Quotation Collection

last updated 6 January 2008

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Christiaan Huygens: The world is my country, science is my religion.

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George in the character of media producer Cy Ogle in Interface, pp. 92 – 93:

“In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam.”

Ogle had broken a six-pack out of a junky old refrigerator behind the “Oval Office” and set up the cans on the presidential desk. Aaron had pulled up another chair and now both of them had their feet up on the desk and beers in their hands.

“So what’s it about now?” Aaron said.

“Scrutiny. We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media,” Ogle said. “The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond. It is a mystical procedure that skirts rationality, which is seen as the work of the Devil, instead drawing down a higher, ineffable power. Like the Romain haruspex who foretold the outcome of a battle, not by analyzing the strengths of the opposing forces but by groping through the steaming guts of a slaughtered ram, we seek to establish a candidate’s fitness for office by pinning him under the lights of a television studio and counting the number of times he blinks his eyes in a minute, deconstructing his use of eye contact, monitoring his gesticulations — whether his hands are held open or closed, toward or away from the camera, spread open forthcomingly or clenched like grasping claws.

“I paint a depressing picture here. But we, you and I, are like the literate monks who nurtured the flickering flame of Greek rationality through the Dark Ages, remaining underground, knowing each other by secret signs and code words, meeting in cellars and thickets to exchange our dangerous and subversive ideas. We do not have the strength to change the minds of the illiterate multitude. But we do have the wit to exploit their foolishness, to familiarize ourselves with their stunted thought patterns, and to use that knowledge to manipulate them the goals that we all know are, quote, right and true, unquote.”

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, p. 62:

The problem now was not so much how to defeat an adversary as how to convince him not to go to war in the first place. Paradoxically, that seemed to require the development of weapons so powerful that no one on the American side knew what their military uses might be, while simultaneously persuading everyone on the Soviet side that if the war did come those weapons would without doubt be employed. Irrationality, by this logic, was the only way to hang on to rationality: an absolute weapon of war could become the means by which war remained an instrument of politics. Truman put it more simply early in 1950: “[W]e had got to do it — make the bomb — though no one wants to use it. But ... we have got to have it if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.”

pp. 67 – 68:

... The solution, most of them believed, was to find ways to fight a limited nuclear war: to devise strategies that would apply American technological superiority against the manpower of the communist world, so that the certainty of a credible military response would exist at whatever level adversaries chose to fight — without the risk of committing suicide.

By the beginning of Eisenhower’s second term in 1957, this consensus extended from Secretary of State Dulles through most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and into the emerging strategic studies community, where the young Henry Kissinger made the case for what would come to be called “flexible response” in an influential book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. The critical assumption, in all of this thinking, was that despite their destructiveness nuclear weapons could still be a rational instrument of both policy and warfighting. They could yet be made to fit the Clausewitzian principle that the use of force — or even threats of such use — must reflect political objectives, no annihilate them.

It was all the more startling, then, that Eisenhower so emphatically rejected this concept of limited nuclear war. Assuming even a “nice, sweet World War II type of war,” he snapped at one point, would be absurd. If war came in any form, the United States would fight it with every weapon in its arsenal because the Soviet Union would surely do the same. The president stuck to this argument, even as he acknowledged the moral costs of striking first with nuclear weapons, the ecological damage that would result from their use, and the fact that the United States and its allies could not expect to avoid devastating retaliation. It was as if Eisenhower was in denial: that a kind of nuclear autism had set in, in which he refused to listen to the advice he got from the best minds available.

In retrospect, though, it appears that Eisenhower’s may have been the best mind available, for he understood better than his advisers what war is really like. None of then, after all, had organized the first successful invasion across the English Channel since 1688, or led the armies that had liberated Western Europe. None of them, either, had read Clausewitz as carefully as he had. That great strategist had indeed insisted that war had to be the rational instrument of policy, but only because he knew how easily the irrationalities of emotion, friction, and fear can cause wars to escalate into meaningless violence. He had therefore invoked the abstraction of total war to scare statesmen into limiting wars in order that the states they ran might survive.

