131 quotes found
"I hope my studies may be an encouragement to other women, especially to young women, to devote their lives to the larger interests of the mind. It matters little whether men or women have the more brains; all we women need to do to exert our proper influence is just to use all the brains we have."
"It is essential that we raise the image of sex, which is currently seen as a purely biological affair and often portrayed in its worst manifestations, to that of a spiritually based activity"
"In the last few decades, it has become increasingly clear that humanity is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Modern science has developed effective measures that could solve most of the urgent problems in today's world--combat the majority of diseases, eliminate hunger and poverty, reduce the amount of industrial waste, and replace destructive fossil fuels by renewable sources of clean energy. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species."
"All the cultures in human history except the Western industrial civilization have held holotropic states of consciousness in great esteem. They induced them whenever they wanted to connect to their deities,other dimensions of reality, and with the forces of nature. They also used them for diagnosing and healing, cultivation of extrasensory perception, and artistic inspiration. They spent much time and energy to develop safe and effective ways of inducing them."
"Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness"
"LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry."
"In one of my early books I suggested that the potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value the microscope has for biology or the telescope has for astronomy. My later experience with psychedelics only confirmed this initial impression. These substances function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing. This unique property of psychedelics makes it possible to study psychological undercurrents that govern our experiences and behaviours to a depth that cannot be matched by any other method and tool available in modern mainstream psychiatry and psychology. In addition, it offers unique opportunities for healing of emotional and psychosomatic disorders, for positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution."
"LSD is a unique and powerful tool for the exploration of the human mind and human nature. Psychedelic experiences mediate access to deep realms of the psyche that have not yet been discovered and acknowledged by mainstream psychology and psychiatry. They also reveal new possibilities and mechanisms of therapeutic change and personality transformation."
"[B]y banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness."
"DYING AND DEATH are the most universal and personally relevant experiences for every single individual. In the course of life, we all lose relatives, friends, teachers, and acquaintances and eventually face our own biological demise. Yet it is quite extraordinary that until the late 1960es, the Western industrial civilization showed an almost complete lack of interest in the subject of death and dying. This attitude has been displayed not only by the general public, but also by scientists and professionals for whom this subject should be of great interest - medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and theologicians. The only plausible explanation for this situation is massive denial of death and psychological repression of everything related to it. This disinterest is even more striking when we compare it to the attitude toward mortality in preindustrial societies..."
"If there were a list of the most influential people in the 20th century (and now a bit beyond), Stanislav Grof would be among them. The importance of altered states of consciousness is now coming to be increasingly recognized, and no one has worked this domain as productively as the author of this book."
"The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did."
"Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on reciprocal atrocities in the Guerra Civil — that the sunny Spanish could never be guilty of an Auschwitz, for example. In the first place, your ovens would have died, like our kitchen stove, instead of your Jews, whom you'd got rid of anyhow in the sunny Fifteenth century, no? And in the second place the whole idea of extermination camps would've been too impersonal for your exquisite Moorish tastes. Much more agradable to push folks off a cliff one at a time into a gorgeous Mediterranean sunset, as you did near Malaga — three hundred, was it, or three thousand? Or to rape and then kill a convent-full of nuns in the manner of the saint of their choice — was that Barcelona or Valencia?"
"One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way."
"Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated."
"[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people."
"[T]here is no will-o'-the-wisp so elusive as the cause of any human act."
"[I]t is sometimes pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him."
"More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations."
"'Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer."
"'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion."
"Is a man a salvage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile manners? Or is salvagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?"
"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe, then the converse ought to have at least some some metaphorical truth: The universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the trouble with God is not that He's a bad novelist; only that He's a realistic one, and that dates Him.) [Footnote:] But also keeps bringing Him back into fashion."
"I don't think it's a good idea, as a rule, for artists to explain their art, even if they can. Jorge Luis Borges puts it arrogantly: God shouldn't stoop to theology. A modern painter put it more politely and poetically: Birds have no need of ornithology."
"[T]he vocation of writing seriously involves the continuous and deep examination of one's own experience of life and the world, and of the language and literary conventions we use to register that experience and make it meaningful."
"The simple burden of my essay ["The Literature of Exhaustion"] was that the forms and modes of art live in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness, at least in the minds of significant numbers of artists in particular times and places: in other words, that artistic conventions are likely to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. I would have thought that point unexceptionable. But a great many people … mistook me to mean that literature, at least fiction, is kaput …That is not what I meant at all. … [L]et me say at once and plainly that …literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language. …What my essay "The Literature of Exhaustion" was really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective "exhaustion" not of language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that admirable, not-to-be-repudiated, but essentially completed "program" of what Hugh Kenner has dubbed "the Pound era." In 1966/67 we scarcely had the term postmodernism in its current literary-critical usage — at least I hadn't heard it yet — but a number of us, in quite different ways and with varying combinations of intuitive response and conscious deliberation, were already well into the working out, not of the next-best thing after modernism, but of the best next thing: what is gropingly now called postmodernist fiction; what I hope might also be thought of one day as a literature of replenishment."
