155 quotes found
"Where fashion in clothes, bodily adornment, and music are concerned, it is the underclass that increasingly sets the pace. Never before has there been so much downward cultural aspiration."
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
"Childhood in large parts of modern Britain, at any rate, has been replaced by premature adulthood, or rather adolescence. Children grow up very fast but not very far. That is why it is possible for 14 year olds now to establish friendships with 26 year olds - because they know by the age of 14 all they are ever going to know."
"Optimism is the parent of despair, while pessimism allows the mind to accustom itself to the inevitable disappointments of human existence by degrees, just as some drugs induce a state of tolerance. Pessimists, moreover, have the better sense of humour, for they have a livelier apprehension of pretension and absurdity. In a meritocracy, furthermore, those who fail must either indulge in elaborate mental contortions to disguise reality from themselves or sink into a deep melancholy."
"Multiculturalism as an official doctrine, complete with enforcing bureaucracies, undermines the rule of law because it seeks to divide people, formalise their cultural differences and enclose them in moral and intellectual ghettoes. As a result, as Bhiku Parekh puts it, ‘The idea of national culture makes little sense.’ But the rule of law requires a common cultural understanding, not merely the means of repression to enforce a legal code. Once that basic cultural understanding is lost, all that remains is repression, effective or ineffective as the case may be, and experienced by many as alien and unjust."
"Compassionate fellow-feeling ... can soon become self-indulgent and lead to spiritual pride. It imparts an inner glow, like a shot of whiskey on a cold day, but like whisky it can prevent the clear-headedness which we need at least as much as we need warmth of heart."
"Nothing is easier - or more gratifying - than to apologise for what your ancestors, enemies or political opponents have done or omitted to do. We get the kudos for having apologised, they get the blame for what we apologise for."
"Humor, fearlessness, seriousness, and honesty: the qualities that are hated with an equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies that are contending for tenure in the humanities departments of our universities."
"When the Berlin Wall was dismantled I, like many other naive observers, supposed that the age of ideology was at an end. On the contrary, ideology proliferated, blossomed and balkanised; we underestimated people’s need, quasi-religious in nature, for an all-encompassing cause."
"Just imagine what the pattern of taking meals I have described actually means. The child who is subjected to it learns that, in the matter of when and how and what to eat, his appetite and opportunity are the only things he has to consult. Meals for him are not social occasions but nasty, solitary, British and short (and, I might add, frequent). He does not learn that, for the sake of the convenience or wishes of others, he sometimes has to refrain from eating or even to eat when he is not fully hungry. He does not learn to wait till others are served, or to share what food is on the table. He does not learn how to converse. These are very elementary social requirements that he does not acquire."
"Education is not a shield against stupidity, much less against brutality. Indeed, one might almost define an intellectual as someone who can witness a massacre and see a principle."
"With carefully nourished resentment, a man can go through his life blaming someone or something else for his failures. This enables him to be a failure and to feel morally superior to the world at the same time."
"It is surely almost self-evident that the strongest political emotions are negative: for example, the rich are hated much more than the poor are loved."
"The absurdity of modern ideological enthusiasms is evident, but while those who promote them make them the focus of their existence and the whole meaning of their lives, better-balanced people try to get on with their lives as normal. No one wants to spend his life arguing, let alone fighting, against sheer idiocy, and thus, sheer idiocy wins the day."
"I am hesitant to write in a satirical vein because, as I and others have remarked, satire is prophecy. A number of current policies would have been regarded as satirical exaggeration only a few years ago. Who would have thought, say a decade ago, that a serious, or at any rate a prominent and powerful female politician (I refer here to the First Minister of Scotland), would argue that a man convicted of rape was actually, that is to say in reality, in fact, in every sense, a woman? Such propositions now elicit only irritation, not laughter; and irritation declines before long to resignation. Absurdity is first discussed, then adopted by a vanguard of intellectuals in search of a cause, and finally becomes an orthodoxy that it is socially unacceptable to question."
