text:
Heathers

Heathers is a 1989 black comedy film about a girl who for a time half-heartedly tries to be part of the "in crowd" of her school, the Heathers, who rule over others through intimidation, contempt, and sex appeal, and the lessons she learns in her interaction with a sarcastic anti-social rebel with an attitude and far more extreme forms of contempt for people and society.
 * Directed by Michael Lehmann and written by Daniel Waters.

Best friends, social trends and occasional murder.taglines

Veronica Sawyer

 * How very.
 * What is your damage, Heather?!
 * If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn't be a human being, you'd be a game show host.
 * Dear Diary: Heather told me she teaches people "real life." She said real life sucks losers dry. You want to fuck with the eagles, you have to learn to fly. I said, so you teach people how to spread their wings and fly? She said, "Yes." I said, "You're beautiful."
 * Dear Diary, Betty Finn was a true friend and I sold her out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads. Killing Heather would be like offing the wicked witch of the west... wait east. West! God! I sound like a fucking psycho.
 * Dear Diary, my teen angst bullshit has a body count. Everybody's sad...but it's kind of a weird kind of sad. Suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, Ram a brain! I don't know what it's given me, but I have no control over myself when I'm with J.D.! Are we going to prom or to hell?!
 * I say we just grow up, be adults, and die.

Jason "J.D." Dean

 * Greetings and Salutations.
 * Football season is over, Veronica. Kurt and Ram had nothing left to offer the school except date rapes and AIDS jokes.
 * Our love is god, let's go get a slushie!
 * Today was great, chaos is great! Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling.
 * [finding Veronica] I can't believe you did it. I was teasing. I loved you. Course, I was coming up here to kill ya...
 * The extreme always seems to make an impression.
 * Color me impressed. You, uh... you really fucked me up pretty bad, Veronica. You, um... you got power, power I didn’t think you had. The slate is clean.
 * Let's pretend I blew up the school - all the schools. Now that you're dead, what are you gonna do with your life?

Heather Chandler

 * Grow up, Heather. Bulimia’s so ’87.
 * They all want me as a friend or a fuck. I'm worshipped at Westerburg and I'm only a junior.
 * Fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Teresa?
 * Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast? First you ask if you can be red, knowing that I'm always red.
 * God, Veronica. My afterlife is so boring. If I have to sing Kumbaya one more time…

Heather Duke

 * Veronica, why are you pulling my dick?

Other

 * Father Ripper: We must pray the other teenagers of Sherwood, Ohio know the name of that righteous dude who can solve their problems: it's Jesus Christ, and he's in the book.
 * Veronica's Mom: When teenagers complain that they want to be treated like human beings, it's usually because they are being treated like human beings.

Dialogue

 * Kurt: Hey, Ram, doesn't this cafeteria have a no fags policy?
 * J.D.: Well, they, uh, seem to have an open door policy on assholes, though, don't they?

 * J.D.: Is your life perfect?
 * Veronica: I'm on my way to a party at Remington University... No, my life's not perfect. I don't really like my friends.
 * J.D.: I...I don't really like your friends either.
 * Veronica: Well, it's just like - they're people I work with, and our job is being popular and shit.
 * J.D.: Maybe it's time to take a vacation.

 * Heather Chandler: You stupid fuck!
 * Veronica: You goddamn bitch!
 * Heather Chandler: You were nothing before you met me! You were playing Barbies with Betty Finn! You were a bluebird! You were a brownie! You were a Girl Scout cookie! I got you into a Remington party! What's my thanks? It's on a hallway carpet. I got paid in puke!
 * Veronica: LICK IT UP, BABY! Lick! It! Up!
 * Heather Chandler: Monday morning, you're history. I'll tell everyone about tonight. Transfer to Washington. Transfer to Jefferson. Nobody at Westerburg's gonna let you play their reindeer games!

 * Veronica: Oh my God! I just killed my best friend!
 * J.D.: And your worst enemy!
 * Veronica: Same difference!
 * J.D.: What are we gonna tell the cops? "Fuck it if she can't take a joke, Sarge"?!
 * Veronica: Oh, the cops! I can't believe this is my life! Oh my God! I'm gonna have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford!
 * J.D.: Ah, right. Just a little freaked here. Well, at least you got what ya wanted, ya know?
 * Veronica: Got what I wanted?! It is one thing to want somebody out of your life! It is another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of liquid drainer!

 * Heather McNamara: [praying over Heather Chandler's casket] Oh God, this is a tragic thing, and sometimes I have a hard time dealing with it and stuff. Please send Heather to Heaven and all that.
 * Peter Dawson: Dear God, please make sure this never happens to me, cause I don't think I can handle suicide. Plus, early acceptance into an Ivy League school and please let it be Harvard. Amen.
 * Ram Sweeney: Jesus, God in Heaven, why did you have to kill such hot snatch? It's a joke, man. Jeez, people are so serious. Hail Mary, who aren't in heaven, pray for all us sinners so we don't get caught. —Another joke, man.
 * Heather Duke: I prayed for the death of Heather Chandler many times, and I felt bad every time I did it, but I kept doing it anyway. Now I know you understood everything. (smiles) Praise Jesus! Hallelujah!
 * Veronica Sawyer: Hi, I'm sorry. Technically I did not kill Heather Chandler, but hey, who am I trying to kid, right? I just want my high school to be a nice place. Amen. Did that sound bitchy?

 * Kurt's Dad: [at Kurt and Ram's funeral] My son's a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead gay son.
 * J.D.: Wonder how he'd react if his son had a limp wrist with a pulse.

 * Veronica: All we want is to be treated like human beings, not to be experimented on like guinea pigs or patronized like bunny rabbits.
 * Veronica's Dad: I don't patronize bunny rabbits!
 * Veronica's Mom: Treated like human beings? Is that what you just said, Little Miss Voice of a Generation? Just how do you think adults act with other adults? You think it's all just a game of doubles tennis? When teenagers complain about wanting to be treated like human beings, it's usually because they're being treated like human beings.

 * Heather McNamara: Suicide is a private thing.
 * Veronica: Heather, you're throwing your life away to become a statistic in the US-fucking-A Today! That's about the least private thing I can think of!

 * Veronica: If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?
 * Heather McNamara: Probably.

 * Veronica: Heather, why can't you just be a friend? Why do you have to be such a megabitch?!
 * Heather Duke: Because I can be.

 * J.D.: Do you think that just because you started this thing you can end it?!
 * Veronica: I'll kill you! I'll fucking kill you! I swear to God! How do I turn off the Goddamn bomb, asshole?!
 * J.D.: [flips the bird at Veronica] FUCK YOU! [Veronica shoots his middle finger] Shit!
 * Veronica: It's all over, J.D.! Help me stop it!
 * J.D.: You wanna clean the slate as much as I do! All right, so maybe I am killing everyone in the school, because nobody loves me! Let's face it, all right? The only place where different social types can genuinely get along with each other is in heaven!
 * Veronica: Which button do I press to turn it off?!
 * J.D.: [sarcastic] Try the red one, all right?! [gestures towards the bomb, which has three red buttons] Seriously, people are gonna look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, "Now there is a school that self-destructed, not because society didn't care, but because the school was society!" That's pretty deep, huh?
 * Veronica: WHICH red button?!
 * J.D.: Press the one in the middle to turn it off - if that's what you really want.
 * Veronica: You know what I want, babe?
 * J.D.: What?! [tries to attack but Veronica shoots him to stop the bomb]
 * Veronica: Cool guys like you out of my life.

 * Heather Duke: Veronica, you look like hell.
 * Veronica: Yeah? I just got back. Heather, my love, there's a new sheriff in town.