"I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist."
"We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them."
"The story of our life is not our life. It is our story."
"A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!"
"[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces."
"A "limited imagination," as I understand it, gets things wrong. From its mere incapacity, like limited intelligence or limited physical strength, it fails to anticipate accurately and to come up with the really new or more effective idea. Never mind that even the most powerful imagination may not be literally unlimited. … In the literary sphere, limited imagination is likely to be limited to the most conventional and obvious: a mere lack of originality in the material, the form, the treatment."
"Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination."
"Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature."
"[While] we have only one life, nevertheless that one life ("that massive datum," John Updike calls it in his memoir Self-Consciousness) lends itself to any number of stories — and I'm speaking here not of fabrications but of sincere, straightforward factual accounts. Another way to put it is that any life's story can be told in any number of ways, depending on the teller's "handle," or angle of view, or lens. In fact, of course, the same applies to fictional characters: people made out of words in a novel or words and images on a screen."
"[A]rtistic Meisterstücken, even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for "solitary meditation and contemplation," to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meisterstück, the particular reader, viewer, or auditor, and the particular circumstances of their encounter."
"There is a popular misconception of the Romantics as rebelling against all formal constraints in favor of untrammeled freedom (as in their fondness for "wild" gardens" around those "broken" columns), and indeed we have heard Schlegel's Julius explicitly rejecting "all that … we call 'order'" in his Lucinde project. But it is clear that in fact he and his creator have a veritable passion for form — in Wallace Stevens's famous phrasing, a "rage for order" — and that what they're rejecting is only certain "conventions" of order and form. I prefer to think of Schlegel as a "romantic formalist" — a term that I apply to myself as well — and I will venture to say that the principal difference between Romantic romantic formalism and Postmodernist romantic formalism is that the latter, more than the former, inclines to the ironic (though impassioned) reorchestration of older conventions — including the classical and the neoclassical — rather than to their rejection in favor of "new" forms."
"[O]ne does not write a truly contemporary novel … merely by writing about contemporary matters. … One writes a contemporary novel by writing it in a contemporary way."
"The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness."
"[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnections between apparently disparate phenomena, as part of our ongoing project of making sense of the world. Somewhat different, and more rigorous, is the novelist's So what? … [T]he best artists have a keenly intelligent feel, however intuitive, for just [such] demonstrable interconnections …, and for the relevance of those interconnections not only to their own artistic practice but to the circumstance of being humanly alive and vigorously sentient in a particular historical time and place."
"The ascendancy of the novel is historically associated with the ascendancy of the middle class and the spread of general literacy, and those in turn, in the West at least, with the development of the institutions of liberal democracy and the civil state. … No doubt I am being both biased and superstitious, but because of that historical connection I think of the novel (and, by extension, of general literacy) as a canary in the coal mines of democratic civil society. … If this particular canary really does go belly-up, I'm old-fashioned enough to fear for the general civic air."
"[R]eading a splendid writer, or even just a very entertaining writer, is not a particularly passive business. An accomplished artist is giving us his or her best shots, in what she or he regards as their most effective sequence—of words, of actions, of foreshadowings and plot-twists and insights and carefully prepared dramatic moments. It's up to us to respond to those best shots with our minds and hearts and spirits and our accumulated experience of life and of art."
"[B]y writing an Aenead that combines an Odyssey with an Iliad, Virgil gives the impression of wanting to outdo the Homer of whom he is the self-conscious heir and to whom his Latin epic is also a homage, just as Augustan Rome is at once the cultural heir and political master of classical Greece. You want to be a great epic poet? Here are your models. Virgil follows them—programmatically but not slavishly—and because he happens to be a great epic poet, his Aenead turns out to be not a monumental Case-1 imitation of the great model, but a great epic poem. Thirteen centuries later, Dante compounds the stunt, taking as his literal and figurative guide not "unselfconscious" Homer but self-conscious (and Homer-conscious) Virgil, and not only scripts himself into the wandering hero role but orchestrates his own welcome … into the company of the immortals—in a Limbo, moreover, where they must ineluctably remain, but from which he will proceed through Purgatory to Paradise. Talk about chutzpah! Happening to be a great poet, Dante brings the thing off."
"As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. … One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best."
"So what's to be said … for a curriculum devoted to a study of a more-or-less-agreed-upon roster of "the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's famous formulation — or at least as representatively much of that Best as the ever-evolving consensus of a good college faculty believes can be fruitfully addressed between undergraduate matriculation and the baccalaureate?Well: what's to be said for it, needless to say, is that it not only edifies and instructs — any good old curriculum does that — but permits discourse within a shared frame of reference richer and more stable than this season's pop music, films, and TV shows, which a colleague of mine used to lament were the only points of cultural reference that he could assume to be shared by his undergraduate students."
