1335) I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation & presentation, analysis & response & personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.

Philip K. Dick
"Exegesis" (written 1981)
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
Lawrence Sutin, ed.
quoted by Lawrence Sutin in
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989)
posted by CandaeK [PKD] (9/26/1995)

1316) We are a nation of 50,000,000 VCRs flashing "12:00", "12:00".

Jeff Greenfield
on C-SPAN (9/15/1995)

1317) The soul of man is divided into three parts, intelligence, reason, and passion. Intelligence and passion are possessed by other animals, but reason by man alone.

Pythagoras
cited by Diogenes Laertius in
"Life of Pythagoras" in
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
(c. 200)
posted by Dan Hayner [IQM] (9/20/1995)

1318) [E]verything a human being wants can be divided into four components--love, adventure, power and fame.

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (attributed)
posted by Dan Hayner [IQM] (9/20/1995)

1319) [Three classes:] Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

Leonardo da Vinci (attributed)
posted by Dan Hayner [IQM] (9/20/1995)

1320) [A]bout half the people alive today have never made a telephone call.

George I. Zysman
"Wireless Telephony for Developing Countries"
Scientific American (9/1995)

1321) [M]ore than half the world's population lives more than two hours' travel from the nearest telephone.

Russell Daggatt
"Satellites for a Developing World"
Scientific American (9/1995)

1322) What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert A. Simon
quoted by Hal. R. Varian in
"The Information Economy" in
Scientific American (9/1995)

1323) If you provide Internet access to an inefficient business, you have merely given it the ability to be inefficient instantaneously, in front of 30 million potential clients.

Clay Shirky
"Wired Money"
Scientific American (9/1995)

1324) John Donne wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself." True enough, and true of countries, too, although Americans find the concept annoying. In physical terms, Americans view the U.S., like some classical physics experiment, as immune to outside influence. But the truth is that the economy is an open system and always have been.

Donald N. McCloskey
"The Analytic Economist: The Gulliver Effect"
Scientific American (9/1995)

1325) Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Fred Hoyle
The Observer (9/9/1979)
posted by Chris West [ISQ] (9/14/1995)

1310) [New York] is a beautiful catastrophe.

Le Corbusier
New York Herald Tribune (8/6/1961) [CQ]

1311) New York has trip-hammer vitality which drives you insane with restlessness, if you have no inner stabilizer [...] In New York I have always felt lonely, the loneliness of the caged animal, which rings on crime, sex, alcohol and other madness.

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) [CQ]

1312) [New York] appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground) , to hang him from his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

Frank Lloyd Wright
The Living City (1958) [CQ]

1313) I like it here in New York. I like the idea of having to keep eyes in the back of your head.

John Cale
London Times (9/27/1989) [CQ]

[Note: cf. Two cities: NYC (slight return)]

1302) It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

Westbrook Pegler
New York World Telegram (11/22/1938) [CQ]

1303) Of all the world's storied thoroughfares, it must be confessed that none produces quite the effect of Hollywood Boulevard. I have been downcast in Piccadilly, chopfallen on the Champs Elysee, and doloroso on the Via Veneto, but the avenues themselves were blameless. Hollywood Boulevard, on the contrary, creates an instant and malign impression in the breast of the beholder. Viewed in full sunlight, its tawdriness is unspeakable; in the torrential downpour of the rainy season, as we first saw it, it inspired an anguish similar to that produced by the engravings of Piranesi.

S.J. Perelman
"The Marx Brothers" in
The Last Laugh (1981) [CQ]

1304) Writers who choose as a subject Los Angeles and its interminable suburbs do so at their peril. The most scrupulous observation yields nothing but cliche: freeways, blondes, the blistering smog, blah, blah, blah. This is because they have mistaken Los Angeles for a city. [...] L.A. is more akin to a theme park - Urban Sprawl Land - and its spirit of place is the isolating spirit of the desert, where, despite the wizardry of modern irrigation, nothing can grow and few things change.

Karen Karbo
"Of Mice and Men"
New York Times Book Review (9/10/1995)

1305) [Los Angeles] is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be in love with its verticality.

