraduate coursework nearly entirely in math and physics. My main Chicago book sources were Powell's, 57th Street Books, and the Seminary Co-op. In Regenstein I browsed the stacks at random and found a few gems.

For some reason I started transcribing choice paragraphs onto 3 inch x 5 inch cards. I stopped when my metal recipe box was full.

At the end of this collection, I have previously added one quotation which I did not record in the 1980s. To bookend that, I add here several remarks from my own manuscript:

=ppp=

*To seek truth can be to seek that which, once found, remains true forever. Thus our lives are not true; but the patterns of life are true -- find we them in a microscope or a market, one library or a loved one, the closest acre, or a familiar congregation.*

=ppp=

*Every prohibition has been advisable for *someone*. But for all? The sum of all negative advice, like the mixing of all paint, holds no light or color. Thus:*

*I heeded all the warnings, heard them all, I never crossed the line. If you don't make your own mistakes, you'll be making mine.*


=ppp=

=sp=4= *Grounding: Notice, feel, sense;    =b=
=sp=6= Focus, patience, and presence.   =b=
=sp=8= Every pore a place to go;   =b=
=sp=10= Embrace a way of going slow.*   =b=

=ppp=

*Poets, prophets, artists, moralists, statesmen, others. Through society and habit what once arose true becomes false. They -- the sometimes "true legislators" -- plow. They plow. A turn of voice true is a product of toil and soil.*

=ppp=

*We become made to the world, like two blanks ground together toward spherical profile perfection.*

=ppp=

Jerry Van Polen  =b=





=wh2=   A-A-A-A   


RUSSEL ACKOFF :: Common sense .. has the curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. ... Common sense provides a kind of ultimate validation after science has completed its work.

RUSSEL ACKOFF :: He who lives by the crystal ball ends up eating glass.

THOMAS ACQUINAS :: Humility is the first virtue in as much as it removes the obstacles to faith.

BRUCE ALSOP :: The naive idea that in making a work of art, the artist is merely expressing himself cannot be discussed here, but this is not what art is about. Certainly in architecture the idea that an architect's art is an expression of himself can only be sustainable, in a social context, if he actually believes that by expressing *himself* he is benefitting society. Art is not self-expression but in the present social climate many people attempt to relieve the pent-up feelings generated in modern society (and partly as a result of the inhumanity of modern architectural environments), by performing para-artistic activities which may well be a valuable form of psychotherapy. It would be foolish to suppose that the results of this treatment are comparable in nature with the works of art produced by Michelangelo, Mozart, or Wren. They are different in kind. ... Though architects will fiercely deny this, there is not enough talent to go round. The answer to this problem is provided by history. All the great civilizations with their virtues and their faults, have accumulated architectural formats in which two things are possible. *Firstly*, the architect of genius can amplify the format and, *secondly*, the format, carefully studied as a system of design within socially acceptable limits, enables minor architects to do good work.

KEN ARMSTRONG :: Battles are waged by those inside the conflict, not by those on the margins defining the boundaries.

ST. AUGUSTINE :: Happy is the man who, in the course of a complete life, has everything he desires, provided he desires nothing amiss.

ST. AUGUSTINE :: My love is my weight: because of it I move.


=wh2=    B-B-B-B   

FRANCIS BACON :: A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

FRANCIS BACON :: It is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent. ... Nay, an honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked to reclaim them, without the help of the knowledge of evil.

WILLIAM BATESON :: I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares.

A. CRAIG BAIRD :: Like William James, James Winans explained that "what holds attention determines action." To him persuasion was "the process of inducing others to give fair, favorable, or undivided attention to propositions." Ideas which "arouse emotion" hold attention. The best way to fix attention is to awaken desire for the end sought. Desire is a motive.

J. BERNSTEIN :: But then, to repeat, the first reason for teaching science to non-scientists is that many of these non-scientists have a genuine desire to learn about science, and this, after all, is the best reason for teaching anything to anyone.

ROBERT BENCHLEY :: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not.

WENDELL BERRY :: The good farmer's mind, as I understand it, is in a certain critical sense beyond the reach of textbooks and expert advice. Textbooks and expert advice, that is, can be useful to this mind, but only by means of a translation -- difficult but possible, which only this mind can make -- from the abstract to the particular. This translation cannot be made by the expert without a condescension and oversimplification that demean and finally destroy both the two minds and the two kinds of work that are involved. To the textbook writer or researcher, the farm -- the place where knowledge is applied -- is necessarily provisional or theoretical; what he proposes must be found to be *generally* true. For the good farmer, on the other hand, the place where knowledge is applied is minutely particular; not *a* farm but *this* farm, *my* farm, the only place exactly like itself in all the world. To use it without intimate, minutely particular knowledge of it, as if it were *a* farm or *any* farm, is, as good farmers tend to know instinctively, to violate it, to do it damage, finally to destroy it.

HANS BETHE :: In the event the discrepancy persists between theory and experiment, I will be inclined to believe [the experimentalist], and perhaps less inclined to believe [the theorist]. But then, I am a theorist.

SISSELA BOK :: For this reason it is also important to consider other lives, less exemplary perhaps, less single-minded in living up to ideals, always questioning even those ideals, willing to go along with some, not necessarily with all of them. One such individual, Micheal Montaigne, left an extraordinary record of questioning and examination of himself.

SISSELA BOK :: Rather we can learn from their lives, share the sheer spaciousness of their perspectives, deliberate with them, examine the choices they made, the ways in which they tried to live up to their commitments. It is how they choose to live, and the ideals that they express through living that astonishes and inspires. Above all it is their consistency and their sense of direction, building up over an entire life; in a word it is their character.

BRITTANICA ENCYCLOPEDIA :: The factual element in the [best-seller] seems to be necessary to make the reader feel that he is being educated as well as diverted. Indeed, the conditions for the highest sales seem to include the reconciliation of the pornographic and the didactic.

BRITTANICA ENCYCLOPEDIA :: [Entry on poetry] Robert Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left behind in translation, which suggests a criteria of almost scientific refinement: when in doubt, translate; whatever comes through is prose, the remainder is poetry. 

BRITTANICA ENCYCLOPEDIA :: [Entry on poetry] But, for better or worse, [religion or politics are not alone real or true]; and perhaps men care for poetry so much -- if they care at all -- because, at last, it is the only one of man's many mythologies to be aware, and to make him aware, that it, and the others, are indeed mythological. The literary critic I.A Richards, in a deep and searching consideration of this matter, concludes: "It is the privilege of poetry to preserve us from mistaking our notions either for things or for ourselves. Poetry is the completest mode of utterance."

BARAN & SWEEZY :: Once more, it is to Conant's credit to have presented clearly and without embellishments the ruling class's real interest in the state of education. His brutish realism certainly sheds much more light on the prevailing condition than all the verbiage about "the dignity of the individual" and the "spiritual elevation of free men." And yet it is shattering testimony to our society's cultural bankruptcy when a former president of one of the countries greatest universities unceremoniously disposes of 80 to 85 percent of the nation as "ineducable" -- declaring with equal readiness that "a sense of distasteful weariness overtakes me" when it is suggested that we need to say what we mean by education. Conant, for his part, is "ready to define education as what goes on in schools and colleges." If this is not an utter unqualified repudiation of the entire humanist tradition of mankind, then pray what is?

BARAN & SWEEZY :: One need not have a specific idea of a reasonably constructed automobile, a well planned neighborhood, a beautiful musical composition, to recognize that the model changes that are incessantly imposed upon us, the slums that surround us, and the rock-and-roll that blares at us exemplify a pattern of utilization of human and material resources which is inimical to human welfare. One need not have an elaborate plan for international cooperation and coexistence to perceive the horror and destructiveness of war. What is certain is the negative statement which, not withstanding its negativity, constitutes one of the most important insights to be gained from political economy: an output the volume and composition of which are determined by the profit maximization policies of oligopolistic corporations neither corresponds to human needs nor costs the minimum possible amount of human toil and human suffering. 

BARAN & SWEEZY :: The contradiction between the increasing rationality of society's methods of production and the organizations which embody them on the one hand and the undiminished elementality and irrationality in the functioning and perception of the whole creates that ideological wasteland which is the hallmark of monopoly capitalism. But we must insist that this is not, as some apologists of the status quo would have us believe, "the end of ideology"; it is the displacement of the ideology of rising capitalism by the ideology of the general crisis and decline of the world capitalist order. That its main pillar is anti-Communism is neither accidental nor due to a transient conjunction of political forces, any more than is the fact that the main content of the political and economic policies of modern capitalism is armaments and Cold War. These policies can only be *anti*; there is nothing left for them to be *pro*.