"The Tragic View of liberal education is that even at its best, … it is so necessarily, unavoidably limited that all it can attempt is to afford us some experience of, for example, informed close reading and critical thinking, and to make us aware that there remain continents of knowledge out there that one lifetime could scarcely scratch the surface of, even were we to devote it all to reading and studying — which we must not, since education comes so much from hands-on doing and experiencing as well as from reading and study."
"[T]o a greater or lesser extent our knowledge even of close kin is often fragmentary, inferred like a fossil skeleton or an ancient vase from whatever always-limited experience and shards of memory we have of them."
"I got a lot of encouragement there from John Barth, a genius, a superb teacher"
"[Johns] Hopkins had this very postmodernist slant. You couldn't help but be really influenced by this emphasis on the text, on experimental texts. People were fascinated with Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth was there, and the focus was on that, which I found very helpful."
"[F]or me, self-consciousness vitiates creation. A writer like John Barth deliberately plays with self-consciousness; I doubt that Barth thinks much of my writing, and I don't take pleasure in his, but I know he knows what he's doing and I respect him for it."
"Writing, I crushed an insect with my nail And thought nothing at all. A bit of wing Caught my eye then, a gossamer so frail And exquisite, I saw in it a thing That scorned the grossness of the thing I wrote. It hung upon my finger like a sting."
"A leg I noticed next, fine as a mote, "And on this frail eyelash he walked," I said, "And climbed and walked like any mountain-goat.""
"Then in my heart a fear Cried out, "A life — why, beautiful, why dead!" It was a mite that held itself most dear, So small I could have drowned it with a tear."
"As a third generation American I grew up with the obsessive idea of personal liberty which engrosses all Americans except the oldest and richest families."
"The public has an unusual relationship to the poet: It doesn't even know that he is there."
"Words like “spokesman” and “touchstone” took me completely by surprise. For very real reasons. Not only had I been out of the country when my first two books were published, but I have always been “out of the country” in the sense that I never had what ordinarily is thought of as a literary life, or been part of a literary group. What psychiatrists nowadays call a support system. I never had any of that and still don’t."
"I had never met a poet in my life before winning the Pulitzer in 1945. Well, that’s not strictly true; when I went to Johns Hopkins in 1939, W. H. Auden gave a private reading to a group of special literature students, and I was one. I shook hands with him. As it happened, at that time he was my idol, above all others as a modern poet, and that experience was a very sustaining one. But I could hardly say I “knew” him."
"I always had this feeling — I’ve heard other Jews say — that when you can’t find any other explanation for Jews, you say, “Well, they are poets.” There are a great many similarities. This is a theme running all through my stuff from the very beginning. The poet is in exile whether he is or he is not. Because of what everybody knows about society’s idea of the artist as a peripheral character and a potential bum. Or troublemaker. Well, the Jews began their career of troublemaking by inventing the God whom Wallace Stevens considers the ultimate poetic idea. And so I always thought of myself as being both in and out of society at the same time. Like the way most artists probably feel in order to survive — you have to at least pretend that you are “seriously” in the world. Or actually perform in it while you know that in your own soul you are not in it at all. You are outside observing it."
"Whitman to me is the most fascinating of American poets. Whitman started to write the great poetry from scratch after he had written all that junk for newspapers, the sentimental lyrical poems. All of a sudden he wrote Leaves of Grass. When I was teaching at the University of Nebraska, my friend James Miller was chairman of the English Department. He wrote the first book attempting to make a parallel between the structure of Leaves of Grass and the steps of the mystical experience as in St. John of the Cross. I was completely bowled over by this, not having been able to explain how Whitman came to write “Song of Myself,” which is unlike anything not only in American literature, but unique in all the world. The parallels to it are mystical literature. Miller tried to show that there was actual evidence for this kind of experience, which evidently happens at a particular moment in someone’s life. … When I saw the negative reaction to Whitman with the great ruling critics of the time, I couldn’t believe it. Eliot never really gave up hammering away on Whitman, neither did Pound. Although Pound makes little concessions. Whitman, you know, didn’t have any influence in this country until Allen Ginsberg came along."
"Influence is strange. Because one can be influenced powerfully in every way but technique. For instance, I would think Walt Whitman probably had more influence on my whole poetic thinking than anybody, but I never dreamed of trying to write in the Whitman manner."
"I was at Notre Dame just a few years ago, and one of the professors there said to me, “You don’t know what effect In Defense of Ignorance had. It ripped the whole academic community in half!” I’m glad I wrote the book. I like it, and I still stand by my observations, although I wouldn’t write it so violently now. I guess I really am in the Whitman tradition."
"I feel that after working a long time, I’ve really learned how to do what I do. I enjoy it. I don’t think there’s anything more satisfying than turning out a good stanza or a good piece of prose. And when you’re satisfied enough, you want to show it to other people. That’s called publication."