Eisenhower had the same purpose in mind; but unlike Clausewitz, he lived in an age in which nuclear weapons had transformed total war from an abstraction into an all-to-real possibility. Because no one could be sure that emotions, frictions, and fears would not cause even limited wars to escalate, it was necessary to make such wars difficult to fight: that meant not preparing to fight them. That is why Eisenhower — the ultimate Clausewitzian — insisited on planning only for total war. His purpose was to make sure that no war at all would take place.

pp. 79 – 80:

The basic idea, he [Robert S. McNamara] suggested in the summer of 1962, would be to fight a nuclear war “in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past.” The objective would be “the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his civilian population.”

There were, however, certain problems with this strategy. For one thing, the conduct of wars had long since blurred the distinction between conbatants and non-combatants. In World War II at least as many civilians had died as military personnel, and in a nuclear war the situation would be much worse. McNamara’s own planners estimated that 10 million Americans would be killed in such a conflict, even if only military forces and facilities, not civilians, were targeted. Second, there was no assurance such precise targeting would be possible. Most bombs dropped in World War II had missed their targets, and missile guidance systems — especially on the Soviet side — were still primitive. Moreover, most military facilities in the United States, as well as in the Soviet Union and Europe, were located in and around cities, not apart from them. Finally, McNamara’s “no cities” doctrine would work only if the Russians followed the “rules” and did not themselves target cities. But that depended on getting Khruschev to think like McNamara, a highly unlikely possibility.

pp. 156 – 147:

But this expansion of the [Vietnam] war set off new waves of domestic protest and, for the first time as a result, the loss of life: on May 4th, Ohio National Guardsmen shot four students dead at Kent State University. ...

Five nights later, unable to sleep, the president of the United States, accompanied only by his valet and a driver, slipped out of the White house to try to reason with students maintaining a vigil in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Nixon was nervous to the point of incoherence, rambling on about Churchill, appeasement, surfing, football, his own environmental policies, and the advantages of traveling while young. The students, surprised by this unexpected nocturnal apparition, were nonetheless polite, self-confident, and focused: “I hope you understand,” one of them told the most “powerful” man in the world, “that we are willing to die for what we believe in.”

So what was going on here? How was it that kids managed to treat the leaders of most of the major Cold War powers as if they had been parents: that is, by reducing them to sputtering ineffectiveness, pointless fury, frequent panic, and the unsettling realization that their authority was no longer what it once had been? How did the young — with so little coordination among themselves — accumulate such strength at the expense of the old?

...

What governments had failed to foresee was that more young people plus more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize: how do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state — or by their parents — without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished to question their elders’ values, but now with university educations their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was, whether that meant the nuclear arms race, social and economic injustice, the war in Vietnam, repression in Eastern Europe, or even the belief that universities themselves had becomes the tools of an old order that had to be overthrown. This was something never before seen: a revolution transcending nationality, directed against establishments whatever their ideology [emphasis added].

Harry S. Truman:

Machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.

Ronald Reagan, of all people, on 16 Jan 1984 (quoted in The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis, and available on the web at http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm):

Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and that there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then deliberate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living? ... They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people do not make wars.

People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war. They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistence that make life worth living. They want to work at some craft, trade, or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of worth. Their common interests cross all borders.

Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, p. 9:

As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy. For even as war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists.

Organized killing is best done by a dsciplined, professional army. But war also empowers those with a predilection for murder. Petty gangsters, reviled in pre-war Sarajevo, were transformed overnight at the start of the conflict into war heroes. What they did was no different. They still pillaged, looted, tortured, raped, and killed; only then they did it to Serbs, and with an ideological veneer. Slobodan Milosevic went one further. He opened up the country’s prisons and armed his criminal class to fight in Bosnia. Once we sign on for war’s crusade, once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, once we embrace a theological or ideological belief system that defines itself as the embodiment of goodness and light, it is only a matter of how we will carry out murder.

p. 28:

The conclusion of Troilus and Cressida — like Macbeth and King Lear — produces no catharsis. There is nothing redeeming about the Trojan War, in both Euripides and Shakespeare, just as there is nothing redeeming about any war, including the supposed good wars that we all might agree had to be fought. The Allied incendiary bombs that spread fires throughout Dresden and Tokyo left some 150,000 people dead. Talk not of the good war to those in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It does not mean the bombing of Dresden or the dropping of the atomic bombs was wrong, given the concept of total war — a concept that would not be alien to the victorious Greeks in Troy. It means that we are naïve to ignore these and countless other events, to ennoble indiscriminate slaughter and industrial killing on so vast a scale. Modern war is directed primarily against civilians. Look at Kosova, Bosnia, Rwanda, Vietnam, or World War II. And nuclear terrorism is the logical outcome of modern industrial warfare.

pp. 93 – 94:

On a recent trip to the region, I visited the Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As the searing afternoon heat and swirling eddies of dust enveloped the camp, I sought cover, slumping under the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes. I was momentarily defeated by the grit that covered my face and hair, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage.