BARAN & SWEEZY :: This commitment reflected an important step forward in the development of the forces of production and in the evolution of human consciousness. Only on the basis of equivalent exchange was it possible to realize the more rational utilization of human and material resources which has been the central achievement of capitalism. At the same time, it must never be forgotten that the rationality of quid pro quo is specifically capitalist rationality which at a certain stage of development becomes incompatible with the underlying forces and relations of production. To ignore this and to treat quid pro quo as a universal maxim of rational conduct is in itself an aspect of bourgeois ideology, just as the radical-sounding assertion that under socialism exchange of equivalents can be immediately dispensed with betrays a utopian view of the nature of the economic problems faced by a socialist society.

PATRICK BRANTLINGER :: Freud's speculations about prehistory work to some extent tautologically: by personification, he identifies the negative or antisocial attributes of infancy with primitive social life; he then discovers at the back of primitive social life the most basic of infantile attributes, the Oedipus complex, enacted as a presumably real (though also merely hypothetical or mythic -- Freud will have it both ways) historical event. Then he is able to suggest that the more civilized the abstract person of society grows, the more it is likely to regress, to fall prey to neurosis or barbarism, to turn suicidal.

PATRICK BRANTLINGER :: Sharing many of the values of the esthetic decadents, Morris stands their antidemocratic attitudes upside down and arrives at the ideal of the complete democratization of the arts. He wanted to be an artist for the masses, but he knew he was an artist only for the few, and he thought this would always be the case under capitalism. Given this theoretical predicament, even his praise of barbarism looks like the last refinement of a decadent age, the longing for a rejuvenation that seems both impossibly remote and historically inevitable, close at hand.

REUBEN A. BROWER :: Yet why be disturbed by the style of academic publications, which is bad enough, even in literary fields? Because to read and write English is to hear it, and if standards are not set by the teachers of teachers, what can we expect of the pupils? ... For the critic, literature is first of all an event of speech, articulated and heard.

REUBEN A. BROWER :: What are the impressions of a teacher-critic who moves from the world of literary criticism and close reading into the world of research on methods of reading? He is struck first by much academic prose of the kind Robert Frost characterizes so well: "It's *declare, declare, declare*." We may forgive the flatness in the interest of objectivity, but not the Germanic compounds of which "book reading" is a mild example. We hear too often "language skills," "reading skills," "recognition skills," "content fields," and "content analysis"; and too many plurals such as "language immaturities," "these learnings" and "these recognitions." The climatic sentence in one report ends with: "the desired pupil learning outcomes."

REUBEN A. BROWER :: A survey of the qualities of "mature readers" includes fashionable names for nearly every intellectual and emotive value in the catalogue, with little stress on the value of knowing one's self and of cherishing the inner life. What has been known historically as the life and care of the soul has all but vanished. We find instead that "Strang pointed out a decade ago that most readers have a central core or radix." We may fondly hope that these stony words conceal the bread of life; but no -- the inner is just more outer: "The striking fact about the central core of the readers interviewed in this study is that it was focused, as a rule, on human welfare and social progress." In this way research sets the "normative" aims for maturity. Again there is not a flicker of doubt, no hint that "a broad social outlook," splendid as it may be, is not "core" enough. As often in this literature, "personal development" is recommended in writing devoid of personal accent, with no asides or gestures to assure the reader that the writer knows what "personal" means.

=wh2=   C-C-C-C   

JOHN CARROL :: The Greek *theoria* had religious origins, and carried with it the sense of ecstatic revelation. Its Orphic mood was of passionate and sympathetic contemplation. The Pythagoreans were the first to intellectualize it, to turn it into metaphysics, by changing the object of its viewing from God to truth. Theory is to do with the disclosing of the essential, and in this it has not changed.

JOHN CARROL :: We sociologists have managed to add another layer of fat to bureaucracies already wheezing with corpulence, by selling governments, councils, and even business corporations the line that our presence is indispensable. But we could not advise one person how best to organize one day in his life; somehow we thought that we should be better at masterminding abstract utopias for concrete masses.

JOHN CARROL :: [The parvenu] ... The three investments that have carried him away are science, idealism, and social relevance.

JOHN CARROL :: On again, past a news-stand, stopping in front of a furniture shop inviting the passer-by into any of its simulated living rooms, one of which is guaranteed to suit 'Your' individual taste. Chairs and couches matched to coffee tables, wallpaper and hanging lights to vases and standing lights, ashtrays to reprinted paintings, a world in suspended animation waiting to have life breathed into it by a family walking into its space, occupying it and making of its designed harmonies something more personal.

WILLIAM D.CAREY :: A Soviet Embassy official, winding up an extended tour of duty in a reflective mood, remarked to his luncheon host that, all things considered, Americans and Russians are not all that different except for one thing: Americans have infinitely more choices. He did not add, though he might have, that the quantity of choices matters less than their quality.

G.K. CHESTERTON :: When a man begins to think that the grass will not grow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally ends either in an asylum or on the throne of an emperor.

WINSTON CHURCHILL :: It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

WINSTON CHURCHILL [to his scientific consultant] :: Praise up the humanities, my boy. That will make them think you are broad-minded.

E.M. CIORAN :: In quest of a pattern that might please everyone Nature settled for death, which, as was only to be expected, pleased none.

CLIFFORD :: Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer. .. It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of town. ... It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

CONFUCIUS :: When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge.

COWPER :: Men deal with life as children with their play, who first misuse, then cast their toys away.

SIDNEY COX :: Given time, poetry that wins no more and no better reading is not good poetry, no matter how sensitive the poet, no matter how subtle and how deft his ear, no matter how fresh his patternings.

=wh2=   D-D-D-D   
 
DAEDELUS Winter 1963 :: The missing dimension in most history is an adequate notion of the individual, just as most psychology lacks sufficient conception of the historical. This fact is paradoxical, for history is above all concerned with individuals and groups of individuals; and every historian must inevitably base his selections and interpretations on some notion of individuals and the way they influence one another. ... Still other historians, repelled by such extravagances of prejudgement, have seemed at times to agree with the early Wittgenstein that the world consists in the totality of true propositions, and to have inferred that the historians sole task was to amass as many true propositions as possible, exposing false ones by the way, and relegating historical interpretation to German historicists, Marxists, and freshmen.

REGINALD G. DAMERELL :: Each time I faced my media theory graduate students, I was painfully aware of how they had acquired their notions. Most, it was true, had attended public school systems not nearly as affluent in media equipment as the Amherst schools. Nevertheless, they had been exposed to all the same language about it. Contrary to their notions, language acts so powerfully in the brain that nonexistent things can be given names and people insufficiently literate to recognize a nominalistic fallacy when they hear or see one treat the name as if it stood for something real. The chief business of schools of education is naming things that do not exist and perpetuating them in every conceivable manner, including publishing such travesties of thought as "Illiterates with Doctorates."

DANTE :: Of learning well retained, unfruitful else.

SIR JOHN DENHAM :: Learn to live well, that thou may'st die so too; To live and die is all we have to do.

DESCARTES :: Neither have I found that by means of disputations employed by the schools, any truth has come to be known which was not previously known. For when each side attempts to vanquish its opponent, there is a greater effort made to establish probability than to weigh the evidence on either side. And those who have long been excellent pleaders do not for that reason the best judges make.

JOHN DEWEY :: The consequent divorce of moral ends from scientific study of natural events renders the former impotent wishes, compensatory dreams in consciousness. In *fact* ends or consequences are still determined by fixed habit and the force of circumstance. ... "Idealism" must indeed come first -- the imagination of some better state generated by desire. But unless ideals are to be dreams and idealism a synonym for romanticism and phantasy-building, there must be a most realistic study of actual conditions and the mode or law of natural events, in order to give the imagined or ideal object definite form and solid substance -- to give it, in short, practicality and constitute it a working end.

JARED DIAMOND :: Creativity tends to flower and fade early in fields that require reasoning skills rather than varied knowledge, but late in fields requiring one to unite disparate data. 

EDWIN DOBB :: ... at its heart lies one of the great mysteries of the universe -- that a person who is visibly present one moment can be irretrievably absent the next. Where, indeed, do they go? Perhaps more to the point, where are we who are left behind?

EDWIN DOBB :: I want someone who appreciates the gulf between what I might have been and what I am.

PHILIP DODDRIDGE :: "Live, while you live," the epicure would say, / "And seize the pleasures of the present day;" / "Live, while you live," the sacred preacher cries, /  "And give to God each moment as it flies." / "Lord, in my views let both united be; / I live in *pleasure*, when I live to *Thee*." 