Jean Baudrillard
"Astral America" in
America (1986, tr. 1988) [CQ]

1288) [T]he practice of uncovering repressed memories, along with the attendant theories of multiple personality disorder and satanic-cult abuse, are fads as widespread and as damaging as any the mental-health field has produced in this century. [...] [R]ecovered memory therapists are not, as they portray themselves, brave healers but professionals who have built a pseudoscience out of an unfounded consensus about how the mind reacts to sexual trauma. In the process they have slipped the ties that bind their professions to scientific method and sound research. Free from any burden of proof, these therapists have created an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which opinion, metaphor, and ideological preference substitute for objective evidence. While claiming to uncover the truth of their clients' past, these therapists have pursued a treatment regime that persuades clients to accept hypnotically generated images, gut feelings, dreams, and imaginings as valid memories. Without an understanding of the damage they have already caused, these therapists have employed methods that blur the already perilously thin line that separates memory from imagination and have unwittingly coerced their patients to mold their beliefs and behaviors to the expectations of their therapy.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1289) The human mind sees patterns. We tell ourselves stories about why one event might have been the cause of a second event and might therefore be a predictor of a third. In many areas, say religion or economics, we often offer such post hoc reasoning without requiring that the validity of those connections be demonstrated. Astrology, for another example, is an elaborate apparatus for creating the appearance of meaningful connections where none exist. All of us are experts at making such cause-and-effect conclusions within our lives.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1290) We tell ourselves stories in order to live [...] We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely [...] by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion
The White Album (1979)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1291) Recovered memory therapists pursue hidden memories for years like archaeologists using dynamite. For months or years they blast away at what they believe are the barriers to memory, unaware that their process destroys the fragile treasure they claim to seek. While this mistake is not new to the field of psychotherapy, recovered memory therapists make it in the most egregious fashion.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1292) Until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated, the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are bred and eaten, that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices, or that Satanists are taking over America's day care centers or institutions. [...] While no one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred, the burden of proof is on those who claim that it has occurred. [...] [It is now] up to the mental health professionals, not law enforcement, to explain why victims are alleging things that don't seem to have happened.

Ken Lanning (FBI Special Agent)
Investigator's Guide to Allegations
of Ritual Child Abuse (1989)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1293) Each [account of plausible Devil worship cited] is accompanied by statements which are anything but plausible [...] To understand why the stereotype of Devil-worshiping sects emerged at all, one must look not at the beliefs or behavior of heretics [...] but into the minds of the orthodox themselves. Many people, and particularly many priests and monks, were becoming more and more obsessed by the overwhelming power of the Devil and his demons. That is why their idea of the absolutely evil and anti-human came to include Devil-worship, alongside incest, infanticide and cannibalism. [...] Stories which contain manifestly impossible elements ought not to be accepted as evidence for physical events.

Norman Cohn
Europe's Inner Demons (1975)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1294) [T]o believe the satanic-cult theories [...] requires that you give up the assumption your neighbor (or your doctor or the teacher who watches over your child) will act decently. If these theories are not true, recovered memory therapists can count themselves responsible for damaging not only individual lives and families but for tearing apart whole communities by eroding the trust the binds people together.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1295) Reasoned dialogue has a limited ability to withstand an assault by the mythic power of falsehood, especially when that falsehood is rooted in an age-old social and cultural phenomenon [...] Mythical thinking and the force of the irrational have a strange and compelling allure for the educated and uneducated alike. [...] Reasoned dialogue, particularly as it applies to the understanding of history, is rooted in the notion that there exists a historical reality that - though it may be subjected by the historian to a multiplicity of interpretations - is ultimately found and not made. [...] Even a historian with a particular bias is dramatically different from the proponents of these pseudoreasoned ideologies. The latter freely shape or create information to buttress their convictions and reject as implausible any evidence that counters them. They use the language of scientific inquiry, but theirs is purely an ideological enterprise.

