non-fiction-authors-from-the-netherlands

"Kakkebaretje [Shit Hat]"

"Dit dansen duurt tot aan den dag, wanneer ieder zijne hangmat gaat ophangen, en een poos slapen. Ondertusschen bevond ik hier het spreekwoord waarachtig, dat een dronke Vrouw een opene deur is: want niet zo haast waren de herssenen door den drank beneveld, en den avond gevallen, of alle schuilhoeken wierden paarhokken; waar na ze zich stilletjes weder aan den dans voegden, even of ’er niets was omgegaan."

"Men zegt, dat bloohartige menschen in ’t gemeyn verraders zijn. Daar zijn verscheyde Natien, die met het Volk van deze Colonie verkeerren, ende Koopmanschap drijven; maar d’eigene Inwoonderen van ’t landt zijn Charibes, ofte Canibalen, die ook wel de meeste in ’t getal zijn van de genen die deze Landen bewoonen; ende die hebben haar selven verspreyt meest in alle Eylanden daar omtrent, ende op het vaste land langs de Riviere van d’Amazones aan, tot aan die van Oronoque."

"Many places in the Vedic literature attest to what may be called a pre-scientific interest in and study of the world, and to attempts at systematizing the knowledge resulting from this study. Much attention is paid to chronology and the calendar... astronomy, cosmology, and cosmogony. This scientific concern is wholly determined by man's ritual and religious interests and constitutes an integral part of one and the same harmonious view of life and the world. This does not, however, exclude the occurrence of references to a certain knowledge of anatomy, embryology, and medical practice. Nor did some linguistic facts—as far as they were utilizable for ritual purposes—escape the authors' notice."

"In all times and among many peoples there have ... been men, who were aware of the reality of "visions" and intuitions, of inspirations and sudden thoughts and ideas, men who understood that besides the purely sensuous impression a thought, a flash of intuition, in short know- ledge, may come to the human mind, as it were spon- taneously, at least without any conscious activity of the organ of sensory perception and which leaves an impres- sion of great reality; men who know that the "doors of the mind may be opened" (RV. 9,10,6). Often also the source of this knowledge is divine. The god Agni, the guest among men and his guru, is explicitly called a dhiirii rtasya (RV. 1,67,7), i.e. "stream or 'fountain' of transcendental truth", the inventor of brilliant speech (2,9 ,4 sukrasya vacaso manotii) , who brings the light of the vibrations of inspiration (3 ,10 ,5 vipiim jyotimsi bibhrat). He opens the thoughts of the poets (4,11,2), his are the origins of the specialgifts of the seers (4,11,3), and in 6,9 we find an elaborate description of the relation between the god - who is the light of the world as well as the internal light illumining poets and sages - and the poet who by devout concentration upon the god experiences the inspiration as an ecstasy."

"Gonda (1975: 65–67) emphasized the “inspired vision of the universal order” expressed in the hymns, in which a “rsi seeks, or enters into contact with, divinity or transcendent reality.”"

"For Gonda, “chariot drives and other races have often the function of regenerating the productive forces in nature,” while the gods “are described as driving swift horses [10.92.6 ...,] as approaching the sacrificers in their chariots [1.84.18, 7.2.5]” (Gonda 1965: 72, 98)."

"Besides the uncertain date of the Avesta, the cases of cultural, stylistic and lexicographical parallelism between texts of this description do not necessarily point to simultaneity."

"[The Aryan invasion] is not reflected in the [Rig-Vedic] hymns."

"As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life."

"The intensity of animal and human contact is becoming much greater as the world develops. This makes it more likely new diseases will emerge but also modern travel and trade make it much more likely they will spread. [...] We have these outbreaks and the international community flies in but in the case of Ebola the disease went under the radar for four months. It’s really crucial we start to change that and make sure local health care infrastructure is better developed. People on the ground are vital. They are our first line of defence."

"Whether it will be contained or not, this outbreak is rapidly becoming the first true pandemic challenge that fits the disease X category."