Taglines

 * Best friends, social trends and occasional murder.
 * A killer comedy.

Cast

 * Winona Ryder - Veronica Sawyer
 * Christian Slater - Jason 'J.D.' Dean
 * Shannen Doherty - Heather Duke
 * Kim Walker - Heather Chandler
 * Lisanne Falk - Heather McNamara
 * Penelope Milford - Pauline Fleming
 * Glenn Shadix - Father Ripper
 * Lance Fenton - Kurt Kelly
 * Patrick Labyorteaux - Ram Sweeney
 * Carrie Lynn - Martha 'Dumptruck' Dunnstock
 * John Ingle - Principal Gowan

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Heathers


text:
Logic

Logic (from the Greek λογική, logikē) refers to both the study of modes of reasoning (which are valid, and which are fallacious) and the use of valid reasoning.

In the latter sense, logic is used in most intellectual activities, including philosophy and science, but in the first sense, is primarily studied in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science. It examines general forms that arguments may take. In mathematics, it is the study of valid inferences within some formal language.

 * CONTENT: A-D, E-H , I-L , M-P , Q-T , U-Z , See also , External links

Quotes

 * Quotes are rearranged alphabetical per author

A-D

 * "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Ah, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys.
 * Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Chapter 6

 * All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
 * Woody Allen in his movie Love and Death cited in: Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird (2006) How We Reason. p. 142

 * Aristotle is noted for his writings on logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and literature. These works are marked by sober tone, subtle analysis, and empirical accuracy. In logic, he produced the first textbooks ever written. They deal with some of the problems which Plato had suggested but not considered in detail.

 * LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion -- thus:
 * 'Major Premise': Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
 * 'Minor Premise': One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore --
 * 'Conclusion': Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second. This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.
 * Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

 * R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, R. von Mises, W. Feller, and L. J. Savage denied vehemently that probability theory is an extension of logic, and accused Laplace and Jeffreys of committing metaphysical nonsense for thinking that it is.

 * No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.
 * Attributed to Niels Bohr in: William Glen (1994) The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis. p. 62

 * If the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
 * Rita Mae Brown (1983) Sudden Death.

 * Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.
 * Charles Caleb Colton (1851), Lacon

 * "Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."
 * Lewis Carroll (1871), Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 4

 * You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
 * Gilbert Keith Chesterton cited in: Quentin Lauer (1992) G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio. p. 39

 * Utility and necessity of logic - It would be a mistake to imagine that, above and beyond what is called the Natural Logic of sound common sense, the study of the Science of Logic is absolutely necessary for right reasoning. Men reasoned rightly before Aristotle ever formulated a canon of logic. It was, in fact, by an analysis of such reasonings that he discovered those canons: they could never have been discovered otherwise. Here as elsewhere the art came before the science; theory followed practice. A man may reason rightly without knowing a single rule of the syllogism; or, conversely, he may know all the details of logic and be an indifferent guide to truth just as a first-rate geometrician may be a failure as an engineer. But still, just as his knowledge of geometry will enable the geometrician to detect the defects in a piece of engineering, so too will an explicit knowledge of the canons of reasoning enable us to discover more readily where the fallacy of a misleading argument lies. Without professing to guard us infallibly from error, logic familiarizes us with the rules and canons to which right reasoning processes must conform, and with the hidden fallacies and pitfalls to which such processes are commonly exposed.
 * Peter Coffey (1912) The Science of Logic. Longmans, Green, and Company. p. 38

 * The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
 * G. K. Chesterton (1908) Orthodoxy, Chapter VI : The Paradoxes of Christianity

 * The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious.
 * G. K. Chesterton (1908) Orthodoxy,

 * Pierce wrote as a logician and James as a humanist.
 * John Dewey, distinguishing the styles and focus of Peirce and William James, in The Development of American Pragmatism" in Studies in the History of Ideas'' (1925), Vol. II, p. 361

 * It is with logic as it is with other sciences. They draw wisdom from the mysterious source of plain experience. Agriculture, e. g., aims to teach the farmer how to cultivate the soil; but fields were tilled long before any agricultural college had begun its lectures. In the same way human beings think without ever having heard of logic. But by practice they improve their innate faculty of thought, they make progress, they gradually learn to make better use of it. Finally, just as the farmer arrives at the science of agriculture, so the thinker arrives at logic, acquires a clear consciousness of his faculty of thought and a professional dexterity in applying it.
 * Joseph Dietzgen, Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906), Letter 2

 * Adherents of formal logic may be compared to a maker of porcelain dishes who would contend that he was simply paying attention to the form of his dishes, pots, and vases, but that he did not have anything to do with the raw material.
 * Joseph Dietzgen, Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906), Letter 3

 * “It’s logical,” Sario said. “Lots of people don’t like coping with logic when it dictates hard decisions. That’s a problem with people, not logic.”
 * Cory Doctorow, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2006), reprinted in Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present ISBN 1-56025-981-7, p. 24

 * These, briefly, are the key elements of the stereotype: logic cripples and constrains; it forces one into narrow and mechanical modes of thought that cut one off from a vast range of superior thoughts, feelings and perceptions; logic is an enemy of wit and humor (Mr. Spock's face was always an impassive mask); logic makes us dull and pedantic (Mr. Spock always spoke in a monotone); logic presupposes a simple-minded, black-and-white, yes-no conception of the world. ... Logic misses the point of half the things we ordinarily say and cannot match the insight of the humblest person's common sense.
 * John M. Dolan (1994), Inference and Imagination

 * From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.
 * Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 2, "The Science of Deduction".

 * The first question we should face is: What is the aim of a physical theory? To this question diverse answers have been made, but all of them may be reduced to two main principles: "A physical theory," certain logicians have replied, "has for its object the explanation of a group of laws experimentally established." "A physical theory," other thinkers have said, "is an abstract system whose aim is to summarize and classify logically a group of experimental laws without claiming to explain these laws... Now these two questions — Does there exist a material reality distinct from sensible appearances? and What is the nature of reality? — do not have their source in experimental method, which is acquainted only with sensible appearances and can discover nothing beyond them. The resolution of these questions transcends the methods used by physics; it is the object of metaphysics. Therefore, if the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics... Now, to make physical theories depend on metaphysics is surely not the way to let them enjoy the privilege of universal consent.

E-H

 * Logic is usually understood nowadays as a study of certain formal systems, though in former times there were philosophers who held that the subject matter of logic was the formal rules of human thought.
 * Hans Freudenthal (1968) "Realistic models in probability"

 * The want of logic annoys. Too much logic bores. Life eludes logic, and everything that logic alone constructs remains artificial and forced.
 * André Gide (1956) The journals, 1889-1949. Vol 2. p. 20

 * To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.
 * Thomas Hardy (1874) Far from the Madding Crowd, Ch. 2.

 * Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.
 * Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road, (1967), Ch. 5.

 * To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.
 * Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume. Quoted in Mathematical Maxims and Minims by N. Rose (1988).