Deborah Lipstadt
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory (1993)
quoted by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters in
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1296) Our growing willingness as a culture to throw history up for grabs - to believe anything is possible and therefore anything might be true - is the cornerstone from which the satanic-cult story is built. We are asked to deny reason in favor of belief.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1297) While Freud's notions functioned something like a paradigm, his theories were prescientific and based on no empirical evidence. As in prescientific eras of other disciplines, his theories were accepted by consensus - not because of anything resembling empirical proof but because of his magnetism and the seductively broad nature of the ideas. No doubt it was the very arrogance and grandiose application of his theories that was appealing to intellectuals and mental-health practitioners who were happy to claim an understanding of what motivated people - even if they could not actually explain the working of these theories, much less prove their truth or value. Those who adopted his theories and defended his assertions gained by association something of Freud's status, at least vis-a-vis the untutored. Recovered memory therapists in many respects have operated within Freud's pseudoscientific paradigm. In doing so they have become to the study of the mind and behavior what astrologers are to the scientific study of the stars and planets. They have engaged in an enterprise based not on science but on impressionistic insight, myth, metaphor, and the powerful persuasive nature of the therapy setting.

Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters
Making Monsters: False Memories,
Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria (1994)

1286) Lesson No. 1: Only a fool would buy shares in a Wall Street firm. In good times the employees takes a huge chunk of the profits; in bad times they not only refuse to give them back but take more.

Lesson No. 2: The Wall Street labor market is now so perfectly fluid that a corporation on Wall Street is not so much a group striving to be prosper together as a bunch of people who happen to work in the same building. The operative unit in modern finance is the individual - another reason it makes little sense to invest in groups of financiers.

Lesson No. 3: The first rule of American capitalism is that the capitalists live by different rules than everyone else. During the leveraged-buyout craze of the 1980's, investment bankers jetted around the country preaching to managers the need to own their own firms, while the bankers themselves remained highly paid employees free of the risk of ownership.

Today the great trend in our economy is the drift of bargaining power from workers to owners. Even as corporate profits skyrocket, real wages remain stagnant. American corporations currently are thriving, in part because they are able to cut workers out of their gains. By contrast, a Wall Street firm that has just lost $1 billion cannot even reduce bonuses without risking the loss of its entire work force.

Michael Lewis
"The Capitalist: The Bonus Holdup"
New York Times Magazine (9/10/1995)

[Note that Lewis wrote this in 1995. Our current state of employee disempowerment, wage stagnation, and the shifting of risk from corporations to consumers didn't spring up overnight.]

1280) No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

Alan Watts
"This is IT"
This Is It (1960)
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

1281) If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.

Chinese proverb (attributed)
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

1282) Finally, after a long period of hating your family, your upbringing, the fact that you grew up in the suburbs, finally you stand there to take full responsibility for yourself. I think it's called maturity.

Jane Siberry
interviewed by Catherine Bush in
"Jane Siberry: Multimedia Musician"
Hot Wired (1995)
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

1283) It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.

unknown
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

[Note: Attributed to both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, but no citations for either can be found in standard references or on the Internet.]

1284) Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.

Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais
The Marriage of Figaro (1778)
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

1285) No philosophy that he had ever heard or read gave any reasonable purpose for man's existence, nor any rational clue to his proper conduct. Basking in the sunshine might be as good a thing to do with one's life as any other - but it was not for him and he knew it, even if he could not define how he knew it.

Robert A. Heinlein
Methusalah's Children (1958)
posted by Michael Fuchs [IQM] (9/14/1995)

1256) [T]he fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

Edward R Murrow
speech to Radio-Television News Directors in Chicago (10/15/1958)
posted by J9cqueline [IQM] (9/1/95)

1257) One of the most interesting phenomena I have ever noticed came when I was teaching hypnosis to a friend. I gave him, among other things, the posthypnotic suggestion that if anyone attempted to hypnotize him surreptitiously, without his having first given his conscious permission, he would cease to understand the language that was being spoken, and that [he] would remain so until his conscious mind had taken full control. A few months later he reported that two stimuli regularly triggered the safety seal, some commercials and some political speeches.

Ron Robertson
personal e-mail (9/3/95)

1258) One way that the soul of professional tennis reveals itself these days is in the parceling out of seats in the players' boxes at Wimbeldon and the three other majors. One seat goes to your coach, one goes to your trainer, one to your agent, one to the person you're most publicly having sex with and one to the administrator of your sneaker contract.

