text:
Michael Johns

Michael Johns (born September 8, 1964), American health care executive, former federal government of the United States official, and conservative policy analyst and writer.

Quotes

 * While there are periodic calls from libertarians and others for the privatization or elimination of the program, given the first political opportunity to dramatically influence the Medicare program, a conservative White House and Congress sought to strengthen, not weaken, the program. To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate on this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive.
 * "The Great Society Meets the 21st Century," Orthopedic Technology Review, January 2004, by Michael Johns: 'Medicare Must Survive'

 * What, exactly, is the cost of this inaction? Estimates of the total national cost of medical malpractice range from $20 billion to $45 billion annually. But this number hardly tells the whole story. There also is the more hidden cost of defensive medicine, including unnecessary testing and second opinions that send patients scurrying through processes that would not otherwise be ordered and deepen the financial burden of America’s health care system by an estimated three percent of our country’s total health care expenditures. Who ultimately pays these costs? Reckless doctors? Faceless insurance companies? Seldom mentioned, the totality of these expenses ultimately falls exclusively on the consumer, since each malpractice award translates ultimately to increased malpractice insurance premiums, which, in turn, translates to either higher health care costs, fewer physicians (with less competitive pricing pressure), or both.
 * "Malpractice: Where Will It End?" Orthopedic Technology Review, September/October 2003, by Michael Johns: Advocating Statutory Constraints on Medical Malpractice

 * The tragedy of Africa seemingly has no end. Viewing it from afar, the casual Western onlooker can be forgiven if the scenes begin to meld: Ethiopian famine in 1987, Somalian civil war and ensuing famine in 1992, and now Central Africa in 1997. The pictures and footage assume the role of media footnotes: snapshots of hopelessness, disaster, and death that seem as far away as the moon and as unrealistic as some science fiction film. Yet, like the African crises before it, the tragedy of Central Africa is very real and, in a global age, perhaps not as distant as some would like to think. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
 * "Africa Deserves a Closer Look," The World and I, February 1997, by Michael Johns.

 * Ultimately, in its collapse, Laos was important because it proved the validity of the so-called domino theory, which preached that communism--once victorious in South Vietnam--would metastasize throughout the region. Laos, like Cambodia, proved the domino theorists correct. On August 23, 1975, just four months after Saigon's fall, communist Pathet Lao (meaning "Land of Lao") guerrillas entered the Laotian capital of Vientiane and seized control of the nation. It was an event that, while clearly destructive to American interests in Asia, served as something of a wake-up call to those American isolationists who had downplayed the regional threat of communism. It also ushered in a horrid era for this nation's 4.8 million people.
 * "Let's Not Forget Laos," The World and I, September 1995, by Michael Johns: The 'Domino Theory' Proved Right

 * The breakup of the former Yugoslavia--like the breakup of the former Soviet Union--presents challenges, some of which (such as developing tranquil relations among peoples of varying and often hostile ethnic and religious orientations) may, indeed, earn the label 'complicated.' But with the Bosnian war now in its third year, it is worth asking whether Washington has for too long outthought itself on this issue. Does the Bosnian crisis not hold some fundamental truths? Most certainly, it does. And if these truths could be agreed upon in a bipartisan fashion, might they not lay the foundation for the development of a comprehensive American policy that could assist in the deterrence of aggression and ultimately an assurance of peace in the region? The answer again is yes.
 * "How to Save Bosnia," The World and I, July 1994, by Michael Johns: Seeking Bipartisan Consensus to 'Save Bosnia'

 * Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror.
 * "Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns: In the former Soviet Union, we face an 'Evil Empire'.

 * No chronology of Soviet atrocities can convey the crushing of the human spirit under Lenin and his successors. But the retelling of 70 years of grisly facts leaves little doubt that what we face today in Soviet communism is, indeed, an 'evil empire.'
 * Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns: In the former Soviet Union, we face an 'Evil Empire'

 * Up against the ropes in the Iran-Contra affair, Ronald Reagan should have come out swinging, announcing clearly that this government carries itself in the tradition of the Marquis de Lafayette, that freedom fighters will no longer be left to die in the jungle, like Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs.
 * "Peace in Our Time: The Spirit of Munich Lives On," Policy Review, Summer 1987, by Michael Johns: Defining the Reagan Doctrine

 * The time has come to stop talking about the lessons of Vietnam, and to start talking about the lessons of Afghanistan."
 * The Lessons of Afghanistan: Bipartisan Support for Freedom Fighters Pays Off," Policy Review, Spring 1987, by Michael Johns: Urging America to Discard its 'Vietnam Syndrome'

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

title: Michael Johns


text:
Talk:Margaret Cho

Funny quotes. 131.247.240.221 17:36, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Margaret Cho


text:
Tombstone (film)

Tombstone is a 1993 film about a successful lawman's plans to retire anonymously in Tombstone, Arizona that are disrupted by the kind of outlaws he was famous for eliminating, resulting in the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
 * Directed by George P. Cosmatos. Written by Kevin Jarre.

'''Every town has a story. Tombstone has a legend.'''taglines

Doc Holliday

 * Ed, what an ugly thing to say... does this mean we're not friends anymore? You know, Ed, if I thought you weren't my friend, I just don't think I could bear it.

 * I have not yet begun to defile myself.

 * I'm your huckleberry.

 * It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds.

 * [On his deathbed, he notices he has bare feet, despite saying he wanted to die with his boots on] Well, I'll be damned. Oh, this is funny.

 * Oh, Johnny, I forgot you were there. You may go now.

 * Why, Kate, you're not wearing a bustle. How lewd.
 * You're no daisy, you're no daisy at all.
 * Say When

Wyatt Earp

 * I spent my whole life not knowing what I want out of it, just chasing my tail. Now for the first time I know exactly what I want... and who... and that's the damnable misery of it.
 * Go ahead, skin it. Skin that smokewagon and see what happens.

 * In all that time workin' those cow towns, I was only ever mixed up in one shooting, just one. But a man lost his life and I took it! You don't know how that feels, and believe me boy, you don't ever want to know. Not ever!

 * All right, Clanton. You called down the thunder, well, now you've got it! You see that? (shows badge) It says "United States Marshal." (gestures to Stilwell) Take a good look at him, Ike, because that's how you're gonna end up! The Cowboys are finished, you understand me? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearin' it! So run, you cur! Run! Tell all the other curs the law's coming! You tell 'em I'm coming and Hell's coming with me, you hear? Hell's coming with me!

 * I don't think I'll let you arrest us today, Behan.

Morgan Earp

 * Look at all the stars. You look up and you think, "God made all this and He remembered to make a little speck like me." It's kind of flattering, really.

 * [Last lines] Remember what I said about dying people seeing a white light? It ain't true! I can't see a damn thing! [Dies]

Narrator

 * 1879 - the Civil War is over, and the resulting economic explosion spurs the great migration west. Farmers, ranchers, prospectors, killers, and thieves seek their fortune. Cattle growers turn cow towns into armed camps, with murder rates higher than than those of modern day New York or Los Angeles. Out of this chaos comes legendary lawman Wyatt Earp, retiring his badge and gun to start a peaceful life for his family. Earp's friend, John "Doc" Holliday, a southern gentlemen turned gunman and gambler, also travels west, hoping the dry climate will relieve his tuberculosis. Silver is discovered in Arizona. Tombstone becomes queen of the boom towns where the latest Paris fashions are sold from the backs of wagons. Attracted to this atmosphere of greed, over 100 exiled Texas outlaws band together to form the ruthless gang recognized by the red sashes they wear. They emerge as the earliest example of organized crime in America. They call themselves The Cowboys.

