ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894–1963) Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. [Proper Studies, “The Essence of Religion: Solitaries and Sociables” (1927).] ALDRICH H. AMES ...after having been convicted as a traitor, and sentenced to life in prison, this career CIA spy called the espionage business "a self-serving sham, carried out by careerist bureaucrats who have managed to deceive several generations of American policy makers and the public"... ALEXIS de TOCQUEVILLE (1805-59) I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. [Democracy in America, vol. 1, ch. 15 (1835)] I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right. [Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 3, ch. 21 (1840)] Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse. [Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 3, ch. 11 (1840)] As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in? [Letter, 9 June 1831 (published in Selected Letters on Politics and Society, 1985)] ALLAN BLOOM The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is. ALONA WARTOFSKY (5/97) Marilyn Manson’s latest album, “Antichrist Superstar,” has reignited the classic pop music tempest: A belligerent, foul-mouthed performer scandalizes parents, the church and professional virtue-crats, thereby increasing the artist’s appeal to teenagers who buy concert tickets. ..... In dozens of cities, demonstrators outside concert halls kneel and pray to save the souls inside. AVERELL HARRIMAN (a poem to his future widow, read by granddaughter Marina S. Churchill at Pamela Harriman’s funeral) Now that I have left you for awhile Please remember me and try to smile Don’t spend your life in empty days But fill each hour in useful ways BERTRAND RUSSELL ...in answer to the question, "What does today's world need most?" The root of the matter is this, (if you want a stable world), a very simple thing, so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it for fear of derisive smiles with which cynics will greet my words -- the thing I mean is Christian love or compassion. If you feel this you have a motive for existence; a guide for action; a reason for courage; and an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. BRENT STAPLES I woke up several times before dawn. Each time, my brothers lay differently twisted in sheets, a new frieze cut from the dance of sleep CHARLES DARWIN from The Descent of Man (Introduction) . . . ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. CHRIS WELSCH from a May 4, 2005 Minneapolis-St. Paul Tribune piece on his experience at Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood, in western Massachusetts . . . . The Emerson Quartet, four men in black tuxes, took the stage when the deep blue of dusk was still accenting the incredible expanses of blond wood inside the hall. The centerpiece of the program was Dimitri Shostakovich's Quartet No. 9. The acoustics in the hall are considered to be among the best in the world; as the violinists were madly sawing away at their strings during the polka-band-on-acid third movement, I felt like I could hear the individual horsehairs of the bows fraying. As played by the Emerson Quartet, the piece expressed all the brooding Russians survived and loved. Marching armies, the contempt of his craven peers, Stalin's threats, many bitter winters, the absurd and deadly bureaucracy. Then, triumph and hilarity, unexpected love, spring and summer. I thought I heard a day or two free of worries. Maybe it was all of those things, and maybe it was none of them. As I said, I don't understand music, even though I appreciate it. Still, it was a strange miracle, how one person put down his feelings in the shape of tones, how others had devoted their lives to making those tones come to life and how we sat there for two hours on a summer night, loving the world with our ears. COLEMAN McCARTHY It was either an Irish mystic or poet, and it's usually one or the other, who said that a friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and plays back the words when you forget how they go. This weekend, with St. Valentine reminding loved ones to love, some homage is due for friends who befriend. If you have a few someones who can't remember the words of their song, sing them back. It's sweeter than chocolates. (Wash Post 2-15-87) DAVID A. BETZ (5/97) (U. of Cal. at Davis, med student) - (near the end of the victorious chess tourney of Big Blue vs. Kasparov) A supercomputer victory would represent yet another assault on humanity’s arrogant belief in its own supremacy. History is a sequence of such assaults: recognizing that the earth is not the center of the universe, understanding that man is not the pinnacle of creation but rather one branch on a large evolutionary tree, and now, perhaps, recognizing that an inanimate computer can in some sense exhibit behavior more intelligent than any living person. EDWIN L. ARTZT (Chairman of Procter & Gamble, company with the fattest U.S. ad budget - speaking May ‘94 to the emerging challenge of on-line media) "If advertising is no longer needed to pay most of the cost of home entertainment, then advertisers like us will have a hard time achieving