 * Logic is logic. That's all I say.
 * Oliver Wendell Holmes (1919), The One-Hoss Shay

 * Logic is one thing and commonsense another.
 * Elbert Hubbard (1927), The Note Book

 * But in this age, logic was a flame that must be frequently starved of fuel.
 * Matthew Hughes, The Spiral Labyrinth (2007), ISBN 978-1-59780-091-4, p. 84

 * I have expos'd myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer?
 * David Hume (1739-40) A Treatise of Human Nature. Part 4 Of the sceptical and other systems of philosophy, Sect. 7 Conclusion of this book

I-L

 * Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true.
 * Eugène Ionesco (1959) Rhinoceros

 * Logic hasn't wholly dispelled the society of witches and prophets and sorcerers and soothsayers.
 * Raymond F. Jones (1956), The Non-Statistical Man

 * Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
 * Benjamin Jowett in: Evelyn Abbott, Lewis Campbell (1897) The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Vol 1. p. 131

 * Logic is concerned with arguments, good and bad. With the docile and the reasonable, arguments are sometimes useful in settling disputes. With the reasonable, this utility attaches only to good arguments. It is the logician's business to serve the reasonable. Therefore, in the realm of arguments, it is the logician who distinguishes good from bad.
 * Donald Kalish, Richard Montague, and Gary Mar, (second edition; 1980), Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning, page 1 (opening paragraph).

 * The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
 * John Maynard Keynes, in Collected Works, vol. XII on Hayek's Prices and Production (1931); Hayek provided historical background up to page 45, after that came his theoretical model.

 * Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.
 * Joseph Wood Krutch (1929), The Modern Temper

 * "There is one basis of science," says Descartes, "one test and rule of truth, namely, that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true." A profound psychological mistake. It is true only of formal logic, wherein the mind never quits the sphere of its first assumptions to pass out into the sphere of real existences; no sooner does the mind pass from the internal order to the external order, than the necessity of verifying the strict correspondence between the two becomes absolute. The Ideal Test must be supplemented by the Real Test, to suit the new conditions of the problem.
 * George Henry Lewes, Aristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science (1864)

 * Anyone who has heard (Jacques Derrida) lecture in French knows that he is more performance artist than logician. His flamboyant style--using free association, rhymes and near-rhymes, puns, and maddening digressions--is not just a vain pose (though it is surely that). It reflects what he calls a self-conscious "acommunicative strategy" for combating logocentrism.
 * Mark Lilla, Review of Derrida's Moscou Aller-Retour in The New York Review of Books, June, 1998

M-P

 * The contemporary mathematical and symbolic logic is certainly very different from its classical predecessor, but they share the radical opposition to dialectical logic. In terms of this opposition, the old and the new formal logic express the same mode of thought. it is purged from that “negative” which loomed so large at the origins of logic and of philosophic thought—the experience of the denying, deceptive, falsifying power of the established reality. And with the elimination of this experience, the conceptual effort to sustain the tension between “is” and “ought”, and to subvert the established universe of discourse in the name of its own truth is likewise eliminated from all thought which is to be objective, exact, and scientific. For the scientific subversion of the immediate experience which establishes the truth of science as against that of immediate experience does not develop the concepts which carry in themselves the protest and the refusal. The new scientific truth which they oppose to the accepted one does not contain in itself the judgment that condemns the established reality. ... In contrast, dialectical thought is and remains unscientific to the extent to which it is such judgment.
 * Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 139-140

 * This fallacy [appeal to authority] is not in itself an error; it is impossible to learn much in today's world without letting somebody else crunch the numbers and offer us explanations. And teachers are sources of necessary information. But how we choose our "authorities" and place a value on such information, is just another skill rarely taught in our education systems. It's little wonder that to most folk, sound bites and talking heads are enough to count as experts. […] Teaching is reinforcing the appeal to authority, where anybody who seems more intelligent than you must ultimately be right. […] We educators must simply role-model critical thinking. […] Educators themselves have to be prepared to show that “evidence” and “answers” are two separate things by firmly believing that, themselves.
 * Mike McRae, Australian teacher and guest columnist, "Educating Future Critical Thinkers", Swift: Online Newsletter of the JREF, 31 March 2006

 * The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians—and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.
 * H. L. Mencken "Clinical Notes" in The American Mercury (January 1924), p. 75; also in Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)

 * Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
 * Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), "Weeds & Moss", My Ireland

 * Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
 * Murphy's law

 * Able logicians have a trick of being unutterably wrong when they come to write about life: the instinctive, intuitive sense of human values often fails them quite. Logic is more likely to make a man a fool than the lack of logic is.
 * John Middleton Murry, (quote from p. 18)

 * It might ... have been supposed that logicians and psychologists would have devoted special attention to meaning, since it is so vital for all the issues with which they are concerned. But that this is not the case will be evident[1] to anyone who studies the Symposium in Mind (October 1920 and following numbers) on "The Meaning of 'Meaning.'"
 * C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, (1923) The Meaning of Meaning p. 160.

 * Logicians tell us that a system of ideas containing a contradiction can be used to deduce any statement whatsoever, no matter how absurd.
 * Steven Pinker (2007) "Introduction" in: John Brockman, ed. What is Your Dangerous Idea? p. xxix

 * Logic and mathematics seem to be the only domains where self-evidence manages to rise above triviality; and this it does, in those domains, by a linking of self-evidence on to self-evidence in the chain reaction known as proof.
 * Willard van Orman Quine (1978), The Web of Belief
 * Three conceptions are perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another. They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation.
 * Charles Sanders Peirce (1891) The Architecture of Theories

 * Logical analysis applied to mental phenomenon shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectibility. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas.
 * Charles Sanders Peirce (1892) The Law of Mind.

 * A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations.
 * Charles Sanders Peirce (1903) Pragmatism and Pragmaticism. Lecture I : Pragmatism : The Normative Sciences, CP 5.14

 * It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.
 * Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (1908) Part II. Ch. 2 : Mathematical Definitions and Education, p. 129

 * The utility of a science which enables men to take cognizance of the travellers on the mind's highway, and excludes those disorderly interlopers, verbal fallacies, needs but small attestation. Its searching penetration by definition alone, before which even mathematical precision fails, would especially commend it to those whom the abstruseness of the study does not terrify, and who recognise the valuable results which must attend discipline of mind. Like a medicine, though not a panacea for every ill, it has the health of the mind for its aim, but requires the determination of a powerful will to imbibe its nauseating yet wholesome influence: it is no wonder therefore that puny intellects, like weak stomachs, abhor and reject it.
 * Porphyry, introduction to Aristotle's Organon, as translated by Octavius Freire Owen (1853), p. v

Q-T

 * Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!
 * Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1976); spoken by the character "The Chink".

 * Mathematics and logic, historically speaking, have been entirely distinct studies. Mathematics has been connected with science, logic with Greek. But both have developed in modern times: logic has become more mathematical and mathematics has become more logical. The consequence is that it has now become wholly impossible to draw a line between the two; in fact, the two are one. They differ as boy and man: logic is the youth of mathematics and mathematics is the manhood of logic. This view is resented by logicians who, having spent their time in the study of classical texts, are incapable of following a piece of symbolic reasoning, and by mathematicians who have learnt a technique without troubling to inquire into its meaning or justification. Both types are now fortunately growing rarer. So much of modern mathematical work is obviously on the border-line of logic, so much of modern logic is symbolic and formal, that the very close relationship of logic and mathematics has become obvious to every instructed student. The proof of their identity is, of course, a matter of detail: starting with premises which would be universally admitted to belong to logic, and arriving by deduction at results which as obviously belong to mathematics, we find that there is no point at which a sharp line can be drawn, with logic to the left and mathematics to the right. If there are still those who do not admit the identity of logic and mathematics, we may challenge them to indicate at what point, in the successive definitions and deductions of Principia Mathematica, they consider that logic ends and mathematics begins. It will then be obvious that any answer must be quite arbitrary.
 * Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) pp.194–195.

 * The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.
 * Bertrand Russell (1919) Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Ch. 7: Rational, Real and Complex Numbers.