"Shapiro is back where he started half a century ago: on the outside, looking in. If the canon has changed drastically, Shapiro has not. At almost age eighty, he still heroically, if sometimes quixotically, wields his verbal weapons against real and imagined enemies, still using for his motto Thoreau's "If I have anything to regret, it is my good behavior.""
"Karl Shapiro's poems are fresh and young and rash and live; their hard clear outlines, their flat bold colors create a world like that of a knowing and skillful neoprimitive painting, without any of the confusion or profundity of atmosphere, of aerial perspective, but with notable visual and satiric force. The poet early perfected a style, derived from Auden but decidedly individual, which he has not developed in later life but has temporarily replaced with the clear Rilke-like rhetoric of his Adam and Eve poems, the frankly Whitmanesque convolutions of his latest work. His best poem — poems like "The Leg," "Waitress," "Scyros," "Going to School," "Cadillac" — have a real precision, a memorable exactness of realization, yet they plainly come out of life's raw hubbub, out of the disgraceful foundations, the exciting and disgraceful surfaces of existence."
"You've always been my favorite editor because you're not like an editor at all."
"I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro-a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. It was, "Poetry doesn't make Cadillacs.""
"Like Jarell, Shapiro was a poet who felt like "stating his opinion or expressing his pleasure or disdain for something that had occurred [or] which should not have occurred" … As editor of Poetry Shapiro was faithful to this approach. Instead of asking professional critics to review or write articles for Poetry, he mainly evaluate their peers. … On several occasions Shapiro had made it seem as if these literary rows just befell him, as if he were accidentally stuck in the middle of two opposing camps that each had an ax to grind. However, he was not quite that innocent."
"It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew/ is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father's story of his student years."
"Every theory of love, from Plato down, teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself."
"War has given applied psychology a tremendous impulse. This will, on the whole, do good, for psychology, which is the largest and last of the sciences, must not try to be too pure."
"The opinion is widely prevalent that even if the subjects are totally forgotten, a valuable mental discipline is acquired by the efforts made to master them. While the Conference admits that, considered in itself this discipline has a certain value, it feels that such a discipline is greatly inferior to that which may be gained by a different class of exercises, and bears the same relation to a really improving discipline that lifting exercises in an ill-ventilated room bear to games in the open air. The movements of a race horse afford a better model of improving exercise than those of the ox in a tread-mill."
"Is the Airship Possible? That depends, first of all, on whether we are to make the requisite scientific discoveries... the construction of an aerial vehicle ... which could carry even a single man from place-to-place at pleasure requires the discovery of some new metal or some new force."
"One of the most curious of these cases [geometrical paradoxers] was that of a student, I am not sure but a graduate, of the University of Virginia, who claimed that geometers were in error in assuming that a line had no thickness. He published a school geometry based on his views, which received the endorsement of a well-known New York school official and, on the basis of this, was actually endorsed, or came very near being endorsed, as a text-book hi the public schools of New York."
"I knew that flying machines were impossible; in engineering school I had studied Professor Simon Newcomb's well-known mathematical proof that the efforts of Professor Langley and others to build an aerodyne capable of carrying a man were doomed, useless, because scale theory proved that no such contraption large enough to carry a man could carry a heat-energy plant large enough to lift it off the ground — much less a passenger. That was science's final word on a folly and it put a stop to wasting public monies on a will-o'-the-wisp. Research and development money went into airships, where it belonged, with enormous success. However, in the past few days I had gained a new angle on the idea of "impossible". When a veritable flying machine showed up in our sky, I was not greatly surprised."
"Professor Fisher's The Purchasing Power of Money is dedicated to Simon Newcomb, from whom vid Professor Kemmerer the PT = MV formula ultimately derives. Newcomb was not a professional economist but a mathematician (Professor of Mathematics in the U.S. Navy and at Johns Hopkins). His Principles of Political Economy, published in 1886, is one of those original works which a fresh scientific mind, not perverted by having read too much of the orthodox stuff, is able to produce from time to time in a half -formed subject like economics."
"It is a matter of historical record that Newcomb, one of the most eminent American mathematicians of his day, published on the topic of four-dimensional space from 1877, and he spoke about it to the New York Mathematical Society in 1893. Four dimensions (and more) were important research topics in mathematics and physics."
"There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it. ...space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to these planes, each at right angle to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a Three-Dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four—if they could master the perspective of the thing. See?"
"In the late 19th century, Newcomb was one of America’s best known and probably one of its most powerful scientists. He had spent most of his career as a professor at the naval observatory in Washington, D. C. He had served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Science and as President of the Political Economy Club in the 1880s. He eventually received numerous awards for his most important astronomical research more accurately measuring the movements of the moon and the planets in our solar system. In the 1880s, Newcomb joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and his views regarding the competence of junior faculty were often communicated to President Daniel Gilman. This was especially the case for Peirce and Ely. Newcomb also confronted America’s most prominent theologians on the relationship between theology and science and of course evolution and Christianity. For the nation’s centennial, Newcomb also had offered his harsh appraisals of American science and political economy maintaining that they were way behind European science and British political economy. Newcomb also thwarted Peirce’s career progress on numerous occasions playing a pivotal role in his exclusion from academia after 1885."