the reach and frequency we need to support our brands." FLORENCE KING Men are not very good at loving, but they are excellent at admiring and respecting. The woman who goes after their admiration and respect will come out better than she who goes after their love. FORUM FOR BAHA'I INVESTIGATIONS People speak of a "spiritual" reality that exists beyond the physical, material world. This usage is best defined as "whatever is beyond the grasp of science." For instance, if a phenomenon regarded as spiritual (or synonymously "supernatural") was to be explained mathematically or mechanically by science, it would no longer be regarded as spiritual. Thus religion stakes its claim in the areas that cannot be methodically expirimented upon. Regardless of what science may discover, this dynamic will always leave room for imagination, superstition, and religion, because there will always be something that might be out there in the gaps, our old friend the spirit world. FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI As for true love, the kind he is famous for portraying, "I don't know whether it exists. But you hear people say, and in books, of being swept away. You hear it so often, not that I don't believe in it, but I wonder if it's something that you make up... " I had pains and loves, but never that. Was it because of me? The question should be posed more often: `Did you ever really fall in love to the point of forgetting everything else, really want to die?' This question has always haunted me." What he has experienced, he says, is "possession--`You belong to me.' That has happened a couple dozen times. It is the worst, most irrelevant way to approach love and passion. It is the opposite of what love should be. (Wash. Post 11-24-86) FREDERICK SOMMER Choice and chance structure art and nature. Aesthetic logic is the ordering of our feelings. Art and nature are not arbitrary. Nature is the distributiveness that life adorns. We cannot afford to be overcome by what we do not understand in our thinking. The poet is inspired by the aptness of what is occurring to him. The miraculous works where profundity is modest. Humanity is mourning man’s inhumanity to man. To put together what we have become is not enough. The past is history, and with foresight the future is also history. What is left is the need to define growth. Art and science see in this world of biology a portable logic of life. To know how man has walked before is to know how to walk. Man is always becoming what he has already been. All relationships arise from the fact that reality is a magic poorly understood. Aesthetics is interested in an elegant apportionment of reality within the offerings of chance. Poetry is the natural order of our feelings. The stones of the earth do this for us. Time is dear. Abstraction is a portable structure within the transitiveness of events. The development of intelligence in the universe may hinge on this beautiful phenomenon. Art brings together the work of nature and the work of man. Art moves us from logic to aesthetics. Poetry is the quality of our acts. Art is evidence that survives. The infinitely near is as far as the infinitely far. All things linger where time builds eternity. Predictive powers in all enterprise depends a great deal upon enthusiasm. Without it absolutely nothing happens. Pessimism has a lot of prestige but very little muscle. To be pessimistic a priori is unfair to the problem. GARRISON KEILLOR from The Baltimore Sun, June 8, 2006 - excerpts from WITH INEPTITUDE ON FULL DISPLAY, THE PARTY'S OVER FOR THE REPUBLICANS The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco, Texas. There may be a reson for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank. They might be lousy tippers, act snooty, talk through their noses, wear spats and splash mud on you as they race their Pierce-Arrows through the village, but you knew they could do the math. To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for five years is disconcerting, like seeing the Rolling Stones take up lite jazz. It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do. GARY ROSEN For Susan Jacoby, the problem with weaving such a tale (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism) is that it would have to conclude with the obvious fact of secularism’s abiding strength and (fiercely contested) ascendancy. As she plainly knows, celebrating past victories is no way for a culture warrior to rally her scattered troops. GEORGE SANTAYANA those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. GLENN BRANCA The reason that I’m getting involved in this so called classsical music scene is because this scene is really the home for people who want to write music without any concerns about whether it’s going to get on the chart or how much money it’s going to make. It’s just too bad that more people don’t realize that the music of real integrity, the real psychedelic music, exists in that world, not on MTV. GODFREY CHESHIRE (from the Independent, NC Triangle's Weekly 11-4-04) Percentages ranging as high as 72 and never lower than 40, depending on the time and the poll that you read, measured the chunk of the American public that believed Saddam Hussein