 * All traditional logic habitually assumes that precise symbols are being employed. It is therefore not applicable to this terrestial life but only to an imagined celestial existence... logic takes us nearer to heaven than other studies.
 * Bertrand Russell (1923) as cited in Gaines (1976) "Foundations of fuzzy reasoning" in: International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 8(6), p. 623

 * The apparent world goes through developments which are the same as those the logician goes through if he starts from Pure Being and travels on to the Absolute Idea. [...] Why the world should go through this logical evolution is not clear; one is tempted to suppose that the Absolute Idea did not quite understand itself at first, and made mistakes when it tried to embody itself in events. But this, of course, was not what Hegel would have said.
 * Bertrand Russell (1950), Unpopular Essays, "Philosophy's Ulterior Motives", p. 74-75.

 * Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
 * Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1942), Flight to Arras, as translated by Lewis Galantière

 * A crisis in doctrine occurred when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational. That is: the square root of two could not be represented as the ratio of two whole numbers, no matter how big they were. "Irrational" originally meant only that. That you can't express a number as a ratio. But for the Pythagoreans it came to mean something else, something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense, the other meaning of "irrational".
 * Carl Sagan (1990 Update) Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

 * [My aim is] to design logic as a calculating discipline, especially to give access to the exact handling of relative concepts, and, from then on, by emancipation from the routine claims of natural language, to withdraw any fertile soil from "cliché" in the field of philosophy as well. This should prepare the ground for a scientific universal language that, widely differing from linguistic efforts like Volapük [a universal language like Esperanto, very popular in Germany at the time], looks more like a sign language than like a sound language.
 * Ernst Schröder, cited in: V. Peckhaus, "19th Century Logic between Philosophy and Mathematics," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 5 (1999), 433-450.

 * Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable.
 * John F. Sowa (1993) Conceptual graphs for knowledge representation. p. 3-51.

 * Logic is in the eye of the logician.
 * Gloria Steinem (1984) cited in: Robert Byrne (2002) The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

 * An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
 * Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Preludes, p.3.

 * It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.
 * Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Epistemology and Subtractive Knowledge, p. 78.

 * Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.
 * Henry David Thoreau Journals (1838-1859) January 26, 1840.

 * The moment we stop assuming that the ideas of any millieu form static 'propositional systems', and recognize that they constitute historically developing 'conceptual populations', we are free to abandon also the philosophers' traditional assumption that rationality is a sub-species of logicality. ...In non-intellectual contexts... we judge the rationality of a man's conduct, not by how he habitually behaves, but rather how far he modifies his behaviour in new and unfamiliar situations, and it is arguable that the rationality of intellectual performances should be judged, correspondingly, by considering, not the internal consistency of a man's habitual concepts and beliefs, but rather the manner in which he modifies this intellectual position in the face of new and unforeseen experiences.
 * , Human Understanding (1972) Vol. 1 The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts.

U-Z

 * Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and self-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains the same for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect.
 * Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (1913)

 * As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom.
 * Evelyn Underhill (1914) Practical Mysticism. Chapter II, The World Of Reality, p. 38

 * Logic is a law which must be obeyed, and man realizes himself only in so far as he is logical. He finds himself in cognition.
 * Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906)

 * Memory, then, is a necessary part of the logical faculty. ... The proposition A = A must have a psychological relation to time, otherwise it would be At1 = At2.
 * Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1906), p. 148

 * Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.
 * Ludwig Wittgenstein in: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, C. K. Ogden (2010) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. p. 83

 * [ Fuzzy logic is ] a logic whose distinguishing features are (i) fuzzy truth-values expressed in linguistic terms, e.g., true, very true, more or less true, or somewhat true, false, nor very true and not very false, etc2.; (2) imprecise truth tables; and (3) rules of inference whose validity is relative to a context rather than exact.
 * Lotfi A. Zadeh (1975) "Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning". Synthese 30: p. 407

title: Logic


text:
Futurama

 * Seasons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | Main

Futurama (1999-present) is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. Set in the year 3000, a 20th century human who was frozen in the year 1999 awakes to find himself in the future, where he finds new friends who are coworkers at the Planet Express delivery company.

Seasons

 * Season 1
 * Season 2
 * Season 3
 * Season 4
 * Season 5
 * Season 6
 * Season 7

Cast
Main Cast
 * Billy West: Philip J. Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Dr. Zoidberg
 * Katey Sagal: Turanga Leela
 * John DiMaggio: Bender
 * Lauren Tom: Amy Wong
 * Phil LaMarr: Hermes Conrad

title: Futurama


text:
David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion (16 October 1886 – 1 December 1973) was the first Prime Minister of Israel. He was an active Zionist campaigner before the establishment of the Jewish state, and played an instrumental role in Israel when the British Mandate in Palestine ended. He carried Israel through the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and led the country in its first years of existence, not leaving office for the last time until 1963.

1917–1939

 * The agricultural community that the Arabs found in Eretz Israel in the 7th century was none other than the Hebrew farmers that remained on their land despite all the persecution and oppression of the Roman and Byzantine emperors.
 * “Leverur Motsa Ha’Falahim,” Luach Achiezer, New York, 1917, pp. 118-27, reprinted in Anachnu U’Shcheneinu (Tel Aviv: Davar. 1931), pp. 13-25

 * The fellahin are not descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab conquerors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement
 * Eretz Israel in the Past and Present (Yiddish, New York, 1918)
 * A fellah or fellahin in Arabic means a "ploughman" or "tiller".

 * The greater majority and main structures of the Muslim falahin in western Eretz Israel present to us one racial strand and a whole ethnic unit, and there is no doubt that much Jewish blood flows in their veins — the blood of those Jewish farmers, “lay persons,” who chose in the travesty of times to abandon their faith in order to remain on their land.
 * “Leverur Motsa Ha’Falahim,” Luach Achiezer, New York, 1917, pp. 118-27, reprinted in Anachnu U’Shcheneinu (Tel Aviv: Davar. 1931), pp. 13-25

 * Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution!  There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it...  We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.
 * Written statement (June 1919), as quoted in Time magazine (24 July 2006)

 * Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them. Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.
 * Written statement (1920), as quoted in.

 * The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.
 * Speech in 1937, accepting a British proposal for partition of Palestine which created a potential Jewish majority state, as quoted in New Outlook (April 1977)

A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily... it is easier for them to continue the war and not get tired than it is for us... The Palestinian Arabs are not alone. The Syrians are coming to help. From our point of view, they are strangers; in the point of law they are foreigners; but to the Arabs, they are not foreigners at all ... The centre of the war is in Palestine, but its dimensions are much wider. When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves and our moral and physical position is not bad. We can face the gangs... and were we allowed to mobilize all our forces we would have no doubts about the outcome... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand ... but in the political sphere they are superior. The land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside. They defend bases which are theirs, which is easier than conquering new bases... let us not think that the terror is a result of Hitler's or Mussolini's propaganda — this helps but the source of opposition is there among the Arabs.
 * In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us. But let us not ignore the truth among ourselves. I insist on the truth, not out of respect for scientific but political realities. The acknowledgement of this truth leads to inevitable and serious conclusions regarding our work in Palestine... let us not build on the hope the terrorist gangs will get tired. If some get tired, others will replace them.
 * Address at the Mapai Political Committee (7 June 1938) as quoted in.

 * Terrorism benefits the Arabs, it may lay waste the Yishuv and shake Zionism. But to follow in the Arabs' footsteps and ape their deeds is to be blind to the gulf between us. Our aims and theirs run counter: methods calculated to further theirs, are ruinous to us.
 * "On three fronts" (3 August 1938) as quoted in.

 * From Jewish terrorism against Arabs it is a short step to Jewish terrorism against Jews.
 * "On three fronts" (3 August 1938) as quoted in.