DRYDEN :: Love studies how to please.

DUMOULIN :: There is no difficulty in assuming here -- indeed, this is the real meaning of the thesis of natural mysticism -- that the soul, which experiences its own spirituality in enlightenment, becomes aware, at the foundation of its own spiritual substance, of God's eternal creative spirit. but precisely at this crucial point the descriptions of the *satori* experience stop short. Only the spiritual and absolute character of the realization can be discerned with certainty. The soul in its spiritual self is aware of perceiving the realm of absolute being. .. In accordance with Mahayana philosophy, Zen disciples interpret this experience in monistic terms.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: I am not sure I would intrust reason with the arrangement of a bowl of flowers. In respect of such things "the sane man is nowhere at all as compared to the madman." Who says so? Plato, than whom no more resolute and uncompromising advocate of reason ever trod the earth.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: How then can we suppose our thinking an infallible organ for the discovery of truth? In proportion as you lower the status of mind, the greater, one must conclude, should be your hesitation in accepting its deliverances.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: We may note merely that some philosophers, having done their best to cut off the branch upon which they are sitting, continue with superb confidence to sit upon it.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: Reason till reason fail, till reason itself discover a power superior to its own -- we must stand to that.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: Does our way of looking at things, of seeing and thinking them, carry with it any guarantee of arriving at truth? In Professor Bergson's view the human intellect is an instrument created by nature for action, to see things in such a way as to work upon them, and no doubt admirably adapted to serve our practical needs. Its application, however, beyond this field leads, he thinks, to a distortion of the object under examination.

W. MACNEILE DIXON [quoting tradition?] :: "Words are the daughters of the earth, but things are the sons of heaven." 

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: The human mind is not, as philosophers would have you think, a debating hall, but a picture gallery.

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: One sometimes thinks the less the majority of people reason for themselves the better. "What would become of the world," asks Burke, "if the practice of all moral duties and the foundations of society rested upon having their reasons made clear to every individual?" Yes, indeed, what would become of it? "When the people undertake to reason," as Voltaire said, "all is lost."

W. MACNEILE DIXON :: Whatever height you reach in your philosophic flights you cannot do other than begin with the familiar world. From this planet you must take your departure, and to this planet return. And on this lowly and common ground you have no need to summon to your assistance the soaring minds, the pilots of the upper air. The values of existence, our joys and sorrows, are not calculated or determined for us by the philosophers, the theologians and the moralists. In respect of these values we can make our own estimates, and we do very well without them. They are no better informed than we are.

=wh2=   E-E-E-E   

ALBERT EINSTEIN [quoted by A. Pais?]:: The essential of the being of a man of my type lies precisely in *what* he thinks and *how* he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.

ALBERT EINSTEIN :: I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of things which exist.

ALBERT EINSTEIN :: But above all stands the marble smile of inexorable nature, who has endowed us with more longing than mind.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Art is the path of the creator to his work.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: The sense of nature is inexhaustible. You think you know the meaning of these tropes of nature, and to-day you come into a new thought, and lo! all nature converts itself into a symbol of that, and you see it has been chanting that song like a cricket ever since the creation. ... 'T was the moral of the river, the rock and the ocean. The river, the rock and the ocean say, "Guess again."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Here is the difference between the poet and the mystic [so-called], that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. ... And the mystic must be steadily told, -- All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, -- universal signs, instead of these village symbols, -- and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON :: Is his ambition pure? Then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things will tell none. ... Dear to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life; -- but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON [attributed] :: Insist on yourself...never imitate. Don't create a division between what you present to others and what you are inside. Stand for yourself, not to impose yourself upon others, but to let them know where they can find you.

T.S. ELIOT :: No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.

T.S. ELIOT :: Second, the conscious impotence of rage / At human folly, and the laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.

JASON EPSTEIN :: The avant-kitsch, as one of my friends calls it, that we knock down so many forests to publish is in the long run not likely to be worth displacing all those sparrows from their nests, and if one measures the political writing that we tend to get these days against the lovely trees that are ground to pulp on which to print them, who would not prefer to keep the woods intact?

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER :: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of all its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

=wh2=   F-F-F-F   


MICHAEL FARADAY :: Remember to do one thing at once. Also to finish a thing.

RICHARD P. FEYNMAN :: The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... they overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be *consistent with everything else we know* ...

FINCK [in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty] :: [Goethe in autobiography:] Nothing is so calculated to make us disgusted with life as a return of Love.... The notion of the eternal and infinite, which forms its basis and support, is destroyed; it appears to us transitory, like everything that recurs. [Finck in reply:] Very few men, if any, who are in Love a second or third time, sit in a corner to muse over the transitoriness of passion till they become "disgusted with life." On the contrary, they feel convinced that the preceding infatuation was, after all, not real indomitable Love, such as they now experience toward Daisy No. 2; which second infatuation they absolutely *know* is the genuine article; just as they *know* that no one ever before loved so deeply and devotedly.

LAWRENCE FOSS :: Theories explain why empirical things obey empirical laws to the extent that they do.

LAWRENCE FOSS :: Science is common-sense gone systematic.

WALLACE FOWLIE :: Prayer is the poem of the mystic, the tangible achievement of of his liberty.

PETER G.O. FREUND :: This is partly explained by the fact that I considered the conjecture "obvious." I have since learned that the obvious can be of great importance since it is subjective: what is obvious to someone may not be so to others. One can be blinded by the very light one sees. It is this gauging of one's ideas that I find one of the hardest tasks in science, and I would not be surprised if this were the case in other fields as well.

SIGMUND FREUD :: The first person who hurled a curse at his adversary, instead of a stone, was the founder of civilization.

FOLKLORE :: If wishes were horses beggars would ride.

FOLKSONG :: The lessons that we learn / Are the bridges that we burn / Always with us, but / behind us just the same.

=wh2=   G-G-G-G   


GALILEO :: Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our gaze -- I mean the universe -- ... The book is written in the mathematical language.

E. GIBBON :: ... although the progress of civilization has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favorable to the virtue of chastity.

E. GIBBON :: The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.

W.M. GLOAG :: If labor be the penalty of sin / I would transgress, the penalty to win. ........ He may have failed His meaning to express, / And when He seemed to curse have meant to bless.

MAX GLUCKMAN :: A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.

GOETHE [motto] :: Without haste, but without rest.

GOETHE [in Faust]:: I've studied now Philosophy / And Jurisprudence, Medicine / And even, alas, Theology / From end to end with labor keen; / And here, poor fool; with all my lore / I stand no wiser than before.

GOETHE :: Thus I saw that most men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and they worship error when it affords them a subsistence.

TIMOTHY GOULD :: There is an air of paradox in this formulation which should not be dissipated too quickly.

ROBERT RANKE GRAVES :: To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. 

ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI :: Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

=wh2=   H-H-H-H   

J.B.S. HALDANE :: A very large number of alleged discoveries are not confirmed by subsequent workers. One well-known English popularizer of science has a perfect genius for picking out discoveries of this kind for announcement to the public. If, like myself, the writer is engaged in research, and has seen a number of his own bright ideas go west, he is less likely to fall into this particular trap.

JOHN HALDANE :: In scientific thought we adopt the simplest theory which will explain all the facts under consideration and enable us to predict new facts of the same kind.

SIDNEY J. HARRIS :: Careful observation of others can teach us to avoid their mistakes, but no observation can prevent us from making our own mistakes.

SIDNEY J. HARRIS :: "No," [the professor replied], "logic must be taught as part of every course, not as an independent study. We learn how to think by dealing with specifics, not with forms or abstractions." ... Obviously, if you begin with a false premise, the more logical your argument, the more certain it is that your conclusion will be false. What we need to learn and examine are our prior assumptions more than their logical implications.

SIDNEY J. HARRIS :: Although everyone holds up justice as a model, what we really want is something less than justice for those we dislike and something more than justice for ourselves.

MARK HARRIS :: "My grounds for wanting to let him have both fists in succession in the middle of the face," Frost wrote of a certain newspaperman, "are chiefly that he stated me so much worse than I know how to state myself."

MICHAEL HARRINGTON :: To be poor in America is to be unable to afford your pride, and there is still plenty of pride in these valleys, even if there is little money.

MICHAEL HARRINGTON :: Is this history about to be erased? Will the fate of its descendants be like that of the Jones and Laughlin plant, which lies along the river like a beached whale? Who will buy from Jones and Laughlin? Who will hire beached people?