 * The power of the Red Sash Cowboy Gang was broken forever. Ike Clanton was shot and killed two years later during an attempted robbery. Mattie died of a drug overdose shortly after she left Tombstone. Virgil and Allie Earp moved to California where Virgil, despite the use of only one arm, became a town sheriff. Wyatt and Josephine embarked on a series of adventures. Up or down, thin or flush, in 47 years they never left each other's side. Wyatt Earp died in Los Angeles in 1929. Among the pallbearers at his funeral were early western stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix. Tom Mix wept.

Dialogue

 * [Wyatt and Behan are discussing the possibility of a racetrack in Tombstone]
 * Doc Holliday: Way ahead of yourselves, aren't you, boys? This is just another mining camp.
 * Behan: Have you seen how everyone dresses? Awful tony for a mining camp. No, sir, the die is cast. We are growing. Be as big as San Francisco in a few years and just as sophisticated.
 * [He's interrupted by gunshots, men yelling, and a brief, but fatal, gunfight in the street mere feet from where they stand]
 * Doc Holliday: [smirking] Very cosmopolitan.
 * [Behan glares at him]

 * Josephine Marcus: [looking at Wyatt] This is a remarkable scene. I wonder who that tall drink of water is.
 * Mr. Fabian: My darling, you've cast your gaze upon the quintessential frontier type. Note the lean silhouette. Eyes closed by the sun, yet sharp as a hawk. He has the look of both predator and prey.
 * Josephine Marcus: I want one.
 * Mr. Fabian: Happy hunting.

 ''[Johnny Tyler stalks after Wyatt with a shotgun. Just as he's about to pull the trigger...]''
 * Doc Holliday: Why, Johnny Tyler! You madcap.
 * Johnny Tyler: [Freezes]...Doc?
 * Doc Holliday: Where do you think you're going with that shotgun?
 * Johnny Tyler: ...I-I didn't know you was back in town!

 * Johnny Ringo: [steps up to Doc] And you must be Doc Holliday.
 * Doc Holliday: That's the rumor.
 * Johnny Ringo: You retired too?
 * Doc Holliday: Not me. I'm in my prime.
 * Johnny Ringo: Yeah, you look it.
 * Doc Holliday: And you must be Ringo. Look, darling, Johnny Ringo. The deadliest pistoleer since Wild Bill, they say. What do you think, darling? Should I hate him?
 * Kate: You don't even know him.
 * Doc Holliday: Yes, but there's just something about him. Something around the eyes, I don't know, reminds me of... me. No. I'm sure of it, I hate him.
 * Wyatt Earp: [to Ringo] He's drunk.
 * Doc Holliday: In vino veritas. [When I drink, I say the truth]
 * Johnny Ringo: Age quod agis. [Do what you do best]
 * Doc Holliday: Credat Judaeus apella, non ego. [Drinking is not what I do best]
 * Johnny Ringo: [pats his gun] Eventus stultorum magister. [Fools must learn from experience]
 * Doc Holliday: [smiles] In pace requiescat. [It's your funeral]

''Note: The above translations are not the actual Latin to English translations. They are American vernacular, showing what Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo are really saying to each other.''
 * Fred White: Come on boys. We don't want any trouble in here. Not in any language.
 * Doc Holliday: [to Kate] That's Latin, darlin'. Evidently Mr. Ringo's an educated man. Now I really hate him.

 * Billy Clanton: Is that "Old Dog Tray?" It sounds to me like "Old Dog Tray." You know, Stephen Foster. "Oh, Susannah," "Camptown Races." Stephen stinking Foster!
 * Doc: Ah, yes. Well, this happens to be a nocturne.
 * Billy Clanton: A which?
 * Doc: You know, Frederic fucking Chopin.

 * Ike Clanton: What is that now? Twelve hands in a row? Holliday, son of a bitch, nobody's that lucky.
 * Doc Holliday: Why Ike, whatever do you mean? Maybe poker's just not your game Ike. I know! Let's have a spelling contest!

 * Billy Clanton: [to Holliday] It's the drunk piano player. You're so drunk, you couldn't hit nothin.'  [draws a knife.]  In fact, you're probably seeing double.
 * Doc: [draws a second gun]  I have two guns; one for each of ya.

 * [Doc Holliday joins the Earps just before the gunfight at the OK Corrall]
 * Wyatt Earp: It's not your problem, Doc. You don't have to mix up in this.
 * Doc Holliday: [Glares at Wyatt] That is a hell of a thing for you to say to me!

 * Kate: I don't understand. I'm your woman, you get killed, where's it leave me?
 * Doc Holliday: Without a meal ticket I suppose.
 * Kate: ... You bastard.
 * Doc Holliday: I'm leaving now darling.
 * Kate: You bastard!
 * Doc Holliday: Have you no kind word to say to me before I ride away?
 * [Kate turns around and says nothing]
 * Doc Holliday: I calculate not.

 * [Doc and Jack Johnson, weapons drawn, surprise some Cowboys in a brothel]
 * Jack Johnson: Nobody move!
 * Doc Holliday: Nonsense! By all means, move.

 * [Doc begins coughing violently.]
 * Jack Johnson: Doc, you ought to be in bed. What the hell you doin' this for, anyway?
 * Doc Holliday: Wyatt Earp is my friend.
 * Jack Johnson: Hell, I've got lots of friends.
 * Doc Holliday: I don't.

 * Wyatt Earp: What makes a man like Ringo, Doc? What makes him do the things he does?
 * Doc Holliday: A man like Ringo has a great empty hole through the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.
 * Wyatt Earp: What does he need?
 * Doc Holliday: Revenge.
 * Wyatt Earp: For what?
 * Doc Holliday: Being born.

 * [Johnny Ringo is awaiting Wyatt Earp's arrival in anticipation of a pistol duel.]
 * Johnny Ringo: Well... I didn't think you had it in you.
 * Doc Holliday: [reveals his face] I'm your huckleberry. [Ringo stops short, looking startled.] Why, Johnny Ringo. You look like somebody just walked over your grave.
 * Johnny Ringo: Fight's not with you, Holliday.
 * Doc Holliday: Oh, I beg to differ, sir. You and I started a game we never got to finish. Play for blood, remember?
 * Johnny Ringo: I was just fooling about.
 * Doc Holliday: [smiles] I wasn't. And this time...[opens his overcoat to reveal a badge] It's legal.
 * Johnny Ringo: [grins] All right, lunger. Let's do it!
 * Doc Holliday: Say when.
 * [Ringo draws, but Doc draws faster and shoots Ringo in the head, killing him]
 * Doc Holliday: Come on! Come on! Oh, Johnny, come on! You're no daisy, you're no daisy at all! Poor soul, you were just too high strung.
 * [Wyatt comes running, a look of shock on his face as he sees Doc standing over Johnny's corpse]
 * Doc Holliday: I'm afraid the strain was more than he could bear. Oh, I wasn't quite as sick as I made out.
 * [Wyatt finds Doc's deputy badge on Ringo's corpse]
 * Doc Holliday: My hypocrisy goes only so far.
 * Wyatt Earp: Alright, let's finish it.
 * Doc Holliday: Indeed, sir. The last charge of Wyatt Earp and his immortals.

 * Wyatt Earp: How are you?
 * Doc Holliday: I'm dying, how are you?
 * Wyatt Earp: Pretty much the same.