 * We must support the army as though there were no White Paper, and fight the White Paper as though there were no war.
 * Statement (12 September 1939), quoted in.
 * Variants:
 * Fight the war as if there was no White Paper, and the White Paper as if there was no war.
 * As quoted in A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times (1949) by James William Parkes, p. 342
 * "We shall fight the War as if there was no White Paper, and the White Paper, as if there was no War."
 * As quoted in Pioneer (1968) by Deborah Dayan, p. 83

 * If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.
 * Attributed to Ben-Gurion (pre-War 1939) by Martin Gilbert in "Israel was everything" in The New York Times (21 June 1987)

1948–1970

 * We accepted the UN resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don't accept?
 * Address to the Israeli cabinet (12 May 1948), as quoted in "One day that shook the world" by Ellli Wohlgelernter, in The Jerusalem Post (30 April 2002)

 * We extend the hand of peace and good-neighborliness to all the States around us and to their people, and we call upon them to cooperate in mutual helpfulness with the independent Jewish nation in its Land. The State of Israel is prepared to make its contribution in a concerted effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.
 * Israel's Proclamation of Independence, read on (14 May 1948)

 * Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.
 * Israel's Proclamation of Independence, read on (14 May 1948)

 * We consider that the United Nations' ideal is a Jewish ideal.
 * As quoted in "The Watchman" in TIME magazine (16 August 1948)

 * Let me first tell you one thing: It doesn't matter what the world says about Israel; it doesn't matter what they say about us anywhere else. The only thing that matters is that we can exist here on the land of our forefathers. And unless we show the Arabs that there is a high price to pay for murdering Jews, we won't survive.
 * Advice reportedly given by Ben-Gurion to Ariel Sharon after the Qibya massacre in 1953. Quoted by Sharon in the documentary The 50 Years War : Israel & The Arabs (1999).

 * I have just come back from the internment camps of Europe where I looked on the survivors of the Nazi charnel houses. I was in Dachau and Belsen. I saw chambers where hundreds of Jews were throttled every day. They were brought naked, as if to bathe, and the Nazis would peer through peepholes and watch them writhing in their death agonies.
 * An address at Hebrew University (28 November 1945), as quoted in Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 151
 * See also The Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps.

 * Our code must be framed to speed the absorption of immigrants into our economy, culture and society; to fuse the returning tribes into a homogeneous national and cultural unit; to forward our physical and moral healing and the cleansing of our lives from the trivia and dross which gathered upon us in dependence and exile. To maintain the status quo will not do. We have set up a dynamic State, bent upon creation and reform, building and expansion. Laws which lag behind development, merely a digest of experience and the lessons of the past, are useless to us. We need to anticipate the character of the times, discern embryonic forms emergent or renewed, and clear the path for circumstantial change.
 * Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419; a portion of this paragraph has sometimes been misquoted as: "To maintain the status quo will not do. We have to set up a dynamic state bent upon expansion."

 * We have rebelled against all controls and religions, all laws and judgments which the mighty sought to foist upon us. We kept to our dedication and our missions. By these will the State be judged, by the moral character it imparts to its citizens, by the human values determining its inner and outward relations, and by its fidelity, in thought and act, to the supreme behest: "and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Here is crystallized the eternal law of Judaism, and all the written ethics in the world can say no more. The State will be worthy of its name only if its systems, social and economic, political and legal, are based upon these imperishable words. They are more than a formal precept which can be construed as passive or negative: not to deprive, not to rob, not to oppress, not to hurt.
 * Rebirth and Destiny of Israel (1954), p. 419.

 * With us, anyone who doesn't believe in miracles isn't a realist.
 * Attributed to Ben-Gurion in Israel : Years of Crisis Years of Hope (1973) by Roman Frister, p. 45
 * Variant: In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles. (Interview on CBS, (5 October 1956))

 * I saw you then not only as the symbol of your people and its greatness, but as the voice of the invincible and uncompromising conscience of the human race at a time of danger to the dignity of man, created in the image of God. It was not only the liberties and the honor of your own people that you saved.
 * Letter to Winston Churchill on his leadership during World War II (1961), as quoted in "Churchill and the Jewish state" by Colin Shindler in The Jerusalem Post (27 December 2007)

 * We shall be a free and self-sufficing nation, honouring Arab rights in an accord of equality, and living in peace with neighbour countries.
 * page 36 of Israel: Opposing Viewpoints (1994) by Charles P. Cozic
 * In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.
 * As quoted on Look magazine, and reproduced by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (4 January 1962).

 * Well done, now give it back to them.
 * Spoken to Louis Nir in June 1967, after his unit captured Hebron in the Six-Day War), as quoted in "Is the end in sight?" by Henry Porter in The Observer (28 October 2001)

 * I was in Dachau and Belsen. I saw chambers where hundreds of Jews were put to death every day. ... I saw the gallows in Belsen where Jews were hanged each Jewish holy day, while the rest were paraded to witness the ghastly punishments of men who had perhaps come a few minutes late to their daily grind. ... It is beyond mortal power to bring back to life six million who were burned, asphyxiated and buried alive by the Nazis. But our six million brothers and sisters who went to their deaths have bequeathed us a sacred injunction: to prevent such a disaster overtaking the Jewish peoples in the future and to do so by the Jewish people being an independent people in its own land, capable of resisting any foe or enemy by its own strength.
 * Letter to an unnamed American friend, as quoted in David Ben-Gurion, in His Own Words (1969) edited by Amram M. Ducovny, p. 57 - 60; similar remarks appeared in an address at Hebrew University (28 November 1945)

 * We will make a great and awful mistake if we fail to settle Hebron, neighbor and predecessor of Jerusalem, with a large Jewish settlement, constantly growing and expanding, very soon. This will also be a blessing to the Arab neighbors. Hebron is worthy to be Jerusalem's sister.
 * As quoted in "Hebron Is Jerusalem's Sister", Sdeh Boker, 18 Shvat 5730 (25 January 1970)

 * For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication [to Zionism]. I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution. Płońsk [Ben-Gurion's hometown] was remarkably free of it ... Nevertheless, and I think this very significant, it was Płońsk that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Eretz Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland ... Life in Płońsk was peaceful enough. There were three main communities: Russians, Jews and Poles. ... The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about five thousand each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group occupying the innermost districts whilst the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang the latter would almost inevitably represent a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews who even if their numbers were initially fewer could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.
 * Memoirs (1970), p. 36.

Undated

 * "The debate has not been for or against the indivisibility of Eretz Israel. No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of Eretz Israel. The Debate was over which of two routes would lead quicker to the common goal.
 * As quoted in.

 * A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning. … I am certain that we well not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreements with our Arab neighbors or by some other means. . . [If the Arabs refuse] we shall have to speak to them in another language. But we shall only have another language if we have a state.
 * As quoted in.

 * What matters is not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do.
 * An "oft-repeated credo" according to the "Windsor Star - Dec 3, 1973 and repeated in various newspapers (with minor variations) including the Jerusalem post (May 22,2009) "It doesn't matter what the goyim say, but what the Jews do."