Peter de Jonge
"Sampras or Agassi?: A 90's Kind of Rivalry" in
New York Times Magazine (8/27/1995)

1248) As anyone knows who has skimmed the World Book Encyclopedia, the history of Russia can be understood as a struggle between the White Russians and the Slavs, or the Russians with long necks who want to be more like the West and the Russians with thick necks who don't. The long necks may drag Russia westward for a while, but the thick necks eventually drag it back into oblivion. To preserve their dignity and often their lives, the long necks erect a Potemkin village of sorts and then retreat hastily to Paris, until the time comes when the thick necks discredit themselves so much that the long necks are given another chance.

Michael Lewis
"The Capitalist: Ruble Roulette"
New York Times Magazine (8/13/1995)

1233) Conscience often gets the credit that belongs to cold feet.

unknown
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

[Note: This aphorism exists in a lot of minor variations, and is occasionally credited to some specific source, but without citation. However, the central idea has been around for a long time:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

William Shakespeare
Richard III (1592) [MAC]]

1234) Beware the fury of a patient man!

John Dryden
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1235) If you see the truck coming, the impact isn't any less.

unknown
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1236) When you have lunch with a man who eats his lasagna with his fingers, you have reason to suspect that he may have one or two other social deficiencies.

Richard Mitchell
Less Than Words Can Say (1979)
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1237) Only the shallow know themselves.

Oscar Wilde
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894) [WQ]
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1238) A person who can read and doesn't, has no advantage over someone who cannot read.

unknown
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

[Note: The most common atrribution of this quote is to Mark Twain, however its authenticity is uncertain. [NGF]&[TQ], not listed:[QMT]&[QT]]

1239) I drink to make other people interesting.

George Jean Nathan (widely attributed)
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1240) If I'm going to be alone, I want to be by myself.

The Misfits (film, 1961)
written by Arthur Miller
directed by John Huston
spoken by the character "Roslyn Taber",
played by Marilyn Monroe
Krasti, personal e-mail (8/23/95)

1241) The only time a woman really succeeds at changing a man is when he's a baby.

Natalie Wood
quoted in The Curmudgeon Woman (2000)
Nancy M. Henley & Jacqueline D. Goodchilds (eds.)
posted by Chris West [ISQ] (8/23/95)

1242) Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

W.H. Auden
"I Believe" (1939)
posted by Chris West [ISQ] (8/23/95)

[Note: cf. #722 Stewart.]

1243) If you want your eggs hatched, sit on them yourself.

Haitian proverb (widely attributed)
posted by George Osner [ISQ] (8/23/95)

1. You want to put pressure on public officials to change whatever policy or action you're protesting against; and



2. You want to convince other ordinary people to come out to your next protest, so the larger number of people will put more pressure on those public officials.

1223) To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price on conjectures.

Anatole France
(Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
The Revolt of the Angels (1914)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1224) You believe you are dying for your country -- you die for some industrialists.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
(attributed)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1225) Burn, burn all the books which teach hatred! Exalt labor and love! Let us create rational human beings, capable of crushing under foot the futile magnificence of barbaric glories, and of resisting those bloody ambitions of nationalism and imperialism which have crushed their brothers.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
speech, Tours, France (8/1919)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1226) If it were absolutely necessary to choose, I would rather be guilty of an immoral act than of a cruel one.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
Crainquebille (1901)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1227) Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
Crainquebille (1901)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1228) The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

1229) So long as society is founded on injustice, the function of the laws will be to defend and sustain injustice. And the more unjust they are the more respectable they will seem.

Anatole France (Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault)
Epigrams (1925)
posted by JR3000 [IQM] (8/23/95)

[Note: cf. #929 France.]

1230) All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-Francois Thibault)
(widely attributed)
posted by Joanne Curme [IQM] (8/23/95)

1231) If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.

W. Somerset Maugham
A Writer's Notebook (1949) [WQ]

[Note: Often misattributed to Anatole France, frequently in the form "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."]

1232) When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-Francois Thibault)
(widely attributed)
posted by Joanne Curme [IQM] (8/23/95)