JOSEPH K. HART :: Can the school ever get back into the life, in this organic way, and relate itself to the actual world of the child, and become the means of organizing the implicit environment of the child in such ways that all these results shall be attained: the ever-more-inclusive self shall be called out, the more explicit consciousness shall be gained, the more complete content of materials for organization shall be secured, and the definite process of organization shall be carried forward? The answer to this question is a problem in social pedagogy; but the answer to it is essential to a final solution of the problem of moral education. So moral education merges even on its formal side over into the larger question of social pedagogy. It is certain that many of the ideals of the advocates of "moral education" today are impracticable; for there is little use in filling a boy with "moral ideals," most, or all, of which he must lose in the actual work of the world. Moral education must not come at the problem from the extrinsic point of view. The life of the growing child is a function of the life of the social whole. To make him officiously "moral" is to  make a fanatic of him. His morality must be a power of control of experience within the experience itself -- a power of control which is based on rich content of experience, and power to organize that content into interpretation at need. This is the real work of the school, or of the educative forces of the community.

DOLORES HAYDEN :: In the United States some of the most influential intellectuals of the 1840's ... adopted Fourier's ideas as residents of Brook Farm. When they built themselves a phalanstery to house an experimental community of both workers and intellectuals, their friend Thoreau came over from Concord to West Roxbury to have a look at the imported new design for collective housing, childcare, and dining. Fresh from the woods around Walden Pond, Thoreau shook his head and muttered, "Huts, huts are safe." Of course, he went to dine with his mother or sister whenever his hut lost its appeal.

F. von HAYEK :: There are no better terms available to describe this difference between the approach of the natural and the social sciences than to call the former "objective" and the latter "subjective."

HEGEL :: It is not the concern of philosophy to produce religion in any individual. Its existence is, on the contrary, presupposed as forming what is fundamental in everyone. So far as man's essential nature is concerned, nothing new is to be introduced into him. To try to do this would be as absurd as to give a dog printed writings to chew, under the idea that in this way you could put mind into it. He who has not extended his spiritual interests beyond the hurry and bustle of this finite world, nor succeeded in lifting himself above this life through aspiration, through the anticipation, through the feeling of the Eternal, and who has not yet gazed upon the pure ether of the soul, does not possess in himself that element which it is our object here to comprehend.

HEGEL :: [Art] fulfills its *highest* task only when it has placed itself in the same circle with religion and philosophy and is only one way of bringing to consciousness and expressing the *divine*, the deepest interests of man, the most encompassing truths of the spirit.

HEGEL :: We must, however, not consider this merely an accidental misfortune which befell art from without, due to the need of the present age, the prosaic sense, the lack of interest, etc. ... for interest arises only when there is fresh activity. The spirit labors over objects only as long as there is something mysterious and not yet revealed in them.

HERACLITUS :: If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out, and difficult.

LARRY HEINEMAN :: To say that we could have won the war is to say that we did not fill our hearts with enough hate, that we did not bomb them enough, destroy enough villages, strafe them enough.

E.D. HIRSCH, JR. :: Estimable cultures exist that are ignorant of Shakespeare and the First Amendment. Indeed, estimable cultures exist that are entirely ignorant of reading and writing. On the other hand, no culture exists that is ignorant of its own traditions. 

HOBBES :: Hell is truth seen too late.

HUMBOLDT :: First, people will deny a thing; then they will belittle it; they they will decide that it had been known long ago.

VICTOR HUGO :: Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

THOMAS HUXLEY :: Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

ERIC HOFFER :: You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy. [Sometimes attributed as: You can never get enough of what you don't really want.] 
  
=wh2=   I-I-I-I   


=wh2=   J-J-J-J   

MAX JAMMER [quoting J.J.COUPLING] :: It is better to debate something without settling it than to settle something without debating it.

JULIAN JAYNES :: Bohr's *theory* was that all atoms were similar to his *model*. ... A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model.

THOMAS JEFFERSON [possibly out-of-context]:: I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies ...

SAMUEL JOHNSON :: Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

NICHOLAS JOSE :: The completeness these writers move toward is different, a matter of working for a coherent, comprehensive understanding, scrupulously eschewing the simplicities of myth and, instead, reckoning with the resistance to coherence exerted by the stubborn, broken, actual world. It is a drama of hope that is enacted, but a hope of a kind different from that which allows visionary futures and golden endings. The impulse toward pacific enlightenment and a changed world, in the works of these writers, is tempered at every turn by the recognition that such hopes are only realizable as they are grounded in a sharp accounting of actual circumstance. For a novelist, there is at once an artistic and a social challenge. To make hope substantial -- not as a dream but as a potentiality for moral and ethical growth, already inherent yet requiring struggle for its realization -- it is necessary for a writer to see without falsification what is, in order to reach minimally for what might be. ... From that glimpse of a real starting point, knowledge becomes possible, whence true hope.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs; and there will be a very widespread tendency in men of vigorous nature to enjoy a certain amount of uncertainty in their philosophic creed, just as risk lends a zest to worldly activity. ... Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by large numbers.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Thus the evolutionist foundation of ethics is purely objective only to the herd of nullities whose votes count for zero in the march of events. But for others, leaders of opinion or potentates, and in general those to whose actions position or genius gives a far-reaching import, and to the rest of us, each in his measure, -- whenever we espouse a cause we contribute to the determination of the evolutionary standard of right. The truly wise disciple of this school will then admit faith as an ultimate ethical factor. Any philosophy which makes such questions as, What is the ideal type of humanity? What shall be reckoned virtues? What conduct is good? depend on the question, What is going to succeed? -- must needs fall back on personal belief as one of the ultimate conditions of the truth. For again and again success depends on energy of act; energy again depends on faith that we shall not fail; and that faith in turn on faith that we are right, -- which faith thus verifies itself.

WILLIAM JAMES :: For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must [in addition to 'banishing uncertainty from the future'] define the future *congruously with our spontaneous powers*. ... Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself. ... [Also:] Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for. This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare -- In nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have power, but no motives.

WILLIAM JAMES :: To preach scepticism as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in the presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?   

WILLIAM JAMES [attribued] :: ... when a thing was new people said 'It is not true'. Later, when its truth became obvious, people said, 'Anyway, it is not important', and when its importance could not be denied, people said, 'Anyway, it is not new'. 

WILLIAM JAMES :: What holds attention determines action ... When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us, the tendency is for no images but such as are congruous with it to come up. If others by chance offer themselves, they are instantly smothered and crowded out.

WILLIAM JAMES :: We do not love these men of the future keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizing ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at present.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Religious history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has lapsed from the minds of men. Some articles of faith, however have maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions' to tell just which hypotheses these are. Meanwhile the freest competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed. They ought therefore not to lie hid under its bushel, indulged in quietly with friends.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Hemholtz's immortal works on the eye and ear are to a great extent little more than a commentary on the law that practical utility wholly determines which parts of our sensations we shall be aware of, and which parts we shall ignore. We notice or discriminate an ingredient of sense only so far as we depend upon it to modify our actions.

WILLIAM JAMES :: As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. ... Why do so few 'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? ... if this very man had been shown something which as a scientist he might *do* with telepathy, he might not only have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough.

WILLIAM JAMES :: At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is at best a learned fool.

WILLIAM JAMES :: But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men. It does not follow, because recklessness may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to them. What *should* be preached is courage weighted with responsibility, -- such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize disaster in case they met defeat.

WILLIAM JAMES :: The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in thought, is the philosophic passion *par excellence*; and any character or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other determinations may by him be overlooked.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized method would be a philosophical achievement of first-rate importance. But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being available for few persons and at few times, and even in these being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical pertinancy, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy. Existence will then be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally unsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophical industry of the race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.

WILLIAM JAMES :: The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the difference between the easy-going mood and the strenuous mood. When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal may be obtained.

WILLIAM JAMES :: Skepticism in moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions.

WILLIAM JAMES :: [of the drive for universality vs. the drive to know particular details:] A man's philosophical attitude is determined by the balance in him of these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or entirely subordinates one to the other.

WILLIAM JAMES :: It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need the critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten.

WILLIAM JAMES :: [in characterizing Hegel] The world is philosophy's own, -- a single block, of which, if she once get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom to obey her will; ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms. ... ...   The insolence of sway, the [hubris] on which gods take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Phillip II are called monsters. But when an *intellect* is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong. Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of liability to excess. And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?

=wh2=   K-K-K-K  

ALAN KAY :: Simple things should be simple; complex things should be possible.