 * The assets of the Jewish National Home must be created exclusively through our own work, for only the product of the Hebrew labor can serve as the national estate.
 * As quoted in Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs : From Peace to War (1985) by Shabtai Teveth, p. 66

 * We should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria....The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established, with its southern border on the Litani River [within Lebanon]. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the [Arab] Legion's strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo.
 * Attributed to Ben-Gurion in The Times of Israel article "Israel Continues Aggression against Syria while Playing the Victim, or: The Way of the Wall"

 * Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee. They didn't offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of cleansing the Galilee.
 * From a protocol of the Government of Israel, translated from Hebrew by Israel Shahak, in "Truth or Myth about Israel? Read between Quotation Marks" by Charley Reese in The Orlando Sentinel (13 June 1999); later published as "What Israeli Historians Say About 1948 Ethnic Cleansing" in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (September 1999)

 * Um-Shmoom.
 * Transliteration of Hebrew statement meaning "The UN—Blah!", quoted in Israel : From War to Peace?: The First Hundred Years (2000) by Efraim Karsh, p. 40

 * The most dangerous enemy to Israel's security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security.
 * Quoted in Supreme Command : Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (2002) by Eliot A. Cohen, p. 172

 * If an expert says it can't be done, get another expert.
 * As quoted in Words from the Wise : Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (2007) by Rosemarie Jarski, p. 170

Disputed

 * Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
 * Attributed to Ben-Gurion in A Call to Action : The Handbook to Unite and Ignite America's Betrayed and Imperiled Public (2004) by A. T. Theodore, p. 6, but earlier published as a saying of unknown authorship in Uncommon Sense : The World's Fullest Compendium of Wisdom (1987) by Joseph Telushkin, p. 204

Misattributed

 * Israel had better rid itself of the territories and their Arab populations as soon as possible. If it did not Israel would soon become an Apartheid State.
 * Quoted from memory by Hirsh Goodman in Let Me Create a Paradise, God Said to Himself: A Journey of Conscience from Johannesberg to Jerusalem By Hirsh Goodman, page 90. The quote was checked by UK Media Watch against Ben Gurion's relevant diary, Ben Gurion archives and with historians Benny Moris, Martin Kramer, Zaki Shalom and Anita Shapira. Hirsh Goodman "stands by his recollection, but declined, when asked, to provide any further details on the interview, such as the name of the radio station or the name of the interviewer" Did the Independent just publish a fake Ben-Gurion quote? (Update)

 * I fight, therefore I exist.
 * No clear citations of this to Ben-Gurion have been located. A very early variant of this idea (which plays upon the statement of René Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" — "I think, therefore I exist") is found in Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung (1922) by Leo Wittmayer, p. 255, a work about the Weimar Constitution, where Wittmayer speaks against the attitude, while stating it in Latin: "bello ergo sum".

 * In our state there will be non-Jews as well — and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well. ...The attitude of the Jewish State to its Arab citizens will be an important factor—though not the only one—in building good neighbourly relations with the Arab States. If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, and if his status will not be the least different from that of the Jew, and perhaps better than the status of the Arab in an Arab state, and if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly subside and a bridge to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab alliance, will be built...
 * Ba-Ma'Araha Vol IV, Part 2, pp. 260, 265, quoted in Fabricating Israeli History, Efraim Karsh, p.67 (1947)

Quotes about Ben-Gurion

 * Statements attributed to your Government to the effect that Israel does not intend to withdraw from Egyptian territory, as requested by the United Nations, have been called to my attention. I must say frankly, Mr. Prime Minister, that the United States views these reports, if true, with deep concern. Any such decision by the Government of Israel would seriously undermine the urgent efforts being made by the United Nations to restore peace in the Middle East, and could not but bring about the condemnation of Israel as a violator of the principles as well as the directives of the United Nations.
 * Dwight D. Eisenhower; Message to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion Urging Withdrawal of Israeli Forces in Egypt Online, The American Presidency Project; 8 November 1956

 * When we spoke together in May 1961 you said that we might make whatever use we wished of the information resulting from the first visit of American scientists to Dimona and that you would agree to further visits by neutrals as well. I had assumed from Mrs. Meir's comment that there would be no problem between us on this. We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel. I cannot imagine that the Arabs would refrain from turning to the Soviet Union for assistance if Israel were to develop a nuclear weapons capability—with all the consequences this would hold. But the problem is much larger than its impact on the Middle East. Development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel would almost certainly lead other larger countries, that have so far refrained from such development, to feel that they must follow suit. I can well appreciate your concern for developments in the UAR. But I see no present or imminent nuclear threat to Israel from there. I am assured that our intelligence on this question is good and that the Egyptians do not presently have any installation comparable to Dimona, nor any facilities potentially capable of nuclear weapons production. But, of course, if you have information that would support a contrary conclusion, I should like to receive it from you through Ambassador Barbour. We have the capacity to check it.
 * Letter from John F. Kennedy (18 May 1963), as cited at the Jewish Virtual Library.

 * After 1905 thousands of Bundists and other revolutionaries (from socialist-Zionists to Bolsheviks) made their way to New York and infused the existing Jewish labor movement with new energy and ideas. Party emissaries came to raise money or seek refuge during difficult times. Visiting dignitaries such as "the grandmother of the Russian revolution," Katerina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, and Israel's future prime minister David Ben-Gurion found warm welcomes from New York's immigrant Jews...
 * Tony Michels A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (2005)

title: David Ben-Gurion


text:
Anatol Rapoport

Anatol Rapoport (May 22, 1911 – January 20, 2007) was a Russian-born American Jewish mathematical psychologist. He was one of the founders of the general systems theory. He also contributed to mathematical biology and to the mathematical modeling of social interaction and stochastic models of contagion.

1940s

 * The behavior of two individuals, consisting of effort which results in output, is considered to be determined by a satisfaction function which depends on remuneration (receiving part of the output) and on the effort expended. The total output of the two individuals is not additive, that is, together they produce in general more than separately. Each individual behaves in a way which he considers will maximize his satisfaction function. Conditions are deduced for a certain relative equilibrium and for the stability of this equilibrium, i.e., conditions under which it will not “pay” the individual to decrease his efforts. In the absence of such conditions "exploitation" occurs which may or may not lead to total parasitism.
 * Anatol Rapoport. "Mathematical theory of motivation interactions of two individuals," The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics(1947) 9: 17-28, March 01, 1947

 * The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.
 * Anatol Rapoport. "Cycle distributions in random nets." The bulletin of mathematical biophysics 10.3 (1948): 145-157.

 * Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.
 * Anatol Rapoport, "Outline of a probabilistic approach to animal sociology: I." The Bulletin of mathematical biophysics 11.3 (1949): p 183

1950s

 * No map contains all the information about the territory it represents. The road map we get at the gasoline station may show all the roads in the state, but it will not as a rule show latitude and longitude. A physical map goes into details about the topography of a country but is indifferent to political boundaries. Furthermore, the scale of the map makes a big difference. The smaller the scale the less features will be shown.
 * Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 85

 * A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concern with the best available map of reality. The scientist will always seek a description of events which enables him to predict most by assuming least. He thus already prefers a particular form of behavior. If moralities are systems of preferences, here is at least one point at which science cannot be said to be completely without preferences. Science prefers good maps.
 * Anatol Rapoport Science and the goals of man: a study in semantic orientation. Greenwood Press, 1950/1971. p. 224; Partly cited in: Book review by Harold G. Wren, in Louisiana Law Review, Vol 13, nr 4, May 1953

 * [It is a] well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals
 * Anatol Rapoport (1954, p. 75); as quoted in: Samuel Leinhardt (1977) Social Networks: A Developing Paradigm, p. 350

 * It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy.
 * Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Promise and Pitfalls of Information Theory"; AS quoted in: (2010) Holistic Darwinism, p. 364

 * The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.
 * Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35

 * The predictions of physical theories for the most part concern situations where initial conditions can be precisely specified. If such initial conditions are not found in nature, they can be arranged. Such arrangements are considerably easier to realize with inanimate than with animate matter, because the properties of animate matter are much more sensitive to being tampered with than inanimate matter. In particular, living tissue in vitro may behave quite differently than in situ. Controlled biological experiments are, of course, possible, but they are more difficult and their scope is more limited than that of physical experiments. For this reason, biology has had to depend to a greater extent than physics on theories of larger speculative scope, in which reasoning by imaginative analogy plays a more important role.
 * Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Search for Simplicity"

 * A theorem is a proposition which is a strict logical consequence of certain definitions and other propositions
 * Anatol Rapoport. "Various meanings of “theory”." American Political Science Review 52.04 (1958): 972-988.