"What is the point of restraint and circumspection, if such stream-of-consciousness vulgarity can win not merely wealth and fame but complete social acceptance?"
"There is no such thing, wrote Oscar Wilde, as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. Presumably, then, Mein Kampf would have been all right had it been better written."
"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."
"Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all—only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment."
"There is nothing an addict likes more, or that serves as better pretext for continuing his present way of life, than to place the weight of responsibility for his situation somewhere other than on his own decisions."
"I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners."
"In the modern view, unbridled personal freedom is the only good to be pursued; any obstacle to it is a problem to be overcome."
"Mere absurdity has never prevented the triumph of bad ideas, if they accord with easily aroused fantasies of an existence freed of human limitations."
"Having been issued the false prospectus of happiness through unlimited sex, modern man concludes, when he is not happy with his life, that his sex has not been unlimited enough. If welfare does not eliminate squalor, we need more welfare; if sex does not bring happiness, we need more sex."
"The intellectual's struggle to deny the obvious is never more desperate than when reality is unpleasant and at variance with his preconceptions and when full acknowledgment of it would undermine the foundations of his intellectual worldview."
"Never has so much indifference masqueraded as so much compassion; never has there been such willful blindness. The once pragmatic English have become a nation of sleepwalkers."
"It seems that when an impending catastrophe will affect them personally, in their very flesh and blood, intellectuals start to think more clearly about the legal and institutional prerequisites of a free society."
"The victory over cruelty is never final, but, like the maintenance of freedom, requires eternal vigilance."
"Even [Marx], whose information about people came mainly from books, must have known that the Manifesto’s depiction of the relations between men and women was grossly distorted. His rage was therefore—as is so much modern rage—entirely synthetic, perhaps an attempt to assume a generosity of spirit, or love of mankind, that he knew he did not have but felt he ought to have"
"Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result."
"Orwell's 1984 refers more directly to contemporary events than does Huxley's book: the narrative takes place in the near rather than the distant future and obviously sets its sights on Stalinism. When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning."
"I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the Great People's Study House—all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata—when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, "Do you speak English?" An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, "Down with Big Brother!" "Yes," I replied. "I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life." It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself."
"Civilization is the sum total of all those activities that allow men to transcend mere biological existence and reach for a richer mental, aesthetic, material, and spiritual life."
"Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it."
"Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one’s own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience."
"For the sake of democracy, vigorous, civilized debate must replace the law of silence that political correctness has imposed."
"Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all."
"The real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?”"
"It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident."
"Political abstractions can disguise or change the meaning of the most elementary realities."
"It is, of course, a common prejudice that censorship is bad for art and therefore always unjustified: though, if this were so, mankind would have little in the way of an artistic heritage and we should now be living in an artistic golden age."
"It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilized—that men become fully human."
"When a population feels alienated from the legal system under which it lives, because that system fails to protect it from real dangers while lending succor and encouragement to every possible kind of wrongdoing, the population may well lose faith in the very idea of law. That is how civilization unravels."
"To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to sudden gusts of kitschy sentimentality followed by vehement outrage, encouraged by the cheap and cynical sensationalism of its press. Spasms of self-righteousness are its substitute for the moral life."
"In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never."
"In Britain, journalists often view comparisons with our society going back two, three, or seven centuries as more relevant than comparisons going back two, three, or seven decades. Drunkenness centuries ago is more illuminating than comparative sobriety 30 years ago. The distant past, selectively mined for evidence that justifies our current conduct, becomes more important than living memory."
"For intellectuals, everyone’s mind is closed but their own."
"Unilateral tolerance in a world of intolerance is like unilateral disarmament in a world of armed camps: it regards hope as a better basis for policy than reality."
"The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent."
"In the welfare state, experience teaches nothing."
"Frivolity without gaiety and earnestness without seriousness—a most unattractive combination."