 * Doc Holliday: What did you ever want?
 * Wyatt Earp: Just to live a normal life.
 * Doc Holliday: There's no normal life, Wyatt, it's just life. Get on with it.
 * Wyatt Earp: Don't know how.
 * Doc Holliday: Sure you do. Say goodbye to me. Go grab that spirited actress and make her your own. Take that beauty and run, don't look back. Live every second. Live right up to the hilt. Live Wyatt. Live for me. Wyatt, if you were ever my friend, if you ever had even the slightest of feelin' for me, leave now. Leave now... Please.
 * Wyatt Earp: [takes Doc's hand] Thanks for always being there, Doc.

Taglines

 * Justice is coming.

 * Every town has a story. Tombstone has a legend.

 * I'm your huckleberry!

Cast

 * Kurt Russell - Wyatt Earp
 * Val Kilmer - Doc Holliday
 * Dana Delaney - Josephine Marcus
 * Powers Boothe - Curly Bill Brocius
 * Michael Biehn - Johnny Ringo
 * Sam Elliott - Virgil Earp
 * Bill Paxton - Morgan Earp
 * Billy Zane - Mr. Fabian
 * Thomas Haden Church - Billy Clanton
 * Jason Priestley - Billy Breckinridge
 * Stephen Lang - Ike Clanton
 * Billy Bob Thornton - Johnny Tyler
 * Charlton Heston - Henry Hooker
 * Joanna Pacula - Kate
 * Robert Mitchum - The Narrator

title: Tombstone (film)


text:
Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Quotes

 * Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
 * "Rules of Language," Science (August 2, 1991)

 * To a linguist, the phenomenon is familiar: the euphemism treadmill. People invent new "polite" words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations.  "Water closet" becomes "toilet" (originally a term for any body care, as in "toilet kit"), which becomes "bathroom," which becomes "rest room," which becomes "lavatory." … The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge. Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name. (We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when names for minorities stay put.)

 * I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology.
 * Introduction to The Nurture Assumption, 1998.

 * The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience. Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.
 * "On Einstein's brain," The New York Times (June 24, 1999)

 * Evolutionary psychology was the organizing framework—the source of “explanatory adequacy” or a “theory of the computation”—that the science of psychology had been missing. Like vision and language, our emotions and cognitive faculties are complex, useful, and nonrandomly organized, which means that they must be a product of the only physical process capable of generating complex, useful, nonrandom organization, namely, natural selection. An appeal to evolution was already implicit in the metatheoretical directives of Marr and Chomsky, with their appeal to the function of a mental faculty, and evolutionary psychology simply shows how to apply that logic to the rest of the mind.
 * Steven Pinker, "Foreword" in: Buss, David M., ed. The handbook of evolutionary psychology. John Wiley & Sons, 2005. p. xiv

The Language Instinct (1994)

 * The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.
 * p. 57

How the Mind Works (1997)

 * Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth-obeying) rules. The computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon fleshed this idea out further by noting that intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation to see how it differs from the goal, and applying a set of operations that reduce the difference. Perhaps reassuringly, by this definition human beings, not just aliens, are intelligent. We have desires, and we pursue them using beliefs, which, when all goes well, are at least approximately or probabilistically true.
 * p. 62

 * Stripped to its essentials, every decision in life amounts to choosing which lottery ticket to buy. . . . Most organisms don't buy lottery tickets, but they all choose between gambles every time their bodies can move in more than one way. They should be willing to 'pay' for information---in tissue, energy, and time---if the cost is lower than the expected payoff in food, safety, mating opportunities, and other resources, all ultimately valuated in the expected number of surviving offspring. In multicellular animals the information is gathered and translated into profitable decisions by the nervous system.
 * p. 175

 * Humans . . . entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires. . . . People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye.
 * p. 188

 * Suppose the reasoning centers of the brain can get their hands on the mechanisms that plop shapes into the array and that read their locations out of it. Those reasoning demons can exploit the geometry of the array as a surrogate for keeping certain logical constraints in mind. Wealth, like location on a line, is transitive: if A is richer than B, and B is richer than C, then A is richer than C. By using location in an image to symbolize wealth, the thinker takes advantage of the transitivity of location built into the array, and does not have to enter it into a chain of deductive steps. The problem becomes a matter of plop down and look up. It is a fine example of how the form of a mental representation determines what is easy or hard to think.
 * p. 291

 * Visual thinking is often driven more strongly by the conceptual knowledge we use to organize our images than by the contents of the images themselves. Chess masters are known for their remarkable memory for the pieces on a chessboard. But it's not because people with photographic memories become chess masters. The masters are no better than beginners when remembering a board of randomly arranged pieces. Their memory captures meaningful relations among the pieces, such as threats and defenses, not just their distribution in space.
 * p. 295

 * Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.'
 * p. 359

 * Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to.
 * p. 499

 * Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”
 * 2009 ed., p. 517

 * 'The most common of all follies,' wrote H. L. Mencken, 'is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.' In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints . . . and gods.
 * p. 554

 * The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
 * p. 560

 * Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players."
 * p. 44

Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (Basic Books, 1999)

 * As an experimental psychologist, I have been trained not to believe anything unless it can be demonstrated in the laboratory on rats or sophomores.
 * p. 84

The Blank Slate (2002)

 * According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence.
 * p. 44, emphasis added

 * [I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
 * p. 95

 * [E]quality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. … If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality.
 * p. 485

 * But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, "Look, I know that males and females are not identical.  I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about the research.  I can't explain it, but when I read claims of sex differences, steam comes out of my ears."
 * Kindle location 7549, emphasis in original.

 * The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology. Yet most psychologists have not come to grips with them, and most intellectuals do not understand them … . Here are the three laws:
 * The First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
 * The Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
 * The Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
 * Kindle locations 8005, 8010.

The Stuff of Thought (2007)

 * The psychologist Dedre Gentner and her collaborators have shown that a focus on relationships is the key to the power of analogy as a tool of reasoning. They note that many scientific theories were first stated as analogies, and often are still best explained that way: gravity is like light, heat is like a fluid, evolution is like selective breeding, the atom is like a solar system, genes are like coded messages. For an analogy to be scientifically useful, though, the correspondences can’t apply to a part of one thing that merely resembles a part of the other. They have to apply to the relationships between the parts, and even better, to the relationships between the relationships, and to the relationships between the relationships between the relationships.
 * p. 254. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Better Angels of our Nature (2011)

 * The world has far too much morality.
 * p 474
 * On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.
 * p 139

The Sense of Style (2014)

 * As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.
 * p 4

Enlightenment Now (2018)

 * A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution - perhaps its biggest breakthrough - was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. In this primitive but ubiquitous understanding, everything happens for a reason, so when bad things happen - accidents, disease, famine, poverty - some agent must have wanted them to happen.
 * p. 24

 * The moral value of quantification is that it treats all lives as equally valuable, so actions that bring down the highest numbers of homicides prevent the greatest amount of human tragedy.
 * p. 173

Rationality (2021)

 * A list of the ways in which we’re stupid can’t explain why we’re so smart: smart enough to have discovered the laws of nature, transformed the planet, lengthened and enriched our lives, and, not least, articulated the rules of rationality that we so often flout.
 * Preface

Quotes about Steven Pinker

 * Thank you, Steven Pinker, for showing the harm when scientists don’t take enough humanities courses. A humanities education helps provide a deeper grip on one’s experiences and on the world in ways other than through graphs and abstractions. Isn’t it more likely that the very lack of humanities education is what fosters thoughtless about the world and the dangerous sway of science denial today?
 * Robert P. Crease, "Unenlightened thinking", Physics World (May 2018)