JOHN KEATS :: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. / That is all ye know on earth, / and all ye need to know.

WILLIAM KIRK KILPATRICK :: Two basic needs: for reward, for story...   The thrill at the idea of reaping a reward of approval from one you want very much to please may not be worthy of a stoic or of those psychologically minded persons who desire perfect self-sufficiency, but for most of us it fits a childlike and very human hope for recognition.

LAWRENCE KOHLBERG :: I have frequently heard the question, "Why King, not Carmichael or Brown?" It is not the people who preach power and hate who get assassinated. They are not a threat; they are like the worst in others. It is the people who are too good for others to take, who question the basis on which people erect their paltry sense of goodness, who die.

JONATHAN KOZOL :: We are one nation. We live as one. We undergo the danger of mortality as one. Only those whose heads follow their hearts into a nineteenth century nostalgia for the insular existence of well separated regions of reality can still adhere to the dangerous illusion of a nation that exists, or can continue to exist, by governance of town committees or of county jurisdictions in those areas of finance and decision that have power to protect or else destroy us all.

JONATHAN KOZOL :: The necessary question, nonetheless, must be addressed: What is it that these networks are connecting? We cannot build a network out of fragmentized defeat. Ivan Illich once observed that, as societies lose faith in God, they build more intricate cathedrals. As literacy proprietors awaken to the failure of their dreams and the aridity of their ideals, they join in coalitions. What do these networks literally do? They network nothingness. They form a coalition of historic losers. They "keep in touch" -- or so they claim? With what? With one another's failure. Unless there is a sweeping transformation of the ways in which the current crisis is defined, and in the nature of the goals that we pursue, universal adult literacy in the United States will not find its genesis in groups like these.

PAUL KRASSNER :: ... a greater variety of gods not to believe in.

ELIZABETH KUBAL :: With her eyes alone, Bancroft gives voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be -- and that we're ordinary because of it. 

LEONARD KUHI :: [Asked, "Are the best minds going into disciplines like engineering, business, law, or other professional or pre-professional studies?"] I don't know if the best minds are; I think it's probably true that many of the best students go into these areas. ...

=wh2=   L-L-L-L   

REGINA LEEDS :: I don't know a single happy couple whose relationship is based on anything I see on television.

LICKONA :: The findings ... suggest that while Piaget's analysis of the cognitive basis of moral judgment is well formed, his speculations about its affective side are on shaky grounds. Young children do not...stand in awe of the authority of adults or the rules they repeatedly set forth. ... The research ... indicates that loyalty to and genuine respect for personal authority, like respect for rules, is something that children must *develop* during the early school years (ages 4-7) and something that accompanies *advance*, not immaturity, on moral dimensions such as judging the rightness of an action apart from its external consequences. The child's early obedience orientation in moral thinking appears to be based less on respect for the moral status of adults than on simple recognition of their superior power.

C.S. LEWIS :: the inconsolable longing ... You have never *had* it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for."

=wh2=   M-M-M-M   

MALCOLM MARGOLIN :: Patrick Henry (of "liberty or death" fame) once said, "Since the achievement of our independence, he is the greatest patriot who stops the most gullies." I used to think this statement a bit outlandish, but the more I've gotten to know about land, gullies, and patriotism, the more I've come to agree.

ARNOLD J. MELTSNER :: The people in a society, in order to keep their sanity, only allow a few problems to perplex them at any one time. If everything was a problem to be confronted and solved, then life would be impossible, or at least not terribly pleasant to live. Thus a great many of us have strong motivations toward being selective about our concerns. In order not to worry excessively, we assume there is not much to worry about. From an emotional and cognitive point of view, this psychological adjustment seems sensible. From a societal point of view, one cannot help but wonder about the wisdom of our individual choices. Are we paying attention to the critical problems, to the problems that will make significant differences in our lives and in our childrens lives?

SYDNEY MENDEL :: If [D.H.] Lawrence often wrote very badly, as T.S Eliot claims, the reason was that he put too much trust in his *daimon*, and did not sufficiently practice the discipline desiderated by Hulme. When Lawrence is in his ranting prophetico-dogmatic vein, we are tempted to cry out, in Cromwell's words: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY :: Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.

FRITZ MARTI :: God is the *question* of prayer.

CZESLAW MILOSZ :: I do not understand my life (who does?). Nor my books, and I shall not pretend to understand them. All bespeak a strenuous self-discipline -- of which it can be said that those who lack it yearn for it, while those who have it to spare know how much is lost through it and long to be released from it, to proceed by impulse and the hand's own free momentum.

BENJAMIN de MOTT :: There are purposes to be served by confronting the bad and the unliving in the classroom; the sight of contempt for the cheap and meretricious is not always an ugly or useless sight; the student who commits himself to the investigation of some popcultural lie has not necessarily polluted his mind. To repeat, the spirit of such enterprises *is* combative; poems and stories do breath easiest in unembattled air; and, returning to the beginning, Isaac Rosenfeld surely was correct in asserting that the struggle needs to be conducted "joyously."

LEWIS MUMFORD :: We may well say of post-historic man, driving himself and all about him to destruction, what Captain Ahab says to himself, in a sudden moment of illumination, in Melville's prophetic "Moby-Dick": "All my means are sane: my motives and objects mad."

LEWIS MUMFORD :: Despite the foreboding that every intelligent mind felt when it contemplated the barbarism of the industrial age, inimical to any culture except that which grew out of its own inhuman absorption in abstract matter and abstract power, the dominant note of the period was hope.

=wh2=   N-N-N-N   

NATURE [31 May 1984] :: It is a well-known failing of even the best intentioned systems for distributing money for research that peer review is harder to trust as the scale of projects grows.

RODNEY NEEDHAM :: People do ask themselves the question What is it all about? and they are not to be deterred from seeking an answer by quibbles about grammatical fictions or the implications of the copula. Some of the frustration they suffer is in consequence of the fact that those to whom they turn for answers are professionally committed to ideologies which are dogmatic or else do not accommodate that kind of question.

RODNEY NEEDHAM :: The view of man that is provided by the neutral scrutiny of comparatism may be thought to resemble that depicted by Samuel Beckett in *Le Depeupleur*, on a vaster canvas, and to some this vision will seem austere, grim, and daunting. Under another aspect, however, it can prove bracing and morally salutary. An instructive parallel can be drawn with the different reactions to the infinite spaces of the universe. Their eternal silence much affrightened Pascal, but the starry heavens filled Kant with wonder and awe, like the moral law within him. (Whitehead thought this a triumph of the obvious over philosophy.)

WILLIAM L. NEUMAN :: The inability of leaders to recognize and work within the limits of power to achieve the achievable seems to be a common psychological weakness of men who direct the behavior of nations. Although it is a well-known adage that a coat must be cut to fit the cloth, in the process of tailoring national policy the assumption tends to be that there is unlimited cloth. This is particularly true as a nation grows in strength and when the early, essential caution of a weak power begins to be lost. ... The result of this lack of caution, of unlimited optimism is always overextension; the establishment of national interests and policies which are incompatible with existent national strength. Even when overextension is belatedly recognized, it is still difficult to effect a strategic retreat or change of course before being challenged and routed. Prestige and national pride frustrate the efforts of prudent heads to trim commitments and pare off untenable policies. The history of international relations is a grim gallery of this sort of failure to act before being routed in what may be a heroic but futile gesture. The defeat of France in Indo-China and of the French efforts to retain Algeria offer only a well-known recent example.

WILLIAM L. NEUMAN :: The new Chinese government was astute enough to realize that the evangelical hopes of the Christian world could be used to their advantage. When in the spring of 1913 the Republic was still unrecognized because of its instability, an official world appeal was sent to Christian churches to dedicate a day of prayer for the welfare of the new government and for its recognition by the powers. American churches responded enthusiastically to what seemed to be a victory for Christianity. A Sunday in April of 1913 was set aside for this act of devotion. President Wilson told his cabinet that he did not know when he had been so deeply stirred as he was by China's call for prayers. When one of the cabinet suggested that it was a play for political support, Wilson rejected the idea. Secretary Bryan said, "It is an extraordinary tribute to Christianity." Whatever the sincerity of the appeal, it brought results. Less than a month after the prayers the United States recognized the new government. The appeals for divine support had also been supplemented by petitions to Wilson from American business interests, chambers of commerce, and many church organizations.

JOHN HENRY (CARDINAL) NEWMAN :: Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk: then you may hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

NIETZSCHE :: Oh my animals [replied Zarathustra], chatter on like this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear you chattering: where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and elusive bridges between things which are eternally apart? ... To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge. ... for me -- how should there be any outside myself? There is no outside. But all sounds make us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget. Have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all the deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows.