had been behind the attacks of 9/11. . . . The election of 2004 was, to me, not ultimately about the Iraq war but about whether our brand of democracy--which we're now trying to impose on other populations and cultures, whether they like it or not--can work as intended when a good portion of the population is opertating on sheer delusion, a form of delusion all too easily fostered and manipulated by the agents of predatory plutocracy and bellicose zealotry. . . . (Marshall McLuhan, '60s media theorist) predicted that when print's dominance was overthrown by electronic media, the result would be that societies that had previously been more or less homogenous would fragment into new forms of "tribalism" and rational, analytical outlooks would increasingly give way to symbolic, totemic, emotional ways of thinking. GORE VIDAL Obviously, in any time and place an overweening person is tiresome, but surely laughter is the best tonic for restoring him to our common weeniness. HAL CROWTHER from NC Triangle's INDEPENDENT, February 15, 2006 For the last 25 years, at least ever since Reagan, there has been a corporate culture of congratulating ourselves for our conspicuous consumption and for consuming the largest share of the wealth and food and for the lack of the guilty conscience. It's no longer popular to apologize for having too much when others have too little. Really, social and economic Darwinism -- this survival of the fittest -- has been official or unofficial policy of the people that set the program of this country for years. excerpts from NC Triangle's INDEPENDENT, April 26, 2006, In spite of its obsessive secrecy, the Bush White House is as obvious as Donald Trump's combover. Liars, bullies and bunglers, these conspirators are the authors and owners of the single worst mistake an American government has ever made. Ever. It takes no insight whatsoever to see through them, yet considerable courage to oppose them. They've created a national crisis where every credible voice can make a difference, where experienced journalists who close their eyes or mask their responses are something worse than useless. Though the lockstep Right rarely wins an argument in the open court of reason, its propogandists enjoy tremendous success portraying America as a Manichaean society where political opinion comes in two flavors only, in vanilla and chocolate and no fudge ripple, please. This ultra-polarized model, pure myth, is the cornerstone of reactionary rhetoric. What's true of "most people with brains" is 10 times true for journalists, who've spent their working lives watching inflexible ideologies founder on the facts. An idealogue with a press pass is always a whore or a fool. But this wide-spread perception of politics as partisan ping-pong and pundits as team players -- a cretinous legacy of Fox News and the Sunday shouting shows -- has worked to marginalize legitimate dissent just when the republic most urgently needs to hear it. (Bill Moyers) sees bad faith, arrogance, atrocious judgment and irreversible damage. The media and the Democrats, he belives, are nearly all intimidated or self-servingly supine. It breaks his heart to see Americans accept deceit and abuse from an empty suit like George Bush, whom every unposed photo seems to expose for what he is -- an inept con artist, a furtive low-rent hustler about to be caught in the act. HUNTER S. THOMPSON In a 5-25-97 review of Hunter Thompson's new book THE PROUD HIGHWAY, there is this quote about journalism and values that may have come from the period when he was disturbed over the John Kennedy assassination. If we cannot produce a generation of journalists--or even a good handful--who care enough about our world and our future to make journalism the great literature it can be, then 'professionally oriented programs' are a waste of time. Without at least a hard core of atriculate men convinced that journalism today is perhaps the best means of interpreting and thereby preserving what little progress we have made toward freedom and self-respect over the years, without that tough-minded elite in our press, dedicated to concepts that are sensed and quietly understood, rather than learned in schools--without these men we might as well toss in the towel and admit that ours is a society too interested in comic strips and TV to consider revolution until it bangs on our front door in the dead of some quiet night when our guard is finally down and we no longer kid ourselves about being the bearers of a great and decent dream. JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like breath on the surface of a pane of glass. JANET MALCOLM ...cheated of the peace that age brings... JERRY GARCIA When we go onstage, we want to be transformed from ordinary players into extraordinary ones, like forces of a larger consciousness. And the audience wants to be transformed from whatever ordinary reality they may be in to something a little wider, something that enlarges them. So maybe it’s that notion of transformation, a seat-of-the-pants Shamanism. You need music. I don’t know why. It’s probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives. And music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI (1895 - 1986) If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it then what you are undergoes a transformation. The problem is not the world, but you in relation with another, which creates a problem; and that problem extended becomes the world problem. It is truth that frees, not your effort to be free. JILL KER CONWAY The very strong utilitarian emphasis in education, which is an effect of Sputnik and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots, which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a democratic republic. JOAN DIDION (regarding Georgia O'Keefe) She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom, and open to what she sees. JOEL ACHENBACH Everone agrees that there us no one part of the brain that is conscious or intelligent. The brain is a raucous, untempered environment with a million things happening at once, consciousness emerging from the mix in the same way that wetness is an emergent property of a whole bunch of water molecules linked together. JOHN MUIR Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. JONATHAN YARDLY (regarding Richard Mitchell's book, The Gift Of Fire) Since the 1960s American education at all levels has been content to reflect the ethos of a culture in which feeling good is taken more seriously than thinking clearly. JONI MITCHELL I'm porous with travel fever But you know I'm so glad to be on my own Still sometimes the slightest touch of a stranger Can set up trembling in my bones I know -- no one's going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone JUDITH ROSSNER (A main theme in her books is separations, and are about whether the heroine should leave--whether it's a husband, a mother, a home. Those with low self-esteem remain to suffocate in indifference; people who value themselves are more likely to leave.) The only men in the world who are interesting are those who have not been so frightened of the female part of their identity as to throw it over completely, and are able to once in a while identify and understand. There's no question that the whole macho refusal to understand or be interested in that world of feeling has to do with fear, and not with anything that's innately masculine. (Wash. Post 8-1-83) LESTIENNE [The Children of Time] "Science is one of philosophy's tools, but it advances only one small step after another. The small "nos" it reveals to us are nevertheless precious. If the large questions remain essentially the same, at least the terms in which they are asked are becoming more and more precise." LEWIS H. LAPHAM Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of “consensus.” In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn’t really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which . . . we no longer need politics. Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935), U.S. essayist and editor. “Democracy in America?,” in Harper’s (New York, Nov. 1990). MARCUS AURELIUS (the emperor) our life is what our thoughts make it MARGO TIMMINS ...to love is to bury those demons from which we all hide... MARK MARCOPLOS (from The Chapel Hill News 9-29-04) The United States and South Africa are the only countries in the developed world that do not provide health care for all of its citizens. A 1998 study revealed that the United States spent $4,178 per capita (on health care). Second place Switzerland spent $2,794, and the average of 29 developed countries in this study was $1,783 -- less than half of the U.S. figure. When it comes to infant mortality and life expectancy, all this big spending does't even get us into the top 20 best among developed countries. Profits of U.S. life and health insurers jumped $5.9 billion or 212.5% to $8.7 billion in the first three months of 2004, according to Weiss Ratings, Inc. a national financial analysis firm. From 1995 through 2002 the pharmaceutical industry was the most profitable industry in the U.S. . . . . we obviously value medical industry profits over the health of individual citizens. (from The Chapel Hill News 11-14-04) . . . we are left with the nearly unfathomable phenomenon of tens of millions of people voting for an administration that lies pathologically, blatantly lines the pockets of its friends, has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and has ensured that the United States is held in record contempt by the rest of the world. . . . The consumer driven superficial popular culture of reality TV, Beautiful People, anti-depressant drugs, and glorified lifetime adolescence has predictably left a lot of people devoid of the lessons of authentic experience and with holes in their souls to fill. In the short term, organizing to win the next political battle is required. In the long term though, building strong communities through energy self-reliance, watershed control, local food production, local health-care networks, strong local business support, environmental protection, and resistance to the corporate siren song (to name just a few) will build strong citizens who can think for themselves, value their connection to the earth, and become the envy of those looking to fill an uncomfortable void. MARY MATALIN I love anything that gets the mega-fems leaders’ panties in a