Barefoot boys, clutching ragged soccer balls and kites made out of scraps of paper, squatted a few feet away under scrub trees. Men, in flowing white or grey galabias — homespun robes — smoked cigarettes outside their doorways. They fingered prayer beads and spoke in hushed tones as they boiled tea of coffee on sooty coals in small iron braziers in the shade of the caves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs outlined on their flanks, were tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels.

It was still. The camp waited, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air a disembodied voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the Israeli side of the camp’s perimeter fence.

“Come on, dogs,” the voice boomed in Arabic. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!”

I stood up and walked outside of the hut. The invective spewed out in a bitter torrent. “Son of a bitch!” “Son of a whore!” “Your mother’s cunt!”

The boys darted in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separated the camp from the Jewish settlement abutting it. They lobbed rocks toward a jeep, mounted with a loudspeaker and protected by bulletproof armor plates and metal grating, that sat parked on the top of a hill known as Gani Tal. The solider inside the jeep ridiculed and derided them. Three ambulances — which had pulled up in anticipation of what was to come — lined the road below the dunes.

There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soliders shot with silencers. The bullets from M-16 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were ripped out, the gaping holes in their limbs and torsos, later in the hospital.

I had seen children shot in other conflicts I have covered — death squands gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo — but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

pp. 147 – 148:

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or, as he liked to say, “the Christian fascists.” He was not a scholar to be disregarded, however implausible such a scenario seemed at the time. There is a danger of a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war — both for and against modern states — and those who believe they understand and can act as agents for God.

History is awash with beleaguered revolutionaries and lunatic extremists who were endowed with enough luck and enough ruthlessness to fill power vacuums. The danger is not that fundamentalism will grow so much as that modern, secular society will wither. Already mainstream Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lie defeated and emasculated by the very forces that ironically turned them into tolerant, open institutions. In the event of massive and repeated terrorist strikes or an environmental catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could rise ascendant within American democracy. The current battle between us and our Islamic radical foes can only increase the reach of these groups.

pp. 160 – 161:

There are few sanctuaries in war. But one is provided by couples in love. They are not able to staunch the slaughter. They are often powerless and can themselves often become the victims. But it was with them, seated around a wood stove, usually over a simple meal, that I found sanity and was reminded of what it means to be human. Love kept them grounded. It was to such couples that I retreated during the wars in Central America, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving — often self-sacrifice — as well as desire. For the covenant of love is such that it recognizes both the fragility and the sanctity of the individual. It recognizes itself in the other. It alone can save us.

[...] Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness. The isolated individual can never be adequately human. And many of war’s most fervent adherents are those atomized individuals who, before the war came, were profoundly alone and unloved. They found fulfillment in war, perhaps because it was the closest they came to love. If we do not acknowledge such an attraction, which is, in some ways, so akin to love, we can never combat it.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God, pp. 49 – 50:

Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon. Even where the new ideologies of the Axial Age were replacing the old veneration of the gods, there was no such vitriolic rejection of the ancient deities. We have seen that in Hinduism and Buddhism people were encouraged to go beyond the gods rather than to turn upon them with loathing. Yet the prophets of Israel were unable to take this calmer view of the deities they saw as Yahweh’s rivals. In the Jewish scriptures, the new sin of “idolatry,” the worship of “false” gods, inspires something akin to nausea. It is a reaction that is, perhaps, similar to the revulsion that some of the Fathers of the Church would feel for sexuality. As such, it is not a rational, considered reaction but expressive of deep anxiety and repression. Were the prophets harboring a buried worry about their own religious behavior? Were they, perhaps, uneasily aware that their own conception of Yahweh was similar to the idolatry of the pagans, since they too were creating a god in their own image?