NIETZSCHE :: Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only *facts*," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only *interpretations*.

NIETZSCHE :: Behold the superfluous! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the sages for themselves; "education" they call their theft -- and everything turns to sickness and misfortune for them. ... Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves.

=wh2=   O-O-O-O   

OWEN :: All things I thought I knew, but now confess / The more I know I know, I know the less.

GEORGE ORWELL :: To see what is front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: The compass throws a bridge between man and the cardinal points.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: When attention is fixed upon an object for a greater length of time or with greater frequency than normal, we speak about "mania." The maniac is a man with an abnormal attention-span. Almost all great men have been maniacs, except that the consequences of their mania, of their "fixed idea," seem useful or commendable to us. ... Moreover, there are different preferences of attention which constitute the very basis of character. ... This formula might well be accepted: tell me where your attention lies and I will tell you who you are.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: No one has ever discovered a physical law simply by intending to do so: the discovery may more accurately be said to come to light in the guise of an unexpected windfall, a by-product of the worker's congenial and disinterested preoccupation with the phenomena of nature.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Not being, but well-being, is the fundamental necessity of man, the necessity of necessities. ... Man is the animal that considers necessary only the objectively superfluous.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: In history, as soon as the man of action puts in an appearance and is discussed and pampered, it means that a period of rebarbarization looms. Like the albatross on the eve of a storm, the man of action appears on the scene at the dawn of every crisis.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Authors that yesterday seemed excellent appear naive today because the present reader is a much better psychologist than the old author. (Who knows whether the political confusion in Europe, which to my mind is much more alarming and deep-seated than is now apparent, does not spring from the same causes? Who knows whether States of the modern type are now possible only while the citizens live in a state of psychological dumbness?)

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: I [will] probably be wrong in nine-tenths of my ideas; but this sacrifice of making a mistake in good faith is almost the only public virtue which the writer, as such, can offer his fellow man. The rest are the empty gestures of a soapbox orator or a cafe benchwarmer, cheap heroics which do not spring from the special organ of his profession: intelligence. (For ten years, many Spanish writers have sought in politics a pretext for not being intelligent.)

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: There is an essential ambiguity in human gestures, and when someone raises the palms of his hands together, we do not know whether it is to bury himself in prayer or to throw himself into the sea. The same gesture prefaces two opposite adventures.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: We ought now to mention that there are two irreducible kinds of men: those who experience happiness as a feeling of being outside themselves, and those who, on the contrary, feel fulfilled only when self possessed. ... These two classes of men go different ways in every area of life.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: When pain lessens it becomes pleasure; when pleasure is repeated it grows wearisome or painful.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: It does not matter what this attitude may be -- wise or unlearned, positive or negative. What does matter is that each man should in each case think what he actually thinks. At best the humblest peasant is so clear about his actual convictions, so well coordinated within himself, so sure of what he thinks about the reduced catalogue of things which makes up his environment, that he has hardly any problems. And the deep repose of his life amazes us, the dignified serenity with which he lets his fate flow on. There are very few of these countrymen left now; culture has reached them, and so has the topical, and that which we called socialization; and they are beginning to live on ideas received from the outside and to believe things they do not believe. Farewell to deep quietude, farewell to life enmeshed with itself, farewell to serenity, farewell to the genuine.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Saint Thomas went straight to the problems of his day without playing games or indulging in the heavy pleasures of the technician, of the intellectual. He moved to solve them because as a man he felt it was necessary that they be solved by the intellectual whom he carried within himself. Saint Thomas was not very acute. His gift was good sense. Duns Scotus was more acute and so were many others after him, notably Occam. But it is not man's highest mission to be acute; he is required simply to resolve his life loyally and sincerely. Saint Thomas did not allow the intellectual within him to play an intellectual's games, did not let himself be made a buffoon in his own image -- he accepted as a man the obligation of intellectuality which his period imposed upon him.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Lust is not an instinct, but a specifically human creation -- like literature. In both, the most important factor is imagination. Why don't psychiatrists study lust from this angle -- as a literary genre which has its origins, laws, evolution and limits?

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: One can live without reasoning geometrically, physically, economically, or politically. All that is pure reason; and humanity has in fact lived for thousands of years without it, or with only the rudiments. The actual possibility of living without pure reason makes many modern men wish to rid themselves of the duty of reasoning, refuse with active disdain to use reason. And this, when one is faced with the bigotry of pure reason, of "culturalism," is not difficult. We will soon see that every crisis begins in this manner. The fifteenth century also started with a cynical refusal to use reason. It is curious that every crisis begins with a period of cynicism. And the first crisis of the western world, that of Greco-Roman history, begins by inventing and propagating cynicism. The phenomenon is one of desperate monotony and repetition. But when men find themselves happiest in that apparent -- and so easy -- liberation, so do they feel themselves most hopelessly prisoners of that other and irremediable reason; of that from which -- whether you like it or not -- it is impossible to escape because it is one and the same thing as living: vital reason.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: The philosophies of the past have an attraction of a similar kind for us. Their clear and simple schematic pattern, their ingenious illusion of being discoveries of truth in its entirety, the confidence with which they rely on formulae which they imagine incontrovertible, convey the impression of a closed circle, defined and definitive, where there are no more problems to solve and everything is satisfactorily determined. There is nothing more pleasant than to spend a few hours in such clear and mild atmospheres. But when we return to our own thoughts and again react to the universe through our own particular sensibility we perceive that the world defined by the philosophies we have been examining was not really the world, but simply the horizon of the philosophers responsible. What they interpreted as the limit of the universe, beyond which there was nothing, was only the curve that closed the landscape their particular perspective afforded them.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Little by little science, ethics, art, religious faith and juristic standards become separated from the person considering them and begin to acquire a consistency of their own, an independent value, prestige and authority. A time comes when life itself, the generator of all these conceptions, bows down before them, yields to its own creation and enters its service. Culture has become objective and set itself up in opposition to the subjectivity which has engendered it. ... At this point culture comes to its fullest maturity. But certain limits have to be maintained to such an opposition to life, to such a separation between subject and object. Culture only survives while it continues to receive a constant flow of vitality from those who practice it. ... In ages of reform like our own ... culture has to face the opposition of self-consistency, spontaneity and vitality.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: This shows that the perspective of life is different from the perspective of science. During the modern age, the two have been confused: this very confusion *is* the modern age. In it man makes science, pure reason, serve as a basis for the system of his convictions. He lives on science. 

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: One feels a profound disdain for everything, or almost everything, which was believed yesterday; but the truth is there are no new positive beliefs with which to replace the traditional ones. ... he tries this side, and then the other, but without complete convictions; he pretends to himself that he is convinced of this or that. ... This last is very important. During periods of crisis, positions which are false or feigned are very common. Entire generations falsify themselves to themselves; that is to say, they wrap themselves up in artistic styles, in doctrines, in political movements which are insincere and which fill the lack of genuine convictions. When they get to be about forty years old, those generations become null and void, because at that age one can no longer live on fictions. One must set oneself within the truth.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Such a dissociation between standards and their permanent translation into action would never have come about if we had been taught, together with the imperative of objectivity, that of self-consistency, which comprises the whole series of vital imperatives. It is necessary that at all times we should be sure that we do in fact believe what we presume we believe; that the ethical ideal we accept "officially" does in fact interest and stimulate the deeper energies of our personality. If we had been in the habit of so clarifying our inward situation from time to time, we should have automatically exercised due selection in culture and eliminated all such forms of it as are incompatible with life, utopian, and conducive to hypocrisy.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: When one despairs of any form of life, the first solution which always occurs, as though by mechanically dialectic impulse of the human mind, the most obvious, the simplest, is to turn all values inside out.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: In the political sphere, supposing the analogy to be a perfect one, Lorentz would say: Nations may perish, provided we keep our principles. Einstein, on the other hand, would maintain: We must look for such principles as will preserve nations, because that is what principles are for.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: For a thing is above all the series of conditions which make it possible.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: I could at one time have had all the youth of Spain behind me, with one word, but that word would have been false.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Now, desire and pleasure imply a taut and profound acquiescence in life. Pleasure, as Nietzsche said, "longs for eternity, longs for deep, deep eternity," its aspiration is to perpetuate the moment of delight and it cries "*da capo*" to the reality which charms it. Accordingly Christianity makes the desire of pleasure, *cupiditas*, its capital sin.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: Here you have the origin of history. Man makes history because, faced with a future which is not in his hands, he finds that the only thing he has, that he possesses, is his past. Of this alone he can make use; this is the small ship in which he sets sail toward the unquiet future that lies ahead.