 * Pinker is at his best when he analyzes historic trends and uses data to put the past into context. I was already familiar with a lot of the information he shares—especially about health and energy—but he understands each subject so deeply that he’s able to articulate his case in a way that feels fresh and new.
 * Bill Gates, "My new favorite book of all time" (January 26, 2018)

 * Pinker's book contains an overwhelming argument against the theory that the human mind is a social construct. But it is far from being a mere diatribe. It is also a wide-ranging and unfailingly sensible discussion of the ethical and political implications of accepting that we have a common nature. As Pinker points out, nothing of ethical importance follows logically from the truth that human mental capacities are largely hard-wired. Certainly, that humans are born with different talents and abilities does not mean they should be treated as being of unequal worth. Nevertheless, the scientific demonstration of the reality of human nature does have some political implications, and - as Pinker shows very clearly - these are consistently anti-utopian.
 * John Gray, "The darkness within. John Gray on why the left is in flight from “human nature”", New Statesman (16 September 2002)

 * Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest. A more intellectually inquiring author would have conveyed something of the Enlightenment’s richness and diversity. Yet even if Pinker was capable of providing it, intellectual inquiry is not what his anxious flock demands. Only an anodyne, mythical Enlightenment can give them what they crave, which is relief from painful doubt.
 * John Gray, "Unenlightened thinking: Steven Pinker’s embarrassing new book is a feeble sermon for rattled liberals", New Statesman (22 February 2018)

 * Among the many debates over the origins and evolution of war is whether humans have been getting more violent or less. Steven Pinker and others who think like him, such as the archaeologist Ian Morris, are on the optimistic side and believe there is a clear trend away from violence. Most countries no longer have public executions; they have laws against cruelty to animals or children; and sports such as bear baiting or dog fighting are normally illegal. The optimists go further and attempt to tot up deaths from war in the past – not in itself an easy task – to argue that homicide rates in the past were far higher than they are today and that deaths in war, as a proportion of humans alive at the time, are fewer in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even allowing for the great bloodlettings of the two world wars, than in earlier wars. Others challenge the figures and also point out that war deaths in the twentieth century may amount to 75 per cent of all war deaths in the last 5,000 years. And if you really want to be depressed about the prospects for humanity, studies using mathematical tools at the University of Florence and the University of Colorado claim to show that the trend is for fewer but more deadly wars. Their argument is that the more interconnected societies become the quicker a conflict can spread along the paths of the network – just as computer viruses or forest fires do. A small squabble in the Balkans in the summer of 1914 grew into the Great War because Europe’s powers were so interlinked by treaties, understandings or plans that tensions spread upwards and outwards from the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo until a general war exploded. Even if Pinker is right – and the debate goes on – it somehow does not seem very reassuring. Those of us who have enjoyed the Long Peace since 1945 need to reflect that much of the world, including Indochina, Afghanistan, the Great Lakes district in Africa and large parts of the Middle East, has seen and still sees conflict. A long-running project at Uppsala University in Sweden estimates that between 1989 and 2017 over 2 million people died as a result of war. Since 1945 perhaps 52 million have been forced to flee because of conflict.
 * Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us (2020)
 * While Pinker elects himself the heir of Enlightenment, his whole approach betrays Enlightenment principles. The very past authorities Pinker invokes did not want to hawk psychic uppers for those in doubt and far more openly advertised the ambivalence of their own belief in progress. They neither claimed that progress was universal nor insisted so monotonously on its indefinite continuation.
 * Samuel Moyn, "Hype for the Best", The New Republic (March 19, 2018)

 * In this piece, Pinker appears to me to change sides almsot completely, from pessimist to optimist and from genetic determinist to social improver. Not only does he present evidence that war and violence are declining in relative importance, his explanation for this seems to be entirely consistent with the Standard Social Science Model he caricatured and debunked in The Blank Slate. He’s still got a sort of rational self-interest model in there, but now Hobbes is invoked, not for his ‘nasty, brutish and short’ state of nature, but for his argument that the Leviathan of social order will suppress violence to the benefit of all.
 * John Quiggin, "Is this the same Steven Pinker?" (August 5, 2009)

 * Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is that guy. He thinks many people are very unreasonable, and makes sweeping claims about their irrationality and moral imbecility, but often doesn’t bother to listen to what they actually say. While insisting for page upon page on the necessity of rationality, he irrationally caricatures and mocks ideas he hasn’t tried to understand. Then, when the people who believe those ideas become upset, he sees this as further proof of their emotion-driven thinking, and becomes even more convinced that he is right.
 * Nathan J. Robinson, "The World’s Most Annoying Man", Current Affairs (May 29, 2019)

 * It’s important to see that Pinker is unreliable, and not simply a neutral presenter of The Data, because his books are bestsellers and are widely praised as brilliant. Yet they reinforce many right-wing talking points and accepting some of their conclusions would have extremely destructive political consequences. I actually agree with perhaps 80 percent or more of what is contained in Enlightenment Now, insofar as it is simply presenting statistics showing that crime has dropped and we are not presently in a world war, or making arguments for secular humanism and democracy. But he also (1) staunchly defends the inequality produced by free-market capitalism, (2) is irrationally dismissive of the scale of the risks facing humankind, (3) trivializes present-day human pain and suffering, (4) whitewashes U.S. crimes and minimizes the dangers of U.S. military aggression, (5) repeats right-wing smears about anti-racist and feminist ideas, and (6) has a colossal ignorance about the workings of politics and the struggle necessary to achieve further human progress.
 * Nathan J. Robinson, "The World’s Most Annoying Man", Current Affairs (May 29, 2019)

 * Steven Pinker’s works are worth examining for a few reason. For one thing, they show how deeply conservative a “liberal” worldview can be. Pinker is all for Equal Rights, Democracy, Sensible Regulation, Secularism, and the other great Liberal values. And yet like many liberals, he seems to detest the left more than the hard right. […] Pinker doesn’t think he has an ideology. He insists that his conclusions simply follow from data, contrasting his own work with the “statistical obtuseness” common among journalists and humanities professors, who use “Anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and the ‘highest-paid person’s opinion.’” If you look through his work though, you’ll find anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and appeals to authority abound.
 * Nathan J. Robinson, "The World’s Most Annoying Man", Current Affairs (May 29, 2019)

 * There’s a noble kernel to Pinker’s project. He wants to discourage the kind of fatalism that leads people to think the only way forward is to tear everything down. But he seems surprisingly blind to how he fuels such fatalism by playing to the worst stereotype of the enlightened cosmopolitan: disdainful and condescending — sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.
 * Jennifer Szalai, "Steven Pinker Wants You to Know Humanity Is Doing Fine. Just Don’t Ask About Individual Humans", The New York Times (Feb. 28, 2018)

 * Let me end with a call for action: Don’t assume that Pinker’s scholarship is reliable. Comb through particular sentences and citations for other hidden — or perhaps intentionally concealed — errors in "Enlightenment Now." Doing so could be, well, enlightening.
 * Phil Torres, "Steven Pinker's fake enlightenment: His book is full of misleading claims and false assertions", Salon (January 26, 2019)

 * Pinker and his ilk don’t acknowledge errors when they make them; they are ideologues rather than truth-seekers, willing to bend the facts, launch personal attacks and censor critics to “win” debates. At exactly the moment in history when we need true intellectual leadership, people who exemplify intellectual honesty and integrity, the most, we get stubborn tribespeople.
 * Phil Torres, "Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the epidemic of annoying white male intellectuals", Salon (October 20, 2019)

 * Pinker’s reasoning on AI was so horrifically bad (as reasoning qua reasoning, not to mention as elementary scholarship; angry and dismissive and failing to consider the opposite or try steeling the imagined argument, as well as ignorant of the Bostrom book that even outsiders who’ve heard of the field have heard is the basic literature), that I’m disinclined to believe anything Pinker says about topics I don’t already know about, lest that just be Gell-Mann Amnesia on my own part. I frankly worry he’s gotten old and run out his supply of precision.
 * Eliezer Yudkowsky, Comment on "Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now" (March 23, 2018)

title: Steven Pinker


text:
Tobias Smollett

Tobias George Smollett (c. March 16, 1721 – September 17, 1771) was a Scottish novelist, translator, historian and editor.