"James R. Wible. "Economics, Christianity, and Creative Evolution: Peirce, Newcomb, and Ely and the Issues Surrounding the Creation of the American Economic Association in the 1880s," 2009."
"The materials collected in this volume are intended to acquaint the student with economic principles as they are manifested in the tangible facts of economic life. A few extracts of primarily theoretical character have been included to represent important aspects of contemporary or historic thought; but for the most part the selections are not so much authoritative formulations of economic laws as concrete case-material embodying such laws, or affording a background of information which the systematic treatises on economics can hardly give and which the teacher certainly cannot often assume that his students will possess."
"This newest, largest and best collection of illustrative documents and programs, tables, and charts, extracts from federal and state commission and departmental reports, selections from trade and commercial newspaper and journals, and experts from the masters, old and new, is clearly the most important book of the year for students and teachers of economics."
"At last a growing number of physicians, private citizens and even the Federal Trade Commission are beginning to re-examine these long standing and deeply ingrained beliefs in the virtue of cow milk. And even Richard Nixon and John Connally came to realize that cow milk may not be good for you. The fact is: the drinking of cow milk has been linked to iron-deficiency anemia in infants and children; it has been named as the cause of cramps and diarrhea in much of the world's population, and the cause of multiple forms of allergy as well; and the possibility has been raised that it may play a central role in the origins of atherosclerosis and heart attacks."
"In general, most animals are exclusively breast-fed until they have tripled their birth weight, which in human infants occurs around the age of one year. In no mammalian species, except for the human (and the domestic cat), is milk consumption continued after the weaning period. Calves thrive on cow milk. Cow milk is for calves."
"Organizations such as the American Heart Association have strongly urged that the consumption of milk and other dairy products be reduced by Americans of all ages-and for good reason. Diseases of the heart and major blood vessels will kill about one million Americans this year."
""But, doctor, what will happen to my teeth and bones if I stop drinking milk?" Nothing. Nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway."
"In 1974 the Federal Trade Commission finally began to catch up with the dairy industry. Specifically, the FTC issued a "proposed complaint" against the California Milk Producers Advisory Board and Cunningham and Walsh, its advertising agency. In the complaint they charged that the dairymen's campaign to stimulate milk sales constituted false, misleading, and deceptive advertising. The dairy industry was shocked. After all, what had they done other than to proclaim that "Everybody Needs Milk?" The public has heard that line for years. This time the FTC wasn't buying the slogan. They couldn't. Too much scientific evidence had been accumulated which indicated that people didn't need milk and, in fact, that it could be harmful to your health."
"Cow milk has no valid claim as the perfect food. As nutrition, it produces allergies in infants, diarrhea and cramps in the older child and adult, and may be a factor in the development of heart attacks and strokes. Perhaps when the public is educated as to the hazards of milk only calves will be left to drink the real thing. Only calves should drink the real thing."
"Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist."
"We’re going to have some very unpleasant circumstances. There are some people that are going to die in protesting construction of this pipeline. We have to understand that. ... Nevertheless, we have to be willing to enforce the law once it’s there … It’s going to take some fortitude to stand up."
"We have seen it other places, that equivalent of religious zeal leading to flouting of the law in a way that could lead to death … Inevitably, when you get that fanaticism, if you will, you’re going to have trouble. ... Are we collectively as a society willing to allow the fanatics to obstruct the general will of the population? That then turns out to be a real test of whether we actually do believe in the ."
"[G]un control advocates seem to be under the impression that governments can pass new felony legislation that will take guns off the streets without requiring more aggressive policing, without putting more people in prison..."
"Gun control and tough-on-crime politics are two sides of the same coin. If governments are serious about cracking down on illegal guns in a meaningful way, they will need to use all of the same tools that they used to crack down on crime from the 1970s onward—tough criminal penalties (i.e., long prison sentences for offenders) and aggressive policing..."
"[A]s Reasons A. Barton Hinkle pointed out, New York’s notorious stop-and-frisk policies, which left-wing mayor Bill DeBlasio led the charge against, was arguably one of the most effective gun control policies in the country."
"[A]ll the evidence suggests that stricter gun laws would fall disproportionately on the same people who have always bear the brunt of tough criminal justice policies."
"[S]ocially liberal gun control champions don’t see themselves as pushing policies that would abet racial profiling or worsen the problem of mass incarceration. They see themselves as going after their political enemies—socially conservative white men in red states."