"The refusal of free inquiry derives from an awareness of the fragility of the basis of religious faith; and since certainty is psychologically preferable to truth, the former often being willfully mistaken for the latter, anything that threatens certainty is anathematized with fury."
"Experience rarely teaches its lessons directly but instead requires interpretation through the filter of preconceived theories, prejudices, and desires. Where these are invincible, facts are weak things."
"If all our political and intellectual elite offers by way of a national culture is “pop music, gambling, fashionable clothes or television,” then we can neither mount a convincing intellectual defense against our enemies, nor hope to integrate intelligent, inquiring, and unfulfilled Muslim youths—young men principally, of course—to our way of life."
"We are like creatures so dazzled with our own technological prowess that we no longer think it necessary to consider the obvious."
"Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against."
"When the cold war ended, I thought, as no doubt did many others, that the age of ideology was over. Again like many others, I underestimated man’s need for transcendence, which, in the absence of religion or high culture, he is most likely to find in a political or social cause."
"The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men’s souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction."
"Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy."
"It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition."
"There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy."
"The tattoo has a profound meaning: the superficiality of modern man’s existence."
"What youth considers liberation, maturity considers tasteless excess."
"There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic."
"To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute."
"Whereas fortitude was once regarded as a virtue, it has come to be regarded as a kind of reprehensible and deliberate obtuseness, to be utterly condemned as treason to the self (there is no fury like a non-judgmentalist scorned)."
"If a lack of money had prevented people from improving their lot, then mankind would still be living in the caves: unless you believe that investment capital first arrived from outer space."
"Modernity is the most transient of qualities."
"It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised."
"Truth is not the first casualty of war alone: it is the first casualty of populism."
"Loose language suggests loose thought."
"If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not."
"Children in school are not students, they are pupils. It is typical of certain kinds of politicians that they should regard children as adults, the better subsequently, and consequently, to regard adults as children."
"In the British public service nothing succeeds like failure: indeed, failure is success, if looked on in the right way, namely as something requiring yet further intervention in people's lives to amend."
"In a corporate state, all attempts to reduce bureaucracy increase it."
"Equality can only be measured by outcome: and this means the imposition of racial quotas. The job of the Senior Executive is therefore to be a senior racist."
"Where tax is solidarity, the national sport is tax evasion."
"Henceforth, virtue was not the exercise of discipline, self-control or benevolence for the sake of others, but the expression of the right opinions of the moment."
"It is strange, is it not, how the more strenuously we deny the importance of race in human affairs, the more obsessed with it and the touchier on the subject we grow."
"The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty."
"The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free."
"It is easy to be lenient at other people's expense, and call it generosity of mind."
"Blanket compassion will shift the distribution decisively towards the manipulative end of the spectrum, and may paradoxically decrease the compassion with which the genuinely despairing are treated: for they are apt to get lost in the great mass of pseudo-distress and manipulation, and often their conduct draws less attention precisely because it is less attention-seeking."
"Resentment is one of the few emotions that never lets you down, but it’s useless. In fact, it’s worse than useless, it’s harmful, and we all suffer from it at some time in our lives."
"The main difference between working in an NHS hospital in Britain and a prison is that prison is much safer."
"<14:06> ...Of course I made it quite clear to the women that I thought that the way that they had been abused was terrible and completely unjustifiable. However, I thought that it was very important that they should understand their own complicity in it; so that, for example, they understood that the way they chose men, and their refusal to see signs (which they were capable of seeing) resulted in their misery… <14:40> To give you a concrete example, I would say to them, ‘This man of yours, who’s very nasty to you, and drags you across the floor, and puts your head through the window, and sometimes even hangs you out of the window by your ankles: How long do you think it would take me to realise he was no good, as he came through the door? Would it take me a second, or half a second, or an eighth of a second, or would I not notice that there was anything wrong with him at all?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, an eighth of a second, you’d know immediately.’ And I would say to them, ‘Well, if you know that I would know immediately, then you knew immediately as well.’ It’s a logical consequence, really. And they would accept that. ‘And yet, you chose to associate with him, knowing full well that he was no good; and I tell you this, because it’s very necessary you should understand your own part in the predicament you now find yourself in, because if you don’t understand it, or don’t think about it, you’re just going to repeat it.’ which is of course, a very, very common pattern."