Quotes

 * Facts are stubborn things.
 * Translation of Gil Blas (1749), Book X, Chap. 1.
 * Also used by Bernard Mandeville in An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour (1732), p. 162, and by Jared Elliot in Essay on Field Husbandry (1747), p. 35.

 * Thy spirit, Independence, let me share, Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye. Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
 * Ode to Independence, strophe 1.

 * Those sculptur'd halls my feet shall never tread, Where varnish'd vice and vanity combin'd, To dazzle and seduce, their banners spread, And forge vile shackles for the free-born mind.
 * Ode to Independence, antistrophe 3.

 * Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.
 * The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).

 * Thy fatal shafts unerring move, I bow before thine altar, Love!
 * The Adventures of Roderick Random (1848), Chapter xl, reported in Bartlett's Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

The Regicide (1749)

 * Keen are the pangs Of hapless love, and passion unapprov'd: But where consenting wishes meet, and vows Reciprocally breath'd, confirm the tie, Joy rolls on joy, an inexhausted stream! And virtue crowns the sacred scene.
 * Act I, scene iii.

 * To-day, in snow array'd, stern winter rules The ravag'd plain—Anon the teeming earth Unlocks her stores, and spring adorns the year: And shall not we—while fate, like winter, frowns, Expect revolving bliss?
 * Act I, scene vi.

 * To exult Ev'n o'er an enemy oppress'd, and heap Affliction on the afflicted, is the mark And the mean triumph of a dastard soul.
 * Act II, scene vii.

 * True courage scorns To vent her prowess in a storm of words; And, to the valiant, actions speak alone.
 * Act II, scene vii.

 * To send the injur'd unredress'd away, How great soe'er th' offender, or the wrong'd Howe'er obscure, is wicked—weak and vile: Degrades, denies, and should dethrone a king!
 * Act IV, scene ix.

Misattributed

 * As Love can exquisitely bless, Love only feels the marvellous of pain; Opens new veins of torture in the soul, And wakes the nerve where agonies are born.
 * Edward Young, The Brothers (1753), Act V, scene i.

title: Tobias Smollett


text:
Jane Wagner

Jane Wagner (born 26 February 1935) is an American playwright and actress, most famous as Lily Tomlin's comedy writer, collaborator, companion and wife.

The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)

 * As performed by Lily Tomlin

 * Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
 * "Trudy"

 * Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it....
 * "Trudy"

 * Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
 * "Trudy"
 * Unsourced variant: Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

 * When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.
 * "Trudy"

 * It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
 * "Trudy"
 * Unsourced variants: I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. Man invented language to satisfy his deep inner need to complain.

 * All my life, I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.
 * "Chrissy"

 * If I had known what it would be like to have it all... I might have been willing to settle for less.
 * "Lyn"

 * Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.
 * As "Chrissy"

 * No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
 * Lily
 * Unsourced variant: No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.

 * I bet the worst part about dying is the part where your whole life passes before you.

 * Your problem is your role models were models.

 * I swear people don't want sex so much as they want somebody who'll listen to 'em … the first thing you learn after fellatio is how to listen.

 * Remember we're all in this alone.

Other material for Lily Tomlin

 * Material in Lily Tomlin's acts credited to Wagner at Tomlin's classic site.

 * Don't be afraid of missing opportunities. Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.

 * For fast acting relief, try slowing down.

 * If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

 * If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?

 * If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?

 * If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

 * Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.

 * The best mind-altering drug is truth.

 * The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

 * Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?

 * Interviewer: You once said you had a drug problem... Lily: Yeah, I still do. It's so hard to find good grass these days.

title: Jane Wagner


text:
John Burroughs

John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 - March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and nature essayist.

Quotes

 * To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring — these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
 * Leaf and Tendril (1908)

 * Science has fairly turned us out of our comfortable little anthropomorphic notion of things into the great out-of-doors of the universe. We must and will get used to the chill, yea, to the cosmic chill, if need be. Our religious instincts will be all the hardier for it.
 * Time and Change, p. 2 (1912)

The Light of Day (1900)
Online text

 * Theology passes; religion, as a sentiment or feeling of awe and reverence in the presence of the vastness and mystery of the universe, remains.
 * Preface

 * The old theology had few if any fast colors, and it has become very faded and worn under the fierce light and intense activity of our day. Let it go; it is outgrown and outworn. What mankind will finally clothe themselves with to protect them from the chill of the great void, or whether or not they will clothe themselves at all, but become toughened and indifferent, is more than I can pretend to say. For my part, the longer I live the less I feel the need of any sort of theological belief, and the more I am content to let unseen powers go on their way with me and mine without question or distrust. They brought me here, and I have found it well to be here; in due time they will take me hence, and I have no doubt that will be well for me too.
 * Preface

 * We are like figures which some great demonstrator draws upon the blackboard of Time. A problem is to be solved, without doubt; what the problem is, we, the figures, cannot know and do not need to know; all we know is that sooner or later we shall be sponged off the board and other figures take our places, and the demonstration go on.
 * Preface

 * From the first the progress of man has been slowly but surely from the artificial to the natural, from the arbitrary and chimerical to the simple and scientific. Getting himself and his affairs more and more into natural currents and following them, this is the way man has progressed.
 * Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural

 * All political progress has been the removal of forced and artificial relations among men, and the establishment of natural relations. Democracy is a search for natural leaders and the rights and privileges that belong to man by virtue of his manhood.
 * Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural

 * Science, in the broadest sense, is simply that which may be verified; but how much of that which theology accepts and goes upon is verifiable by human reason or experience?
 * Ch. III: Science and Theology

 * Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and shapes the universe with man as the centre. It has no trouble to believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as the special theatre of the celestial powers powers to whom it has given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities.
 * Ch. III: Science and Theology

 * ...the Kingdom of Heaven is not a place, but a state of mind.
 * Ch. III: Science and Theology

 * If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology, with all its miraculous machinery, must go.
 * Ch. III: Science and Theology

 * Goethe, as lately quoted by Matthew Arnold, said those who have science and art have religion; and added, let those who have not science and art have the popular faith; let them have this escape, because the others are closed to them. Without any hold upon the ideal, or any insight into the beauty and fitness of things, the people turn from the tedium and the grossness and prosiness of daily life, to look for the divine, the sacred, the saving, in the wonderful, the miraculous, and in that which baffles reason. The disciples of Jesus thought of the kingdom of heaven as some external condition of splendor and pomp and power which was to be ushered in by hosts of trumpeting angels, and the Son of man in great glory, riding upon the clouds, and not for one moment as the still small voice within them. To find the divine and the helpful in the mean and familiar, to find religion without the aid of any supernatural machinery, to see the spiritual, the eternal life in and through the life that now is--in short, to see the rude, prosy earth as a star in the heavens, like the rest, is indeed the lesson of all others the hardest to learn.
 * Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