"[F]ew intelligent observers are under any illusions that this type of symbolic half-measure on gun control would meaningfully cut into America’s gun violence statistics. Meaningfully reducing gun violence in a nation with 300 million guns would probably require the type of confiscatory gun regulations enacted in Australia and some European countries. And the mechanics of enacting such policies could well contradict the vision for police and prison reform that has been gaining momentum on the left and right alike over the past year."
"[T]errorism has rattled us, starting with 9/11 but continuing through lesser forms of murder and mayhem ever since—the kind perpetrated by radical Muslims via internet indoctrination (for example, Ft. Hood, Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, Orlando) and the more nativist kind perhaps more so (for example, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Dylann Roof, Stephen Paddock, and, just this past week, Cesar Sayoc and Robert Bowers). Terrorism does its damage not mainly through body counts but by undermining the social trust that keeps communities engaged, united, and optimistic. The bureaucratized paranoia we have allowed to develop as a consequence hasn’t helped in the least—“If you see something, say something” spoken a hundred million times a day across the country by our now ubiquitous automatonic ghosts. By essentially reminding people of the real prospect of mass murder several times a day, it’s been on balance counterproductive as well as very expensive."
"[B]roken families produce more insecure children; kids who feel emotionally betrayed by those who are supposed to love and protect them often grow into insecure adults, replicating insecurity by often failing to form secure loving bonds. Deep-seated insecurity is a host on which fear feeds, and so is the loneliness that is often the result of a love-deprived life. Unfortunately, American family life has been hurting now for some time, especially among lower socio-economic cohorts under growing economic pressure."
"[S]ince fear is ubiquitous, every civilization has devised ways to manage it. That has typically been accomplished in the context of religious culture. Dangers are easier to cope with for most people when they are seen as something other than completely random and meaningless, when they are integrated into shared narratives that make a certain kind of emotional sense. When traditional religious templates erode, as they have in most Western societies in recent times, the frameworks that control the psycho-social impact of fear erode with them. They have been replaced, in a manner of speaking, with the pseudo-religion of the therapeutic, whose obsession with absolute security has only served to make nearly everyone more anxious, not less."
"[F]earful societies—and American society obviously isn’t the only example—develop markets for fear abatement. The most effective way for political entrepreneurs to tap into such markets is to focus on what or, better, who to blame for what makes people afraid. The simpler the depiction of fear’s source the better for the would-be political hustler. No matter how varied and interactively complex the real sources of fear and insecurity may be, rattled people are easily manipulated by demagogues offering parsimonious, emotion-driven conflations—say, about “carnage” caused by immigrants."
"[W]e have become so beset with ambient fear in recent decades that Donald Trump’s rise to the White House would be inexplicable without it. Too many people, abetted by the media, focus on the man: That’s a mistake. The proper focus needs to be on what has happened to our culture that has allowed a man like that to become President—and what it may lead to next."
"[D]emocracy is not in imminent jeopardy but American liberal democracy—predicated on the rule of law, individual rights, and tolerance for dissent—does seem up for grabs in a way it has never been in my lifetime. The willful trashing of U.S. postwar grand strategy takes us anew into a world based not on a U.S.-led Western rules-based order, but on a ragged concert of great powers with zones of influence in which power-based relationships alone define relations between big and small nations. We’ve been there before and we’re still here to tell of it—but earlier epochs of balance-of-power realism did not proceed in a world with nuclear weapons."
"[S]hould we be afraid? Yes. But understand that what we think we fear may not exhaust its real sources."
"[F]ear is necessary, for without it we become passive victims of our own bewilderment. We can still work our way out of the mess we’re in, with fear as our fuel. But to do that we must understand and tame our fear, not let it drive us crazy—even despite events like Saturday’s murder of eleven Jewish worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. For many people, naturally enough, the difference can sometimes be a thin line."
"An initial first impression is that this (COVID-19) is significantly milder than SARS, so that's reassuring. On the other hand, it may be more transmissible than SARS, at least in the community setting."
"I have thought for a long time that the most likely virus that might cause a new pandemic would be a coronavirus. We don't yet know how contagious it (COVID-19) is. We know that it is being spread person to person, but we don't know to what extent."
"If we can protect kids (from COVID-19 pandemic) – one, it's good for them, but two, it's good for the population. If it does penetrate the pediatric population, that might amplify the outbreak."