knot. NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (first Arab author to win Nobel Prize in 1988) (after having been found near the top of a militant Muslim death list) And so what if they get me? I have lived my life and done what I wanted to. (he was stabbed several times in the neck ~10-14-94, and survived) PAUL RICHARD (Wash. Post Art Reviewer) It (Whistler’s Mother painting) is one of those rare images - like George Washington in winter in his boat on the Delaware, or Mona Lisa smiling - that have slipped into the gallery we all carry in our minds. PETER EICHENBERGER We live in a world increasingly indistinguishable from systematic and well orchestrated vertical corporate structure -- controlled fascist corruption. There is a growing, submerged sense that the systems that form our culture have universally been compromised, leaving us with a loss of moral direction and a growing realization that we are quite alone. (Independent - NC Triangle's Weekly8-18-04) There are only a few rules and you don't have to learn them -- they are in you. Be conscious of the results of what you choose, and if you have any heart at all, you can't go wrong. (INDY 10-6-04) PHILIP K. DICK 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 is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history. PLATO (c.427-347 B.C.) We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know - or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know. RICHARD VOSS Good music like a person's life or the pageant of history, is a wondrous mixture of expectation and unanticipated turns. RITA MAE BROWN ...most people enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought ...you can't make gray look white by comparing it to black ...(a minority group member) must learn to understand the majority in order to survive. A minority person knows much more about a majority person than vice versa. It's time we reverse this process. Our entire foreign policy is built around ideological antagonism. So is the foreign policy of every other nation on earth, and most individuals think the same way, i.e., that there is a person, group of people, religion, sex, or other country that is "the enemy". Their behavior is then crystallized around reaction to the enemy. How utterly perverse this is. It means that your life is controlled by the very people you hate. A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must (strive) for a life of action, not reaction. SIMON JEFFES regarding a found harmonium . . . I frequently visited this instrument during the next few months and remember the time fondly as one during which I was under a form of enchantment with the place and the time. Describing how the idea of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra came to him, Jeffes said: I was on the beach sunbathing and suddenly a poem popped into my head. It started out 'I am the proprietor of the Penguin Café, I will tell you things at random' and it went on about how the quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing. And if you suppress that to have a nice orderly life, you kill off what's most important. Whereas in the Penguin Café your unconscious can just be. It's acceptable there, and that's how everybody is. There is an acceptance there that has to do with living the present with no fear in ourselves. SUSAN CHEEVER Norma McCorvey is an angry shadow from the dark side of the American dream. That Jane Roe and Norma McCorvey are the same person is just another example of the randomness and absurdity of a politics marked by an unbridgable gulf between myth and reality. Henry Wade was Dallas District Attorney. (Roe vs. Wade) T.S. ELIOT From the 1922 book, THE WASTE LAND: April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. TERRY PRATCHETT Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened. THOMAS CARDINAL WOLSEY (1471 - 1530) Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. TOM WAITS Things you planned turn out to be meaningless, and that which you accumulated without knowing it becomes your real treasure, your innocence, your confidence. WALTER ISAACSON (from an article about TIME’S Man of the Year, Andrew Grove, ~ 1-1-98, The Digital Age) The microchip has become--like the steam engine, electricity and the assembly line--an advance that propels a new economy. It decentralizes power. As the transistor was being invented, George Orwell, in his book 1984, was making one of the worst predictions in a century filled with them: that technology would be a centralizing, totalitarian influence. Instead, technology became a force for democracy and individual empowerment. The Internet allows anyone to be a publisher or pundit, E-mail subverts rigid hierarchies, and the tumult of digital innovation rewards wildcats who risk battle with monolithic phone companies. The symbol of the atomic age, which tended to centralize power, was a nucleus with electrons held in tight orbit; the symbol of the digital age is the Web, with countless centers of power all equally networked. It rewards openness. Information can no longer be easily controlled nor ideas repressed nor societies kept closed. A networked world facilitates free minds, free markets and free trade. | 