 * But we must learn it sooner or later. There surely comes a time when the mind perceives that this world is the work of God also and not of devils, and that in the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal; in fact, that God is here and now in the humblest and most familiar fact, as sleepless and active as ever he was in old Judea. This perception has come and is coming to more minds to-day than ever before--this perception of the modernness of God, of the modernness of inspiration, of the modernness of religion; that there was never any more revelation than there is now, never any more conversing of God with man, never any more Garden of Eden, or fall of Adam, or thunder of Sinai, or ministering angels, than there is now; in fact, that these things are not historical events, but inward experiences and perceptions perpetually renewed or typified in the growth of the race. This is the modern gospel; this is the one vital and formative religious thought of modern times.
 * Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

 * The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.
 * Ch. IV: Natural Versus Supernatural

 * It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative; it is not till the second or third thought that doubt begins. Belief is so vital and necessary that one would say the tendency was made strong at the perpetual risk of extra belief and superstition; it were better to believe too much than not enough. Hence mankind have always believed too much, as if to make sure that the anchor hold. To believe just enough, to free his mind from all cant and from all illusion, and see things just as in themselves they are, is the aim of the philosopher or of the true skeptic.
 * Ch. VII: The Modern Skeptic

 * Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.
 * Ch. X: Religious Truth

 * Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal Power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.
 * Ch. XI: Points of View

 * Hence when the man of science says, 'There is no God,' he only gives voice to the feeling of the inadequacy of the old anthropomorphic conception, in the presence of the astounding facts of the universe.
 * Ch. XI: Points of View

 * When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.
 * Ch. XII: God and Nature

Accepting the Universe (1920)

 * We are here to see and contemplate the great spectacle.
 * p.10

 * Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.
 * p.108

 * In us or through us the Primal Mind will have contemplated and enjoyed its own works and will continue to do so as long as human life endures on this planet.
 * p.111

 * Man’s craving for the supernatural is as natural as our discounting of the present moment... The natural becomes trite and commonplace to us and we take refuge in an imaginary world above and beyond it.
 * p.261

 * Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.
 * p.263

 * The truths of naturalism do not satisfy the moral and religious nature.
 * p.301

Quotes about John Burroughs

 * The tradition of John Burroughs, which you seek to keep alive through these awards, is a long and honorable one. It is a tradition that had its beginnings in even earlier writings. On the other side of the Atlantic it flowered most fully in the works of Richard Jefferies and W. H. Hudson; and in this country the pen of Thoreau - as that of John Burroughs himself-most truly represented the contemplative observer of the world about us. These four, I think, were the great masters. To those of us who have come later, there can scarcely be any greater honor than to be compared to one of them. Yet if we are true to the spirit of John Burroughs, or of Jefferies or Hudson or Thoreau, we are not imitators of them but-as they themselves were - we are pioneers in new areas of thought and knowledge. If we are true to them, we are the creators of a new type of literature as representative of our own day as was their own.
 * Rachel Carson 1950s speech included in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)

 * The awful thing seemed too big for hate by puny humans, and I was amazed and no little shocked soon after the outbreak when, visiting my friend John Burroughs at Squirrel Lodge in the Catskills, I found him whom I had always regarded apostle of peace and light in a continuous angry fever against all things German. Woodchucks were troubling his corn, and every morning he went out with his gun. "Another damned Hun," he would cry savagely when he returned with his dead game. Time did not cure John Burroughs' wrath, for in December, 1917, he pledged himself in an open letter published in the New York Tribune never to read a German book, never to buy an article of German make.
 * Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (1939)

title: John Burroughs


text:
Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen (born 19 December 1960) is an American author and environmental activist who lives in Northern California.

Sourced

 * We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.
 * Listening to the Land

 * I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
 * "Beyond Hope", Orion Magazine

 * A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid.
 * Interview with The A Word Magazine, March-April 2005.

 * I've never written this before in public, but my first thought on September 11 when I heard someone was attacking the World Trade Center is, 'Ah, so now it begins. Someone is finally fighting back. Given the terror that the United States routinely inflicts on people (including nonhumans, of course) the world over (and of course now a couple of years later the United States calls these programs of systematic terror 'Shock and Awe'), I'm surprised it didn't happen long ago. The poor have been very patient and long suffering, more patient and long suffering than anyone could ever expect.' That is what I thought.
 * Interview with Counterpunch, 2 February 2005.

 * I want to bring down civilization. It's really clear that civilization is killing the planet. I’m interested in living in a world that has more wild salmon every year than the year before. A world that has more migratory songbirds every year than the year before. A world that has less dioxins and flame retardants in mothers' breast milk. A world not being destroyed. A world where krill populations aren’t collapsing. A world where there are not dead zones in the oceans. A world not being systematically dismantled. I want to live in a world that is not being killed. I will do whatever it takes to get there.
 * Interview with No Compromise, 2005.

 * People often say that violence accomplishes nothing, that it's ineffective. Violence is dreadfully effective. That's why those in power use it.
 * quoted in The Pied Pipers of Pacifism: Lee Hall, Gary Francione, and the Betrayal of Animal Liberation by Steven Best and Jason Miller (2009). p. 12.

 * Is it possible to talk about fundamental social change without asking ourselves questions we too often refuse to ask, such as 'What if those in power are murderous? What if they're not willing to listen to reason at all? Should we continue to approach them nonviolently? . . . When is violence an appropriate means to stop injustice?' But with the world dying - or rather being killed - we no longer have the luxury to change the subject or delete the question. It's a question that won't go away.
 * quoted in The Pied Pipers of Pacifism: Lee Hall, Gary Francione, and the Betrayal of Animal Liberation by Steven Best and Jason Miller (2009). p. 50.

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

 * Jeanette [Armstrong, "a traditional Okanagan Indian"] said, 'Attitudes about the species communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.' She paused, then continued emphatically, 'It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.'
 * p. 24

 * I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.

 * Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically--there are so many ways to kill time.

 * I remember staring at the computer screen--light green letters on dark--then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.

 * I quit work two weeks later--having sold another eighty of my hours--and knew I could never again work a regular job.
 * p. 110-111

 * I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides my home, and thus become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christoper Manes, who said, 'For most cultures through history--including our own in preliterate times--the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls.' Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, 'The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees--all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.'
 * p. 361

 * In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

 * There can be no real peace when living with someone who has already declared war, no peace but capitulation. And even that, as we see around us, doesn't lead to further peace but to further degradation and exploitation. We're responsible for not only what we do but for what is in our power to stop. Before we can speak of peace, we have to speak honestly of stopping, by any and all means possible, those who have declared war on the world and on us. Those who destroy wont stop because we ask nicely. There is only one language that they understand, and everyone here knows what it is. Yet we don't speak of it openly.