JOSE ORTEGA Y'GASSET :: This present essay is nothing more than a preliminary skirmish against this triumphant man, and the announcement that a certain number of Europeans are about to turn energetically against his attempt to tyrannise. For the moment it is only a first skirmish, the frontal attack will come later, perhaps very soon, and in a very different form from that adopted by this essay. The frontal attack must come in such a way that the mass-man cannot take precautions against it; he will see it before him and will not suspect that it precisely is the frontal attack.

=wh2=   P-P-P-P   

PLATO :: But whether such a one exists, or will ever exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.

PLATO :: For when a man consorts with the many, and exhibits to them his poem or other work of art or the service which he has done to the State, making them his judges when he is not obliged, the so called necessity of Diomede will oblige him to produce whatever they praise.

LETTY POGREBIN :: There is a torturous double message at work here: a prohibition against male intimacy but *for* masculine loyalty; a social imperative to keep men attached to women -- to keep men heterosexual -- by offering women's nurture, while also keeping men attached to other men -- mutual guardians of male institutions and power -- yet condemning "too much" affection; a prescription for enough friendship to ensure male solidarity but not so much that it depletes male energies that must go to country, corporation, and the nuclear family.

LETTY POGREBIN :: Gardner, a college professor observes: "One's place in the academic hierarchy is so important that there's almost no possibility of an honest, selfless friendship taking root in this setting. Ambition eats up whatever intimacy might develop between scholars. We spend so much time on superficial collegueship and so little on real intimacy. We read and cite each other's work and recommend each other for tenure -- or not -- but we don't share our feelings or talk about our worries or mistakes. We're out to impress, not to help." Gardner's self-awareness is atypical. Most academics are taken by surprise when they change universities and their ex-colleagues become instant ex-friends. "Our camaraderie is based on loyalty to the institution, not to each other," he says.

LETTY POGREBIN :: Fun is the third presence in a rowboat with two guys fishing at dawn. ... Loyalty is the other prize in the Cracker Jack box of male friendship. Men who make do without affection and nurture get a splashy payoff: They promise to save each other's lives. Male loyalty feeds on heroism, on oaths, initiations, and codes of conduct, on the romance of blood brotherhood, on legends of rescue, danger, and sacrifice, on myth and melodrama.

HUGH PRATHER :: "Next time I will. From now on I will." What makes me think I am wiser today than I will be tomorrow?

PASCAL :: The heart has its reason which reason knows not.

PROUST :: The only true paradise is the paradise we have lost.

=wh2=   Q-Q-Q-Q   

=wh2=   R-R-R-R   

RABELAIS :: Then I began to think, that it is very true which is commonly said, that the one-half of the world knoweth not how the other half liveth.

RENAN :: To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people. ... In the past, an inheritance of glories and regrets; in the future, one and the same programme to carry out. ... The existence of a nation is a daily plebescite.

RESURGENCE [Oct. 1985] :: Non-violent civil disobedience is a tactic perfected by powerless out-groups to get power -- especially people in colonial India and black people in the Southwest. It is now being used in anti-nuclear-power and anti-nuclear-weapons work by people who are not part of powerless out-groups, by people who by virtue of their backgrounds have or could have a lot of power. ... Educated middle-class white people in fact. Is non-violent civil disobedience the best tactic for members of the powerful in-group to use? Are we faking powerlessness because we are uncomfortable with the potential power that we have and that we don't know how to use?

WILLIAM E. RIDDLE :: Our heritage determines, to an over-riding degree, the way we approach problem solving and the general nature of our solutions. Asked to consult on increasing the productivity of a chicken farm, an engineer will think in terms of harnesses and conveyor belts... What would prove most effective is an amalgamation of all these views and, since a team would be a disaster, the farmer should look for a consultant well-versed in all these concerns.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD :: We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.

RICHARD RORTY :: The pragmatist, on the other hand, thinks that the quest for a universal human community will be self-defeating if it tries to preserve the elements of every intellectual tradition, all the "deep" intuitions everybody has ever had. It is not to be achieved by an attempt at commensuration, at a common vocabulary that isolates the common human essence of Achilles and the Buddha, Lavoisier and Derrida. Rather, it is to be reached, if at all, by acts of making rather than of finding -- by poetic rather than Philosophical achievement. The culture that will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one that does equal justice to each, but one that looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors. So the pragmatist's quarrel with the intuitive realist should be about the *status* of intuitions -- about their *right* to be respected -- as opposed to how particular intuitions might be "synthesized" or "explained away." To treat his opponent properly, the pragmatist must begin by admitting that the realist intuitions in question are as deep and compelling as the realist says they are. But he should then try to change the subject by asking, "And what would we *do* about such intuitions -- extirpate them, or find a vocabulary that does justice to them?"

RICHARD RORTY :: It is rather, the question of whether we can give up what Stanly Cavell calls the "possibility that one among endless true descriptions of me tells me who I am." The hope that one of them will do just that is the impulse which, in our present culture, drives the youth to read their way through libraries, cranks to claim that they have found The Secret that makes all things plain, and sound scientists and scholars, toward the ends of their lives, to hope that their work has "philosophical implications" and "Universal human significance."

ISAAC ROSENFELD :: The truth is, we must often struggle and always be prepared to struggle ... to keep alive [the] inherent sense for what is lively and good in art. How to conduct this battle joyously, in such a way that we will ... not alienate [people] from the life of the mind, is a problem which it may take genius to solve.

BERTRAND RUSSELL :: Another advantage of the efficient regime is its trim and tidy neatness. Often it seems as if the Utopian is more disgusted with the haphazard messiness or ordinary life than with its deprivation and misery. ... For while it is true that only saints should be trusted with autocracy, only angels could prosper in an anarchy; and the Utopians lean with more confidence toward the saintly than the angelic.

=wh2=   S-S-S-S   

SANTYANA :: To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

JULIET SCHOR :: If more is better, discontent will not be far behind.

SECOND CITY :: Let us look at this objectively for a moment ... [namely] as I see it.

"SEDULUS" :: Since our visit we have been quizzing citizens on street corners about the merits of Disney World, and the responses have been largely positive, a fact we are trying to live with. ... In a society that can make a god of Mickey Mouse the chief danger is probably not that TV fail to raise its sights, but rather that it do so and raise them towards the wrong targets, letting significance be created arbitrarily, created by unscrupulous entrepreneurs.

ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.:: If one really wants to see racism in the United States, ... observe the people who believe that communism is tolerable for people of a different skin color.

B.F. SKINNER :: Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.

SOCRATES :: And do you not also think, as I do, that the harsh feeling which the many entertain towards philosophy originates in the pretenders, who rush in uninvited, and are always abusing them, and finding fault with them, who make persons instead of things the theme of their conversation? And nothing can be more unbecoming in philosophers than this.

SOCRATES :: If thou continuest to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but never know how to love with men.

LAWRENCE STERN :: They order these things differently in France.

JOHANNA STOYVA :: Experience leaves us undecided, but a writer must present ambiguity in the clearest of terms, and that means going deep enough to find causes, however difficult they may be to express.

WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: Indeed, one might perhaps sum up one aspect of the history of these matters over the past few centuries in the following way. The affirmation "I believe in God" used to mean: "Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. ..." To-day the statement may be taken by some as meaning: "Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is 'yes'. I judge God to be existent". The idea of God is part of the furniture of that man's mind. .............  Only those sensitive to the enormous difference between these two, and aware of what a radical transformation has taken place in the history of religious thought and life, are in a position to reflect adequately on religious language.

WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: I find it of interest -- in fact, revealing; casting bright illumination on the human condition -- that also in Chinese, as in Greek, the same word means both trusting and trustworthy. To be a person who trusts others, and to be a person whom others may trust, coincide. Is our society today wrong in thinking of these as two different acts, two distinct qualities?

WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: It is a sub-hypothesis of mine that if one comes to understand what they meant when they talked this way, how they felt, what they saw, what they purposed, how they ordered their personalities, then one will begin to understand what faith is, and begin also to realize that belief has essentially relatively little to do with it -- or anyway, less to do with it than we used to think: not only those persons' believing, but one's own not believing.

WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: That faith in the Bible is primarily in persons is a comment not only on the Christian contribution to our conception of faith, but also on that to our conception of humanity, of personhood. The concept 'person' is ... [that of] an object of faith. Nor is this in any way whimsical. If no one has faith in a particular person, that individual will have trouble in becoming or remaining a person, as the psychiatrists well know.

WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: As I have put it on another occasion, love of truth that is known may make a man a fanatic; love of truth not yet discovered makes him an intellectual. The dedication of one's life to the pursuit of transcendent truth, plus the moral commitment to order one's life in accord with such truth as one can here approximate, is the [pistis] in New Testament Greek. It used to be called "belief" in English; and then "faith"; Locke called it "love" of truth (one may recall that "believe" and "belove" were originally the same word)....   ........  Let me quote Locke more fully on this. His wording is almost casual; yet worth noting is how saturated it all is with notions of transcendence, and of human orientation to it. "He that would seriously set upon the search for truth", he writes in a chapter added to the fourth edition of his *Essay concerning Human Understanding*, "ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it." "[T]here are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake", he goes on a little later. And [he elsewhere] writes: "To love truth for truth's sake is the principle part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues." These are faith statements. A comparative religionist quickly recognizes them as that -- and applauds.... Faith is the human orientation to transcendence.

THOMAS SOWELL :: Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right -- creating great resentments among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent.

THOMAS SOWELL :: The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge -- and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient.

THOMAS SOWELL :: In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the benighted and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the *total* direct knowledge brought to bear through social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group. Moreover, the existing generation's traditions and values distill the experiences of other millions in times past.

THOMAS SOWELL :: To those with the tragic vision, institutions, traditions, laws, and policies are to be judged by how well they cope with the intellectual and moral inadequacies of human beings, so as to limit the damage they do, and to coordinate the society in such a way as to maximize the use of its scattered fragments of knowledge, as well as to correct inevitable mistakes as quickly as possible.

THOMAS SOWELL :: In social life, the more fundamental a truth is, the more likely it is to have been discovered long ago -- and to have been repeated in a thousand ways to the point of utter boredom. In this context, to make excitement and novelty the touchstones of an idea is to run grave risks of abandoning the truth for ideological trinkets. ... If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome.

THOMAS SOWELL :: If there was one defining moment of the 1960's it might well have been at the judicial conference in 1965 when Justices Brennan and Warren roared with laughter as a law professor poured scorn and ridicule on the concerns of a former police commissioner about the effects of recent judicial rulings on law enforcement and public safety. It was the anointed in their classic role of disdaining the benighted -- and dismissing the very possibility that the unintended ramifications of morally inspired decisions might make matters worse on net balance.

THOMAS SOWELL :: Those who criticize the existing "distribution" of income in the United States are criticizing the statistical results of systemic processes. ... What is really being said is that *numbers don't look right to the anointed* -- and that this is what matters, that all the myriad purposes of the millions of human beings who are transacting with one another in the marketplace must be subordinated to the goal of presenting a certain statistical tableau to anointed observers.

THOMAS SOWELL :: Another way of verbally masking the elite preemption of other people's decisions is to use the word "ask" ... But of course governments do not ask, they *tell*.

THOMAS SOWELL :: Given this vision, particular solutions to particular problems are far less important than having and maintaining the right processes for making trade-offs and correcting inevitable mistakes. To those with the tragic vision, the integrity of the processes is crucial -- much more so than particular causes. As Jean-Francois Revel put it, in a free society "there is no single just *cause*, only just *methods*."

=wh2=   T-T-T-T   

MAURICE TELLEEN :: An unwary farmer is a quarry to be mined by men with minds of one dimension.

THEOPHRASTUS :: They who seek a reason for all things do utterly overthrow reason.

TOLSTOY :: The true painter is the person who can paint everything.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Conventionalities are at length as bad as impurities. Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters proud of his extensive correspondences has not heard from himself this long while.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefor, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. ...

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest of obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: Art is all of a ship but the wood.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: To say that God has given a man many and great talents, frequently means, that he has brought his heavens down within reach of his hands. ........ When the poetic frenzy seizes us, we run and scratch with our pen, intent only on worms, calling our mates around us, like the cock, and delighting in the dust we make, but do not detect where the jewel lies, which, perhaps, we have in the meantime cast to a distance, or quite covered up again.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: Some poems are for the holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives. ...  Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse, since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet often only makes an irruption, like a Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman, and settled colonies. ....

HENRY DAVID THOREAU :: My life has been the poem I would have writ, But I could not both live and utter it.

=wh2=   U-U-U-U   

UNKNOWN/ANON :: The young man knows the rules; the older man knows the exceptions.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: The cause of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it you will not know what justice is.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: No vice is as bad as advice.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: He delights in using the most unlovely, the most unlikely, the most inferior, the more credit to him.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: Nature's secrets are safe with us.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: He who marries the spirit of the times is soon a widower.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: I love you. I'd swim an ocean for you. I'll be over Friday night if it doesn't rain.

UNKNOWN/ANON :: He may hold anything who holds his tongue.

=wh2=   V-V-V-V   

BILL VEECK :: How much money can you pay a tulip to bloom?

=wh2=   W-W-W-W   

RICHARD WALLACE :: A good idea is one that has a high ratio of conception time to implementation time.

AUSTIN WARREN :: Even for a poor man, to buy books is easier than to read them; to read them, than to comprehend; to comprehend them, than to assimilate them; and all is easier than to correct and apply what one has found in them.

RICHARD WEAVER :: If truth exists and is attainable by man, it is not to be expected that there will be unison among those who have different degrees of it. This is one of the painful conditions of existence which the bourgeoisie like to shut from their sight. I see no reason to doubt that here is the meaning of the verses in Scripture: "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division" and "I bring not peace, but a sword," It was the mission of the prophet to bring a metaphysical sword among men which has value. But amid this division there can be charity, and charity is more to be relied upon to prevent violence than are the political neofanaticisms of which our age is signally productive.

T.H. WHITE :: "The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, or may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

STEPHEN WHITE :: I have before me, for example, a text that appears to pride itself that it no longer asserts, "Five and six is eleven," but asks instead "Is five and six eleven?" This is unqualified non-sense, and should be treated as such by teacher and parent; children, of course, simply ignore it, for question mark or no question mark, they know a flat assertion when they see one.

WALT WHITMAN :: Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

GARY WILLS :: [quoting King George speaking of George Washington:] "If [he prevails, and] goes back to his farm, he'll be the greatest man alive." And he did!

WITTGENSTEIN :: The philosopher who does not enter into public debate is like a boxer who never enters the ring.

ANGUS WRIGHT :: They tend to feel that barriers to this sort of problem solving are unnecessarily thrown up by politicians, dreamers, agitators, and fellow scientists who have become lost in the vagaries of social and economic theory. They tend not to see that their own work is itself a form of political activity. They deny that their work carries the moral responsibilities inherent in political action.... [It] is not simply a question of funds provided to public research to produce private profits. ... Much more important is the fact that, with every intention of doing well by humankind, those who have patronized the research have certain assumptions about what is good for the human race, a certain innocence protected from doubt by power and influence. ... Historically, science and technology made their first advances by rejecting the idea of miracles in the natural world. Perhaps it would be best to return to that position.

SIMONE WEIL :: To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis -- to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives. 

SIMONE WEIL :: We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

SIMONE WEIL :: It is not easy to give with the same humility that is appropriate for receiving. To give in the spirit of one who begs.

SIMONE WEIL :: Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification.

SIMONE WEIL :: Science, art: [those] which we practice to keep from deceiving ourselves.

SIMONE WEIL :: Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

SIMONE WEIL :: It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves. ... To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace. ... Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

SIMONE WEIL :: It is impossible for two human beings to be one while scrupulously respecting the distance that separates them, unless God is present in each of them. The point at which two parallels meet is infinity.

SIMONE WEIL :: The beautiful: that which on beholding we feel no desire to change.

SIMONE WEIL :: There is nothing about modern science which can be popularized, save perhaps the results, and they too only in a manner which promotes credulity.

SIMONE WEIL :: For anyone in affliction, evil can perhaps be defined as being everything that gives any consolation.

SIMONE WEIL :: There is somewhere in the charter of the League of Nations a sentence declaring that henceforth labor shall no longer be regarded as a commodity. It was a joke in the worst possible taste. We live in an age when a host of worthy people, who judge themselves to be very far removed from what Levy-Bruhl called the prelogical mentality, have believed in the magical efficacy of words far more than any savage from the depths of Australia ever did.

=wh2=   X-X-X-X   

=wh2=   Y-Y-Y-Y   

=wh2=   Z-Z-Z-Z   

ZEN ROSHI [this added in 1999] :: Q: What happens when we die? A: That has been taken care of. 




=pagebreak=