"What is Semantics?", 1950
Anatol Rapoport. "What is Semantics?" In: S. I. Hayakawa (ed.). Language, New York 1950, Harper & Brothers; Republished in: Et Cetera, (1951); American Scientist, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan. 1952), pp. 123-135; and General Systems 23 (1978): 159-164.

 * There are two suffixes in our language (and similar ones in other European languages) which suggest organized knowledge. One is the venerable, academic "ology," that reminds one of university curricula and scholarship. The other is the energetic and somewhat mysterious "ics," which has a connotative flavor of magic. Where "ology" suggests academic isolation (ichthyology, philology) "ics" suggests a method of attack on life's problems. It contains a faint throwback to the ancient dreams of the philosopher's stone and of "keys" to the riddles of the universe. Ancient words ending in "ics" are mathematics and metaphysics. Of more recent origin are economics, statistics, semantics, and cybernetics.
 * 1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123) lead paragraph

 * Who Are the Semanticists? To answer this question, let us go to the writings of those who make frequent references to semantics or to equivalent terms which have to do with the study of meaning. We find that a number of prominent thinkers have occupied themselves with this study. In England these include Whitehead, Russell, Ogden, Richards, Ayer, and others; in Austria (later scattered, fleeing from fascism), a group of writers who called themselves the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap and Frank (now in in the United States), Wittgenstein (now in England), and Neurath (deceased); the United States is represented by Charles Morris, and Poland by Tarski and Korzybski (deceased), both of whom emigrated to the United States.
 * 1950, p. 12 (1952, p. 123)

 * For a general semanticist, communication is not merely words in proper order properly inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these together, with the chain of 'fact to nervous system to language to nervous system to action.
 * 1950, p. 14; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 105.

 * "What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved.
 * (1951, p. 14)

 * The accusations of cultism leveled against Korzybski's followers are not altogether unfounded. In the United States there is a large floating population of 'truthseekers'. Many of them lack the capacity of strenuous intellectual effort required in a fruitful pursuit of knowledge and wisdom; others lack the power of critical evaluation, which would enable them to tell the genuine from the false. Still others cannot be comfortable until they find a panacea to believe in. These people support 'movements' and cults. They are as likely to 'go for' Christian Science as for technocracy, for psychoanalysis as for theosophy, for the Great Books programme as for dianetics. And so inevitably one finds some of them among the adherents of general semantics ... Whether they were actually helped by general semantics or by other factors cannot be determined without sufficient controls. But they went about spreading the faith, thus giving a cultist flavour to the 'movement'.
 * p. 6; as cited in: Schaff (1962; 94-95)

 * If Korzybski cannot be said to have established an empirical science, what then has he done? He has pointed a way toward the establishment of such a science. He was a precursor of an intellectual revolution which is just now beginning and which promises to match that of the Renaissance. If Korzybski is seen in this role, then the question of his originality or erudition is not important. He might have something of a dilettante in him. He might have pretended to have more specialized knowledge than he actually had. Great portions of his outlook might be found in the works of more modest and more meticulous workers, That is not important. He was a man of vision and an apostle. Such men are all too rare in our age of specialization.
 * p. 6; as cited in: Schaff (1962; 95)

1960s

 * The outstanding feature of behavior is that it is often quite easy to recognize but extremely difficult or impossible to describe with precision.
 * Anatol Rapoport, "An Essay on Mind". Reprinted in Toward Definition of Mind (Jordan Ma Scher, editor). Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1962. p. 92

 * In the case of strategy and conscience, I am not sure. Here I believe, is essential incompatibility, not merely a result of misunderstanding. I do not believe one can bring both into focus. One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.
 * Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience. Harper & Row, 1964. p. 195

 * The military forces of the revolutionary adversary are diffuse. One is never sure whether one has destroyed them unless one is ready to destroy a large portion of the population, and this usually conflicts with the political aim of the war and hence also violates a fundamental Clausewitzian principle
 * Anatol Rapoport (1968), as quoted in: William John Thomas Mitchel (2011) Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present. p. viii

 * There are different levels of organization in the occurrence of events. You cannot explain the events of one level in terms of the events of another. For example, you cannot explain life in terms of mechanical concepts, nor society in terms of individual psychology. Analysis can only take you down the scale of organization. It cannot reveal the workings of things on a higher level. To some extent the holistic philosophers are right.
 * Anatol Rapoport, General Systems, Vol. 14, (1969), p. 96; As cited in: Gordon Chen (1980) The General Theory of Systems Applied to Management and Organization, Volume 2, p. 590

 * It is one thing to say that the dwelling has symbolic and cosmological aspects... and another to say that it has been erected for ritual purposes and is neither shelter nor dwelling but a temple.
 * Anatol Rapoport (1969:40); As quoted in: Michael Parker Pearson, Colin Richards (2003) Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Space. p. 49 : Commented on the

 * The "flow of information" through human communication channels is enormous. So far no theory exists, to our knowledge, which attributes any sort of unambiguous measure to this "flow".
 * Anatol Rapoport (1969) in: Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist. p. 139

Fights, games, and debates, (1960)
Anatol Rapoport. Fights, games, and debates. University of Michigan Press, 1960/1974.

 * It is the shortcomings of game theory (as originally formulated) which force the consideration of the role of ethics, of the dynamics of social structure, and of social structure and of individual psychology in situations of conflict.
 * p, vii (1974)

 * In a game, the potentialities and evaluations of alternative outcomes must be taken into account, if the reactions of the opponents to each other's moves are to moves are to be understood or described systematically.
 * p. 10

 * Conflict... is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love. In the vast output of discourse on the subject, conflict has been treated in every conceivable way. It has been treated descriptively, as in history and fiction; it has been treated in an aura of moral approval, as in epos; with implicit resignation, as in tragedy; with moral disapproval, as in pacifistic religions. There is a body of knowledge called military science, presumably concerned with strategies of armed conflict. There are innumerable handbooks, which teach how to play specific games of strategy. Psychoanalysts are investigating the genesis of "fight-like" situations within the individual, and social psychologists are doing the same on the level of groups and social classes.
 * p. 11

 * At present game theory has, in my opinion, two important uses, neither of them related to games nor to conflict directly. First, game theory stimulates us to think about conflict in a novel way. Second, game theory leads to some genuine impasses, that is, to situations where its axiomatic base is shown to be insufficient for dealing even theoretically with certain types of conflict situations... Thus, the impact is made on our thinking process themselves, rather than on the actual content of our knowledge.
 * p. 242; As cited in: Han Dorussen. "Min beste fagbok: Anatol Rapoport: Fights, Games, and Debates" at sv.ntnu.no, 1998

"The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," 1962
Anatol Rapoport, "The Use and Misuse of Game Theory," Scientific American, December 1962, 108–18, 108.