"I think we can defend the view that there are two different sorts of moral gap, an ‘affection gap’ and a ‘performance gap’. The affection gap is that non-human animals do not have what Duns Scotus calls ‘the affection for justice’, which is a pull towards what is good in itself, regardless of any relation to us. The performance gap is that we do not find in ourselves the innate capacity to live consistently by the affection for justice by merely human devices. ... De Waal says that the doctrine of original sin has been refuted and that we are not sinfully self-centered but ‘we are driven to empathize with others in an automated, often unconditional fashion. We genuinely care about others, wanting to see them happy and healthy regardless of what immediate good this may do for us.’ However, he agrees that we do not find in non-human animals morality itself, though we do find kin selection, so-called ‘reciprocal altruism’, and social control. This admits the affection gap. He also agrees that human beings, despite formal protestations to the contrary and despite our innate goodness, put self and its kin first, then the ingroup, and the idea of being moral towards individuals from other groups is very recent and very fragile. As far as I can see, this is the performance gap."

"At the time, I was interested in reconciliation after fights, and I wanted to know how bonobos did it compared to chimpanzees. Very soon I discovered that they were much more sexual in everything they did, and that interested me — not so much for the sex part, even though that became a very hot topic, the peacemaking-through-sex thing — but much more how they have such a peaceful society, because they are much less violent than chimpanzees."

"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."

"I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."

"The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures."

"In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor."

"Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone."

"I first saw them in 1978. At the time, I knew a lot about chimps, because I had been studying them. I saw the bonobos at a zoo in Holland, and I thought immediately, they're totally different. The sense you get looking them in the eyes is that they're more sensitive, more sensual, not necessarily more intelligent, but there's a high emotional awareness, so to speak, of each other and also of people who look at them."

"If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation. Indeed, among hunter-gatherers, peace is common 90 percent of the time, and war takes place only a small part of the time. Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities. Whereas bonobos do tell us something; they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships."

"It is true that the chimpanzee is dominance-oriented, violent, territorial. But it's also cooperative in many ways, and so that side is sometimes forgotten. The bonobo is sensual, sensitive, sexual, a peacemaker, but also can have a nasty side, and that's sometimes forgotten. So both species are sort of the ends of the spectrum, and we fall somewhere in between. Clearly, we have both of these sides in us, and that's why I sometimes call us "the bipolar apes.""

"I would say there are people in this world who like hierarchies, they like to keep people in their place, they like law enforcement, and they probably have a lot in common, let's say, with the chimpanzee. And then you have other people in this world who root for the underdog, they give to the poor, they feel the need to be good, and they maybe have more of this kinder bonobo side to them. Our societies are constructed around the interface between those two, so we need both actually."

"Imagine that we didn't know the chimpanzee, that all we knew were those bonobos who have sex all the time and are peaceful and female-dominated and that people would say that this is our only close relative. I think we would have totally different theories about ourselves and our background. But, of course, it didn't happen that way."

"I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years."

"Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and impotence."

"“Architecture has been a domain of architects, a discipline presumably dominated by immaculately dressed bookish pedants that have a stream of thought well displaced from regular human thought.”- Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine, (2000)"

"Interview in Wired magazine"

"Noting that architecture can no longer keep up with the world: "The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture."

"It's very simple and it has nothing to do with identifiable goals. It is to keep thinking about what architecture can be, in whatever form. That is an answer, isn't it? I think that S,M,L,XL has one beautiful ambiguity: it used the past to build a future and is very adamant about giving notice that this is not the end. That's how it felt to me, anyway. That is in itself evidence of a kind of discomfort with achievement measured in terms of identifiable entities, and an announcement that continuity of thinking in whatever form, around whatever subject, is the real ambition."

"People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living."

"We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away"

"Japan lives with drastic segregation between the sublime, the ugly, and the utterly without qualities. Dominance of the last 2 categories makes mere presence of the first stunning: when beauty 'happens', it is absolutely surprising."

"Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. (...) Its subtext is fuck context."

"The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now."

"I live in a Victorian apartment building in London."

"Find optimism in the inevitable."