The comparison with the Christian attitude toward sexuality is illuminating in another way. At this point, most Israelites believed implicitly in the existence of the pagan deities. It is true that Yahweh was gradually taking over some of the functions of the elohim of the Canaanites in certain circles: Hosea, for example, was trying to argue that he was a better fertility god than Baal. But it was obviously difficult for the irredeemably masculine Yahweh to usurp the function of a goddess like Asherah, Ishtar or Anat, who still had a great following among the Israelites, particularly among the women. Even though monotheists would insist that their God transcended gender, he would remain essentially male, though we shall see that some would try to remedy this imbalance. In part, this was due to his origins as a tribal god of war. Yet his battle with the goddesses reflects a less positive characteristic of the Axial Age, which generally saw a decline in the status of women and the female. It seems that in more primitive societies, women were sometimes held in higher esteem than men. The prestige of the great goddesses in traditional religion reflects the veneration of the female. The rise of the cities, however, meant that the more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength were exalted over female characteristics. Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position was particularly poor in Greece, for example — a fact that Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchal attitudes of the Orient. The democratic ideal did not extend to the women of Athens, who lived in seclusion and were despised as inferior beings. Israelite society was also becoming more masculine in tone. In the early days, women were forceful and clearly saw themselves as the equals of their husbands. Some, like Deborah, had led armies into battle. Israelites would continue to celebrate such heroic women as Judith and Esther, but after Yahweh had successfully vanquished the other gods and goddesses of Canaan and the Middle East and become the only God, his religion would be managed almost entirely by men. The cult of the goddesses would be superseded, and this would be a symptom of a cultural change that was characteristic of the newly civilized world.

p. 55:

The Jews have often been criticized for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of denial that fueled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times. All three of the monotheistic faiths have developed similar theologies of election at different times in their history, sometimes with even more devastating results than those imagined in the Book of Joshua. Western Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God’s elect. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Crusaders justified their holy wars against Jews and Muslims by calling themselves the new Chosen People, who had taken up the vocation that the Jews had lost. Calvinist theologies of election have been largely instrumental in encouraging Americans to believe that they are God’s own nation. As in Josiah’s Kingdom of Judah, such a belief is likely to flourish at a time of political insecurity when people are haunted by the fear of their own destruction. It is for this reason, perhaps, that it has gained a new lease on life in the various forms of fundamentalism that are rife among Jews, Christians and Muslims at this writing. A personal God like Yahweh can be manipulated to shore up the beleaguered self in this way, as an impersonal deity like Brahman can not.

Alma Garret in Deadwood: I know we are as much in the world in our pain as in our happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, in Reply to American Philosophical Society, 1808: “I feel... an ardent desire to see knowledge disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may... reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings.”

Tolkien on dissidence: “I owe much to Éomer,” said Théoden. “Faithful heart may have froward tongue.”

“Say also,” said Gandalf, “that to crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face.”

Tolkien on technology, via Gandalf: “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.”

Tolkien on war: It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, of what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

Richard Stallman: I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality.

Albert Einstein (from Out of My Later Years): Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We are crossing the seas by power and utilize power also in order to relieve humanity from all tiring muscular work. We have learned to fly and we are able to send messages and news without any difficulty over the entire world through electric waves.

However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the the want of everything. Furthermore, people living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must also live in fear and terror. This is due to the fact that the intelligence and the character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce something valuable for the community.

I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.

James Madison: The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

Edward Livingston, 1798, in opposition to the Alien & Sedition act: Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foriegn aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that [...] we are absurd enough to call ourselves “free and enlightened” while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to the be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be the fundamental principle of American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.

Simon Cozens: Why do so many otherwise intelligent people look for answers to serious questions in systems purely of their own devising, which are able to prove on their own terms that they don’t even have them? Mathematics, logic, science: they’re useful servants, but exceptionally bad masters.

Laurence J. Peter: Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer: You put a hard question on the virtue of discipline. What you say is true: I do value it — and I think that you do too — more than for its earthly fruit, proficiency. I think that one can give only a metaphysical ground for this evaluation; but the variety of metaphysics which gave an answer to your question has been very great, the metaphysics themselves very disparate: the Bhagavad Gita, Ecclesiastes, the Stoa, the beginning of the Laws, Hugo of St. Victor, St. Thomas, John of the Cross, Spinoza. This very great disparity suggests that the fact that discipline is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation, and charity, and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we can learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandom with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror. But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that dicipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude, for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.

J. C. F. von Schiller: Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit,
Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit.
(Only wholeness leads to clarity,
and truth lies in the abyss.)

Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: Speech is a clumsiness and writing an impoverishment. Not language but the surface of the body is the child’s first map of the world, undifferentiated between subject and object, coextensive with the world it maps until awakening consciousness divides it off.

Randy Maas: Bad news: Only academics write about it, so it reads like a 70’s paper on OOP. “It is intrinsically true that lambda-squiggle v & ! greek summa bladda is wally wally wally yielding a complete closure.”

Vernon Reid: But the blues is not the clichéd old black guy sitting on the porch — it’s a battle between the sacred and the profane, the sensual and the spiritual. The blues reveals deep truths about the human condition. Unfortunately — particularly in America — we have to make fun of, or run screaming away from, anything that deals with the truth.

Learned Hand, on receiving and honorary degree: They taught me, not by precept, but by example, that nothing is more commendable, and more fair, than that a man should lay aside all else, and seek truth; not to preach what he might find; and surely not to try to make his views prevail; but, like Lessing, to find his satisfaction in the search itself.

Learned Hand, Preservation of Personality: Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, New York Times, 27 Nov 2001, p. B8: There was, maybe 10 days or close to two weeks ago, an uncorroborated report of undetermined reliability [about an unspecified target]... Frankly, those are the kinds of reports which we take seriously.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: [...] All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority”. The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister...all the way up to “God”.

John von Neumann: Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

Sir Herbert Robert Beerbohm Tree on examining a gramophone: Sirs, I have examined your machine. It adds new terror to life and makes death a long felt want.

Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: The stuff we call “software” is not like anything that human society is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something like language, and something like thought, and art, and information... but software is not in fact any of those other things.

Benjamin Franklin: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Eben Moglen, legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation: What we have here are two different structures of the distribution of cultural product. You have a set of people whose fundamental belief is that cultural products are best distributed when they are owned, and they are attempting to construct a leak proof pipe from production studio to eardrum or eyeball of the consumer. Their goal is to construct a piping system that allows them to distribute completely dephysicalized cultural entities which have zero marginal cost and which in a competitive economy would therefore be priced at zero, but they wish to distribute them at non-zero prices. In the ideal world, they would distribute them at the same prices they get for physical objects which cost a lot of money to make, move and sell, and they would become ferociously profitable. They are prepared to give on price, but at every turn, as with the VCR at the beginning of the last epoch, their principle is any ability of this content to escape their control will bring about the end of civilization.

Richard Stallman, on non-free hardware drivers: But technical goals, whatever they are, have their meaning in a context of social goals and ideas of right and wrong.

Douglas Adams, The More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?

Douglas Adams, The More Than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: But when she smiled, as she did now, suddenly, it was as if she had just arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body.

Christopher Morley reviewing Don Maquis in The Saturday Review, 1938: Energy is not endless. Better hoard it for your own work. Be intangible and hard to catch; be secret and proud and inwardly uncomfortable. Say yes and don’t mean it; pretend to agree; dodge every kind of organization, and evade, elude, recede. Be about your own affairs as you would also forbear from others at theirs, and thereby show your respect for the holiest ghost we know, the creative imagination.

Catherine Liu, Oriental Girls Desire Romance: They didn’t want what I wanted from them. They were confused by my insistence. I’ll never be able to tell them how hurt I was, how betrayed I felt. I’ll never be able to tell them that they broke my heart, but in all the wrong places.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: You know you have achieved perfection in design not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

Jean de La Bruyère: Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.

Fred Brooks: Conceptual integrity. A clean, elegant programming product must present to each of its users a coherent mental model of the application, of strategies for doing the application, and of the user-interface tactics to be used in specifying actions and parameters. The conceptual integrity of the product, as perceived by the user, is the most important factor in ease of use.

John Cage: I don’t understand why people are afraid of new ideas. I’m afraid of the old ones.

Edwin Schlossberg: The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

Henry Rollins, Get in the Van: I left my hometown like a guy making a jail break.

Carl Jung, “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”: Since human nature is not compounded wholly of light, but also abounds in shadows, the insight gained in practical analysis is often somewhat painful, the more so if, as is generally the case, one has previously neglected the other side.

Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his introduction to Metamagical Themas, pp. xxv-xxvi: How can anyone fascinated by creativity and beauty fail to see in computers the ultimate tool for exploring their essence? Such ideas are the inner fire that propels my research and my writings.

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