The Culture of Make Believe (2003)

 * If we wish to stop the atrocities, we will need to understand and change the social and economic conditions that cause them.
 * p. XII

 * If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.
 * p. 19

 * How, precisely, do you define a police state? Is it the number of police per capita? How about the number of prisons? Police use of machine guns or armored personnel carriers? The use of the police or the military to put down strikes, or to otherwise "keep the trains running on time," as was Mussolini's specialty? Perhaps it's the use of the police or the military to halt civil unrest. Or maybe the widespread use of curfews. Arbitrary confiscation of private property. How about this: could a police state be defined, as in Nazi Germany, by the use of force to segregate members of a specific race into concentration camps or prisons?
 * p. 22

 * Perception creates behavior. Perception encourages behavior. And because this institution--this artifice--continues to socially reinforce patterns of perception and behavior, if this behavior is destructive, it may not be a bad idea to eliminate or curtail the institution.
 * p. 50

 * Much was made by abolitionists that the King James version of the Bible didn't use the word slaves, but, instead, servants. This meant, in their minds, that God didn't really approve of slavery. But that argument was linguistic at best. Slavery was codified and even sanctified in the tenth commandment, throwing slaves (and wives) in with other property belonging to one's neighbor that one must not covet. The Bible even regulated--as opposed to banning outright--the killing of slaves, stating that if a slave were beaten to death, the slave owner should be punished (though not killed himself, as would be his fate were he to kill a freeman), but if the slave didn't die until a day or two after the beating, the slave owner "shall not be punished, for he [the slave] is his money."
 * p. 56

 * To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.
 * p. 57

 * If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence.
 * p. 59

 * Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.
 * p. 60

 * In order for a slave--or, for that matter, a slaveholder--to become free, a series of successive perceptions must be realized. First, the person must perceive that the owners (and slaves) are merely human, that is, putting all rhetoric aside, that there exists a dichotomy of privilege and exploitation, and that the privilege is a result of exploitation. … The second realization is, once again, that the owners and slaves are merely human, meaning this time that the exploitation and consequent privilege are not inevitable, but the result of social arrangements and force (as well as a huge dollop of bad luck on the part of those enslaved). … The third realization is yet again that the owners are merely human, by which I now mean they are vulnerable. Wealth does not protect them.
 * p. 63

 * I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes.
 * p. 69

 * Property has always been the central consideration of the United States government, but it has become even more so over time. Between the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, to provide just one obvious, and in some ways, silly, example (silly because all of the terms are seemingly obvious, yet in fact nearly impossible to adequately define) and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, the inalienable right with which men [sic] are self-evidently endowed by their Creator, and which may not be abridged by the State, changed from "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," to life, liberty, and property. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed during the KKK's maiden reign of terror, ostensibly to protect the rights of blacks from racist state governments, has been used far more often to protect the rights to property: Of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, only nineteen dealt with the rights of blacks, while two hundred and eighty-eight dealt with the rights of corporations.
 * p. 92

 * I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime."
 * p. 102

 * It seems to me that entitlement is the key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred. The man who flayed the cat presumably felt that his employers were entitled to the cat's skin. Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting slaves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the "surplus return on labor," as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims' bodies, and entitled to inflict cruelty upon them. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world's resources, and the change the world's climate. All industrialized humans act like they're entitled to anything they want on this planet.
 * p. 105-6

 * From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with--and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with--the perceived entitlement.
 * p. 106

 * Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state--where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised--to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode.
 * p. 106-7

Endgame (2006)

 * Love does not imply pacifism.
 * Vol. 1, pg. XI

 * From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
 * Vol. 1, pg. XI

 * Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
 * Vol. 1, p. IX

 * Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it's not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture.
 * Vol. 1, pg 129

Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006)

 * I am not the first to make the case-as I have in my other work-that the industrial economy, indeed, civilization (which underpins and gives inevitable rise to it), is incompatible with human and nonhuman freedoms, and in fact with human and nonhuman life. If you accept that the industrial economy-and beneath it, civilization-is destroying the planet and creating unprecedented human suffering among the poor (and if you don't accept this, go ahead and put this book down, back away slowly, turn on the television, and take some more soma: the drug should kick in soon enough, your agitation will disappear, you'll forget everything I've said, and then everything will be perfect again, just like the voices from the television tell you over and over), then it becomes clear that the best thing that can happen, from the perspective of essentially all nonhumans as well as the vast majority of humans, is for the industrial economy (and civilization) to go away, or in the shorter run for it to be slowed as much as humanly possible during the time we await its final collapse.
 * "What Goes Up Must Come Down", p. 286

 * I've always wanted to blow up dams in order to save salmon, sturgeon, and other creatures whose lives depend on wild and living rivers. But that's not right. We need to blow up dams for the rivers themselves, so they can be again the rivers they once were, forever, the rivers they still want to be, the rivers they themselves are struggling and fighting to once again become.
 * "What Goes Up Must Come Down", p. 287

title: Derrick Jensen


text:
Bryan Magee

Bryan Edgar Magee (12 April 1930 – 26 July 2019) was a British philosopher, writer and politician who, as a broadcaster, sought to make philosophy accessible to a non-specialist audience. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for Leyton from 1974 to 1983; originally elected as a Labour MP, he joined the Social Democrats in 1982.

Quotes

 * I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.
 * Heidegger and Modern Existentialism (1977), BBC Productions

Confessions of a Philosopher (1997)

 * Confessions of a Philosopher : A Journey Through Western Philosophy (1997) Random House, New York

 * As Voltaire once remarked, "It is the privilege of the real genius, especially one who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity." The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy. For that reason there has been, ever since, a watershed in understanding between those who have taken his work on board and those who have not. For a good many of the problems he uncovered, the solutions he put forward have not stood the test of time, but his uncovering of the problems remains the most illuminating thing a philosopher has ever done. Because of the fundamental character of these problems, and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since.
 * p. 157

 * The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as "mankind's need for metaphysics."
 * p. 232

 * Some of my readers may find themselves thinking that the mere fact that millions of human beings, including many highly intelligent and deeply thoughtful ones, have had strongly held religious beliefs is itself a reason for giving them serious intellectual attention — not necessarily for believing them, of course, but for finding them interesting and for treating them with respect. I would agree with this if the reasons given for them commanded respect. But I have yet to encounter such reasons. What are claimed as proofs are not proofs, and all such "proofs" have long since been discredited, the most important of them by Christians themselves, such as Kant. Yet they go on being trotted out: assertions are made without evidence; mutually contradictory claims proliferate; historical knowledge is defied; mistranslations abound; language is used in a way that slithers unacknowledged between literal meaning and metaphor; the whole vocabulary rests on unsecured presuppositions. Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.
 * p. 346

 * Speaking for myself, I am not one of those people who are able to deal with the problem by ignoring the questions: it may be a matter of temperament, but for me the apparent unanswerability of the questions sharpens the persistence with which they nag at my mind. Scarcely a day has gone by since my childhood in which I have not thought of them. In fact, the truth is that I have lived my life in thrall to them. They seem to me obviously the most important and interesting questions there are, and in my heart of hearts I do not really understand why not everybody sees them as such. And yet at the end of it all I have no solutions. I am as baffled now by the larger metaphysical questions of my existence as I was when I was a child — indeed more so, because my understanding of the depths and difficulties of the questions themselves is now so much greater.

 * It could be that the total scenario for human beings is an insoluble mystery until we die, followed by nothing at all.

title: Bryan Magee


text:
Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor (January 30 1775 – September 17 1864) was an English prose-writer on themes drawn from literary history, a verse-dramatist, and a poet.

Quotes

 * But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue... Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polished lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.
 * Gebir, Book I (1798). Compare: "Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed/ Mysterious union with his native sea", William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), Book iv. Wordsworth's prompted Landor to comment, "Poor shell! that Wordsworth so pounded and flattened in his marsh it no longer had the hoarseness of a sea, but of a hospital", Walter Savage Landor, Letter to John Forster.

 * Past are three summers since she first beheld The ocean; all around the child await Some exclamation of amazement here. She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased, Is this the mighty ocean? is this all? That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,— Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold, Soul discontented with capacity,— Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say She was enchanted by the wicked spells Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed The western winds have landed on our coast? I since have watcht her in lone retreat, Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.
 * Gebir, Book I (1798). It is reported that "these lines were specially singled out for admiration by Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Scott, and many remarkable men"; Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), citing Forster, Life of Landor, vol. i. p. 95.