"Faced with insoluble social, political, and economic crises that threatened the very existence of Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif sought to compensate by adopting a strict version of the Sharia as the country’s legal system.... By mid-September, Islamabad was arguing that Islamization offered the only chance of holding Pakistan together as it slid toward political and social collapse amid technical bankruptcy and increasing political assertiveness by the local Islamist parties. Relying on their powerful militias and allied Kashmiri terrorist organizations, the Islamist parties flexed political muscle Nawaz Sharif could no longer confront. By the end of the month the Pakistani government was hanging by a thread, and the crisis was exacerbated by economic disaster and a collapsing social order that brought the country to the verge of a civil war. The Islamist members of the army and ISI high command warned Nawaz Sharif that the only alternative to chaos was to implement “Talibanization”—the transformation of Pakistan from a formally secular pseudo-democracy into a declared extremist Islamic theocracy.... Sharif orchestrated a profound purge of the entire military and ISI high command, throwing out the Westernized elite and replacing them with Islamists who are ardent supporters of bellicosity toward India, active aid for the war by proxy in Kashmir, and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan and other Islamist jihads.... Washington cannot offer Islamabad anything that would be worth provoking a major confrontation with the Pakistani Islamists. Even if Sharif gave an order to apprehend bin Laden, his order would not be carried out by the Pakistani security services because they are riddled with, even actually controlled by, militant Islamists. For them bin Laden is a hero, not a villain. These Islamists are also the new army and ISI elite Sharif just empowered. The Pakistani security establishment knows that any cooperation with Washington will place it in a “state of war” with the local Islamist militias, the Arab “Afghans,” and the Kashmiri terrorist organizations they sponsor. With the Afghan Taliban providing safe haven to these groups, they can easily destabilize Pakistan and drag it into a fratricidal civil war the Islamists are sure to win.... Not only did Islamabad have advance knowledge of the impending strikes, but at the very least it warned the Taliban leadership—whom Islamabad created and is sponsoring—so that they could ensure that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their lieutenants were not harmed in the strike. According to Arab sources, the ISI even sent a senior official to Afghanistan to personally warn bin Laden about the impending U.S. strike."
"... Defense physics is generally ; it solves problems by applying other physicists' more basic work. Its result is usually not knowledge but technology. The adjective applied, when used by physicists, is not a compliment. Academic physics is pure research; its direction is determined by what academics are curious about and can get funding for. It is, of all the sciences, the most fundamental; its questions are about matter's basic nature and the forces that govern the known universe. Moreover, pure research is considered innocent, neither moral nor immoral. Applied research, whose technologies have potential for harm, comes accompanied by difficult moral decisions."
"The ’s first image looked like all hell. A month later, in late June 1990, the telescope's political shepherd, , found out what had gone wrong. He called some interested local astronomers—, Don Schneider, and particularly —and since astronomy in Princeton, New Jersey, usually involves food, he invited them to supper at a Route 206 strip-mall Chinese diner. He told them that NASA was about to announce that the telescope's perfect mirror had been ground to the perfectly wrong shape. Jim Gunn, who had designed and overseen the construction of the telescope's principal camera, had also seen the first image and had thought the problem might be fixed. But no, now Bahcall was telling him no, it was the mirror's shape, the telescope couldn't focus, the problem was irrevocable. … NASA, of course, pulled off an ingenious fix, installed by astronauts dangling improbably over the telescope up in space."
"In the end, I learned two things about the long-term effects of . One is that a child's death is disorienting. The human mind is wired to find patterns and attach meanings, to associate things that are alike, to generalize from one example to another, in short, to make sense of things. Your mind could no more consciously stop doing this than your heart could consciously stop beating. But children's deaths make no sense, have no precedents, are part of no pattern; their deaths are unnatural and wrong. So parents fight their wiring, change their perspectives, and adjust to a reality that makes little sense. The other thing I learned is that letting go of a child is impossible. ..."
"Following the launch of NASA's planet-finding in 2009, the number of possible s quickly multiplied into the thousands — enough to give astronomers their first meaningful statistics on other planetary systems, and to undermine the standard theory for good. Not only were there lots of exoplanet systems bearing no resemblance to ours, but the most commonly observed type of planet — a 'super-Earth' that falls between the sizes of our world and Neptune, which is four times bigger — does not even exist in our Solar System. Using our planetary family as a model, says astronomer of the , “has led to no success in extrapolating what's out there”."
"The fundamental necessity of space security is knowing where every satellite is and how it is behaving. ’s June 2020 doctrine calls this “space domain awareness.” Officially that awareness comes via a global network of sensors on satellites and telescopes on the ground that covers all orbits all the time and tracks everything bigger than 10 centimeters: 3,200 live satellites, as well as 24,000 nonfunctioning “zombies” and pieces of space debris that, in a collision with a satellite at 35,400 kilometers an hour, would cause a catastrophic breakup. The information is sent to Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron at the Combined Space Operations Center at in California. Data on the secret satellites are set aside, and the rest go into a public, free, online catalog called Space-Track, from which “conjunction notifications” are issued when two satellites look like they might get too close."
"Of the 100 or so scientists who have served on , Finkbeiner has interviewed 36. A few spoke anonymously, and others refused to talk at all. That reticence is not surprising, given that as much as three-quarters of Jason's work has consisted of classified military projects, some of them morally questionable. Like Errol Morris's film "The Fog of War," in which Robert McNamara painfully revisits Vietnam, Finkbeiner's book shows how even the smartest people with the noblest intentions can end up committing shameful acts."
"Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. He is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects."
"Kant's idealism can be understood as limiting empirical reality to that with which we can have acquaintance. He thinks that this empirical reality is mind-dependent in the sense that it is not experience-transcendent, rather than holding that it exists literally in our minds. Reading intuition in this way enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there. This shows that reading a central part of his argument in the Transcendental Deduction as epistemological is compatible with a metaphysical, idealist reading of transcendental idealism."
"My aim in this chapter is to characterize the change of heart that plays a role in forgiveness—in giving up warranted blaming reactive attitudes. I present this in the context of developing a Kantian account of what forgiveness is and why we need it, drawing on his moral psychology to characterize the relevant change of heart."
"I appeal in particular to Kant’s account of human frailty and its relation to his account of human evil. I argue that it is frail and flawed agents who lack an entirely fixed and stable character for whom forgiveness is a live option and a need. For such agents, there may be space to interpret us in the light of better willing than our wrongdoing indicates."
"I shall adopt the convention by which particular propositions are taken as implying the existence of their subjects, and universal propositions as not implying the existence of their subjects. would infer that the two propositions The sea-serpent is not found in the water, The sea-serpent is not found out of the water, are contradictory; bur , , and would infer that the sea-serpent does not exist. With this convention, contradiction can never exist between universal propositions nor between particular propositions taken by themselves. A universal proportion can be contradicted only by a particular proposition, and a particular only by a universal. The above premises are inconsistent with The sea-serpent has (at least once) has been found. With this convention, hypothetical and categorical propositions receive the same formal treatment. If a, then b = all a is b = a implies b. (Peirce.)"
"The whole field of Deductive Logic, even when thought of merely in the terms of common language, has acquired, for the student of , a symmetry and a completeness and a simplicity which it is, apparently, far from possessing in the minds of its usual exponents. The natural repugnance which the ordinary logician felt, at first, to seeing processes of deductive reasoning made the subject of a great development by a purely mechanical process, has in great part passed away; it would have been hard for it to survive the eloquent persuasiveness of 's Symbolic Logic. It seems, therefore, to be time for the simplified ways of looking at things which prevail in Symbolic Logic to begin to sink into the elementary expositions of the subject."
"What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions."
"… was of the brooding type. He sat when he addressed his handful of students (who turned out afterwards, however, to be a not unimportant handful) and he had all the air, as has been noted by , of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well. He got his effect not by anything that could be called an inspiring personality, in the usual sense of the term, but rather by creating the impression that we had before us a profound, original, dispassionate and impassioned seeker of truth. No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be the “science of unclear thinking.”"
"In their attempts to get around these artificial barriers and inconsistencies, early women scientists developed a great many strategies. These tended to be of two sorts. One was the idealistic, liberal-to-radical, and often confrontational strategy of demanding that society reject all stereotypes and work for the feminist goal of full equality. This involved writing angry letters and otherwise documenting the "unfairness" of the unequal opportunities open to men and women. The most prominent and successful strategist of this school was Christine Ladd-Franklin, a graduate of the 1860s, would-be physicist turned mathematician, psychologist, and logician, who for fifty years, worked shrewdly and tirelessly for educated women. Her greatest triumph was in opening graduate schools to women in the 1890s, and thus allowing women to earn the same doctorates as men."
"Historical capitalism is not a system in which state power is abolished or in which states never interfere with market forces. Rather it is a system in which the most successful competitors use state power to facilitate capitalist accumulation. This does not mean that taxation and tribute are abolished, but rather that they are utilized to support the search for profit-making opportunities in the world market."
"National societies (both their states and their nations) have emerged over the last few centuries to become the strongest socially constructed identities and organizations in the modern world, but they have never been whole systems."
"Thirty years ago, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein pointed out that revolutionaries rarely attain their demands immediately. Rather what happens is that ‘enlightened conservatives’ implement the demands of the most recent previous world revolution in order to cool out the challenges of a current world revolution. This is the way in which world revolutions produce the evolution of global governance"
"A resistance to formal organization is common among the Left, as we have seen not only in the but also in phenomena like Occupy and the Arab Spring. Activists sought to intentionally avoid the inherent conservatism of institutions, which can often fight to maintain their own self-interest and internal power structure. But the avoidance of organization hamstrings any movement’s ability to achieve its own goals."
"...These are exciting times. Another World Revolution is happening. The Global Right and the Global Left are once again contending with each other and with centrist liberalism. It is different this time around, but imagination and perseverance will be rewarded, as they were in the World Revolution of 1917. As my old friend often said, a luta continua. (2020)"
"...Even in the most intimate forms of writing, people still followed established conventions and wrote what they felt was expected of them. They could lie to their friends and family, even to themselves."
"Ideas do not have force outside specific social contexts. The same ideas may have enormous force in one context and look bizarre or repulsive in another."
"Science is the art of understanding nature."