 * We live in an age of belief-belief in the omnipotence of science. This belief is bolstered by the fact that the problems scientists are called on to solve are for the most part selected by the scientists themselves.
 * p. 108

 * A thorough understanding of game theory, should dim these greedy hopes. Knowledge of game theory does not make one a better card player, businessman or military strategist.
 * p. 108

 * Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life.
 * p. 108

 * Although the drama of games of strategy is strongly linked with the psychological aspects of the conflict, game theory is not concerned with these aspects. Game theory, so to speak, plays the board. It is concerned only with the logical aspects of strategy.
 * p. 110

 * Whether game theory leads to clear-cut solutions, to vague solutions, or to impasses, it does achieve one thing. In bringing techniques of logical and mathematical analysis gives men an opportunity to bring conflicts up from the level of fights, where the intellect is beclouded by passions, to the level of games, where the intellect has a chance to operate.
 * p. 114

Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation (1965)
Anatol Rapoport Prisoner's dilemma: A study in conflict and cooperation. co-authored by Albert S. Chammah. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965.

 * Many psychologists, sociologists and especially anthropologists and psychiatrists raise serious objections against routine attempts to "extend the methods of the physical sciences" to the study of man. These objections cannot be dismissed simply on the grounds that they are not constructive; for inherent in the objections may well be a conviction that there can never be a "behavioral science" as scientists understand science. Whether there can be such a science or not will be decided neither by citing successful applications of "scientific method" to carefully circumscribed sectors of human behavior nor by pointing out what has not yet been done. Therefore on the question of whether a can in principle be constructed, we shall take no sides. That some kinds of human behavior can be described and even predicted in terms of objectively verifiable and quantifiable data seems to us to have been established.
 * p. v

 * Crisis in its simplest terms is defined as an upset in a steady state... the habitual problem-solving activities are not adequate and do not rapidly lead to the previously achieved balance state.
 * p. 24

 * The usefulness of the models in constructing a testable theory of the process is severely limited by the quickly increasing number of parameters which must be estimated in order to compare the predictions of the models with empirical results.
 * p. 150

 * Our first objective in undertaking the experimental program described here has been to gain some understanding of what goes on in long sequences of plays of Prisoner's Dilemma. We have attempted to gain this understanding by postulating a system going through a sequence of states and by attempting to formulate some mathematical models from which the dynamics of the system could be deduced. Once such a model is found, its parameters, properly interpreted, become the key terms in the emerging psychological theory. This strategy can be deemed successful, if the parameters so discovered are independent of the process itself, if they suggest further investigation, and if the further investigations, in turn, lead to a more inclusive theory.
 * p. 185

 * (Game theory is) essentially a structural theory. It uncovers the logical structure of a great variety of conflict situations and describes this structure in mathematical terms. Sometimes the logical structure of a conflict situation admits rational decisions; sometimes it does not.
 * p. 196

"The Study of Conflict," 1968
Anatol Rapoport (1968) "The Study of Conflict," ''Can. Pap. in Peace Studies No. 1; As quoted in: Science for Peace in SfP Bulletin,'' June 1989.

 * We must admit that it is extremely difficult to formulate a theory sufficiently general to encompass all possible sufficient causes of wars. With regard to necessary causes, however,... it is weapons. Without weapons wars could not be fought. We are told that, deprived of weapons, people would still fight with sticks and stones. This, however, need not concern us. We are concerned not just with fighting but with the sort of mass insanity that can destroy the entire civilization, the product of millenia of accumulated effort, in a matter of hours. And this can be done only with real, up-to-date weapons, not sticks and stones.

 * [Education] seems to be the only hope: to spread enlightenment sufficiently wide so that people can no longer be manipulated to give consent to policies that will surely eventually lead to their own destruction.

 * The American Revolution was ignited by the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’, a slogan suggested by democratic ideals... Ought not the present day version of the old slogan be ‘No annihilation without representation?

1970s and later

 * To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.
 * Anatol Rapoport, "Modern Systems Theory – An Outlook for Coping with Change", paper given in the 1970 John Umstead Distinguished Lectures at North Carolina Department of Mental Health, Research Division, on 5 February 1970, and appeared in Revue Francaise de Sociologie, October 1969, p. 16

 * Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability. ... choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center.
 * Anatol Rapoport, as quoted in: Gerald McKnight (1973) Computer crime, p. 203

 * The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality.
 * Anatol Rapoport. (1974). Game Theory as a Theory of Conflict Resolution p. 4

 * The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.
 * Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, J.H. Kerr, S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64

 * In the US. Infantry Manual published during World War II, the soldier was told what to do if a live grenade fell into the trench where he and others were sitting: to wrap himself around the grenade so as to at least save the others. (If no one "volunteered," all would be killed, and there were only a few seconds to decide who would be the hero.)
 * Anatol Rapoport (1988), quoted in: William Poundstone (2011) Prisoner's Dilemma. p. 203

Quotes about Anatol Rapoport

 * Anatol Rapoport is a pioneer and lead-figure of the systems sciences, studies in conflict & cooperation, and peace research. He is professor emeritus of Psychology and Mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada... Rapoport has spearheaded many scientific innovations, including the application of mathematical methods, first to Biology and later to the Social Sciences. Moreover, he is one of the rare thinkers who have contributed significantly to "marrying" philosophy and science. The originality and rigor of his thinking make his theoretical oeuvre extraordinarily resourceful, as well as unique in its ethical substance and esthetical appeal. Rapoport operates from a multidimensional background of experience and studies (see the following C.V.), embodying a deep humanistic commitment (cf. Rapoport 1994), and a profoundly systemic thinking.
 * "Anatol Rapoport (*1911)" at isss.org, September 1998.

 * The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod's legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent's work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
 * Daniel Dennett, quoted in In memoriam: Anatol Rapoport at whimsley.typepad.com, 2007/02

title: Anatol Rapoport


text:
Quentin Reynolds

Quentin James Reynolds (April 11, 1902 – March 17, 1965) was a journalist and World War II war correspondent.

Quotes

 * Short on glamour and long on tragedy.
 * Describing World War II in his autobiography, By Quentin Reynolds (1963).

title: Quentin Reynolds


text:
Louis Nizer

Louis Nizer (6 February 1902 – 10 November 1994) British-born U.S. lawyer; Author of My Life in Court, Thinking On Your Feet, Reflections Without Mirrors

Sourced

 * A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
 * Between You and Me, Beechurst Press, 1948.

 * Once early in the morning, at two or three in the morning, when the master was asleep, the books in the library began to quarrel with each other as to which was the king of the library. The dictionary contended quite angrily that he was the master of the library because without words there would be no communication at all. The book of science argued stridently that he was the master of the library for without science there would have been no printing press or any of the other wonders of the world. The book of poetry claimed that he was the king, the master of the library, because he gave surcease and calm to his master when he was troubled. The books of philosophy, the economic books, all put in their claims, and the clamor was great and the noise at its height when a small low voice was heard from an old brown book lying in the center of the table and the voice said "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want". And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was.
 * "Ministers of Justice", Address delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Convention of the Tennessee Bar Association at Gatlinburg, June 5, 1963; published in 31 Tennessee Law Review 1 (Fall 1963), p. 19.

 * When a man points a finger at someone else, he should remember that four of his fingers are pointing to himself.
 * My Life in Court (1961), p. 115.

 * There is an aphorism about a farmer who before sunrise on a cold and misty morning, saw a huge beast on a distant hill. He seized his rifle and walked cautiously toward the ogre to head off an attack on his family. When he got nearer, he was relieved to find that the beast was only a small bear. He approached more confidently and when he was within a few hundred yards the distorting haze had lifted sufficiently so that he could recognize the figure as only that of a man. Lowering his rifle, he walked toward the stranger and discovered he was his brother.
 * My Life in Court (1961), p. 443.

 * A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.

title: Louis Nizer