 * Ah what avails the sceptered race, Ah what the form divine!
 * Rose Aylmer (1806).

 * Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.
 * Rose Aylmer (1806).

 * 'Tis verse that gives Immortal youth to mortal maids.
 * Verse.

 * When we play the fool, how wide The theatre expands! beside, How long the audience sits before us! How many prompters! what a chorus!
 * Plays, st. 2 (1846).

 * There is delight in singing, though none hear Beside the singer.
 * To Robert Browning (1846).

 * Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's, Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee, Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale, No man hath walked along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse.
 * To Robert Browning (1846). Compare: "Nor sequent centuries could hit/ Orbit and sum of Shakespeare's wit", Ralph Waldo Emerson, May-Day and Other Pieces, Solution.

 * The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
 * To Robert Browning (1846).

 * I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; Nature I loved; and next to Nature, Art. I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
 * I Strove with None (1853). The work is identified in Bartlett's Quotations, 10th ed. (1919) as Dying Speech of an old Philosopher.
 * Quoted in W. Somerset Maugham: The Razor's Edge, The Blakiston Company, Philadelphia, 1944, p. 161.

 * Around the child bend all the three Sweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity. Around the man bend other faces; Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.
 * Dry Sticks, Different Graces (1858).

 * The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.
 * Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 8.

 * I am heartily glad to witness your veneration for a Book which to say nothing of its holiness or authority, contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence.
 * Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 33.

 * Wearers of rings and chains! Pray do not take the pains To set me right. In vain my faults ye quote; I write as others wrote  On Sunium’s hight.
 * The last Fruit of an old Tree, Epigram cvi, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations'', 10th ed. (1919).

 * Stand close around, ye Stygian set, with Dirce in the boat conveyed, Lest Charon, seeing her, forget, That he is old and she a shade.
 * Epitaph on Dirce. George Orwell called it 'one of the best epitaphs in English – If I were a woman it would be my favourite epitaph – it would be the one I should like to have for myself." Quoted in It is What I Think, p. 45. Orwell's text differs from that published by Landor in Gebir, Count Julian, and Other Poems (London: E. Moxon, 1831):Stand close around, ye Stygian set, With Dirce in one boat conveyed! Or Charon, seeing may forget  That he is old and she a shade.

Imaginary Conversations (1824-1829)

 * There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè! that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.
 * "Aesop and Rhodopè", I.

 * Of all failures, to fail in a witticism is the worst, and the mishap is the more calamitous in a drawn-out and detailed one.
 * "Chesterfield and Chatham".

 * We must not indulge in unfavourable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe that they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.
 * "Barrow and Newton".

 * Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace.
 * "Cromwell and Noble".

 * Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked.
 * "Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney".

Quotes about

 * Upon the work of Walter Landor I am unfit to speak with candor. If you can read it, well and good; But as for me, I never could.
 * Dorothy Parker, "A Pig's-Eye View of Literature" from Sunset Gun (1927); reproduced in Not So Deep as a Well: Collected Poems (1937), p. 110.

 * We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.
 * C. S. Lewis, "The Condemned" or "Under Sentence"
 * The Spectator (7 September 1945); revised in Poems (1964)

title: Walter Savage Landor


text:
Joseph Roux

Abbé Joseph Roux (19 April 1834 – February 1905) was a French Catholic parish priest, poet, and philologist.

Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)

 * Pensées, translated by Isabel Florence Hapgood, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1886 (view online)

 * Science is for those who learn; poetry, for those who know.
 * Part 1, LXXI

 * A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.
 * Part 1, LXXIV

 * Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.
 * Part 4, XXVIII (1886)

 * The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another.
 * Part 4, LXXXV

 * It is a very rare thing for a man of talent to succeed by his talent.
 * Part 4, LXXXVIII

 * Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.
 * Part 4, XCIX

 * Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.
 * Part 5, XXII

 * The happiness which is lacking makes one think even the happiness one has unbearable.
 * Part 5, XXXVII

 * We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
 * Part 9, LIV

title: Joseph Roux


text:
Teresa Heinz Kerry

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira Heinz (born 1938-10-05) is an American philanthropist, the widow of the late U.S. Senator John Heinz and the wife of Senator John Kerry.

Quotes

 * I think I can best do my work as a head of a family, as a nurturer, for the family, meaning a nurturer for Pittsburgh, and in that sense what we do here can be applicable in many places in the world.
 * Quoted in "Teresa Heinz: A Woman On A Mission," Harry Stoffer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1993-11-07
 * Explanation on announcing she would not run for her late husband John Heinz's Senate seat.

 * You said something I didn't say. Now shove it.
 * Colin McNickle, "Teresa Heinz Kerry tells editor to 'shove it'", Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (2004-07-26)
 * Said to McNickle, an editor from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, during a reception at the Massachusetts State House, Boston (2004-07-25).

 * They want four more years of hell.
 * Dan Balz, "Heinz Kerry Has Retort for Bush Fans", washingtonpost.com (2004-08-03)
 * From a campaign rally speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2004-08-02) after a Bush supporter chanted "Four more years!" on a bullhorn.

 * Three more months!
 * Dan Balz, "Heinz Kerry Has Retort for Bush Fans," washingtonpost.com (2004-08-03)
 * From a campaign rally speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (2004-08-02).

 * I want you to issue a challenge for me to debate Howard Dean.
 * Quoted in Howard Kurtz, "The Making of a Non-President: Behind the Scenes With The Kerry Campaign", washingtonpost.com (2004-11-15).
 * Said to Jim Jordan, John Kerry's campaign manager, during the Democratic primaries in 2004.

title: Teresa Heinz Kerry


text:
Jim Elliot

Philip James Elliot (October 8, 1927 – January 8, 1956), known as Jim Elliot, was a Christian missionary who was killed in Ecuador during the evangelizing effort known as Operation Auca.

Quotes

 * No one warns young people to follow Adam's example. He waited till God saw his need.  Then God made Adam sleep, prepared for his mate, and brought her to him.  We need more of this 'being asleep' in the will of God.  Then we can receive what He brings us in His own time, if at all.  Instead we are set as bloodhounds after a partner, considering everyone we see until our minds are so concerned with the sex problem that we can talk of nothing else when bull-session time comes around.  It is true that a fellow cannot ignore women — but he can think of them as he ought — as sisters, not as sparring partners!
 * Quoted in Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty (1989), Chapter 4
 * Father, make of me a crisis man. Bring those I contact to decision. Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me.
 * Journal excerpt from Shadow of the Almighty (1989) by Elisabeth Elliot, Jim Elliot, Summer 1948

Misattributed

 * He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.
 * Journal excerpt from Shadow of the Almighty (1989) by Elisabeth Elliot, Jim Elliot, 1949
 * This quote is a paraphrase of Elliot's from the original quote (below) by English nonconformist clergyman Philip Henry (1631-1696)
 * He is no fool who parts with that which he cannot keep, when he is sure to be recompensed with that which he cannot lose.
 * Quoted from The life of the Rev. Philip Henry, A.M., Matthew Henry, J. B. Williams, pub. W. Ball, 1839 p. 35 (Google Books)

title: Jim Elliot


text:
User talk:Mbecker~enwikiquote

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title: User talk:Mbecker~enwikiquote


text: User:Mbecker~enwikiquote

title: User:Mbecker~enwikiquote