"Over and over again, medical writers liken withdrawal [from heroin], at worst, to a dose of flu. … Let me ask the reader this: if you were given a choice between suffering a bout of flu in the above sense, or avoiding it by robbing someone in the street or breaking into a house and stealing its contents, which would you choose?"
"There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue."
"His greatest fear, or nightmare, is not to be thought hip or cool, and if to avoid that terrible fate it means that he has to glamorize evil--well, so be it."
"If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion."
"There is nothing an official hates more than a person who makes up his own mind."
"Wisdom and good governance require more than the consistent application of abstract principles."
"The withdrawal symptoms from opiates are not severe and never dangerous, though of course they do exist. Insofar as they are genuinely feared, there has been a campaign of exaggeration about them for nearly 200 years."
"People who are given opiates after operations — sometimes for days — do not become addicts in the sense that I’m talking about. Moreover, it’s been shown that heroin addicts have to make considerable efforts — in other words to be determined — to become addicts, and addicted; and on average it takes them about a year or so. In other words, heroin does not hook them, they hook heroin. And this, I think should suggest, is a typical example of the way that when we think about social problems, or the way many of us think about social problems, we ascribe agency not to agents but to inanimate objects and substances, and forces."
"And the fact is that millions of opiates addicts having given up their habit without medical assistance."
"Incidentally, many thousands of American servicemen addicted themselves to heroin in Vietnam, but two years after their repatriation their rate of addiction was no greater than that of draftees who were to go to Vietnam, but never did go because the war had ended."
"Addicts, to this day, claim that they are they are the only people qualified to speak of the seriousness of withdrawal effects; as if only people with cerebral malaria or bowel cancer could speak of their seriousness."
"I’m not actually against, for example, people going into rehabilitation, provided it is understood that this is not really a medical procedure. Often what happens is that people who are addicted to a substance — alcohol or opiates — have comprehensively messed up their lives, and since life is biography and not just a series of unconnected moments, it may be that they require some assistance in getting their lives together. But I don’t regard that as really a medical procedure."
"During the last few years it has become apparent that the concept of "machine" must be very greatly extended if it is to include the most modern developments. Especially is this true if we are studying the brain and attempting to identify the type of mechanism that is responsible for the brain’s outstanding powers of thought and action. It has become apparent that when we used to doubt whether the brain could be a machine, our doubts were due chiefly to the fact that by ‘‘machine’’ we understood some mechanism of very simple type. Familiar with the bicycle and the typewriter, we were in great danger of taking them as the type of all machines. The last decade, however, has corrected this error. It has taught us how restricted our outlook used to be; for it developed mechanisms that far transcended the utmost that had been thought possible, and taught us that ‘‘mechanism’’ was still far from exhausted in its possibilities. Today we know only that the possibilities extend beyond our farthest vision."
"The invasion of psychology by cybernetics is making us realize that the ordinary concepts of psychology must be reformulated in the language of physics if a physical explanation of the ordinary psychological phenomena is to become possible. Some psychological concepts can be re-formulated more or less easily, but others are much more difficult, and the investigator must have a deep insight if the physical reality behind the psychological phenomena is to be perceived"
"If intellectual power is to be developed, we must somehow construct amplifiers for intelligence — devices that, supplied with a little intelligence, will emit a lot."
"Two main lines are readily distinguished. One already well developed in the hands of von Bertalanffy and his co-workers, takes the world as we find it, examines the various systems that occur in it - zoological, physiological, and so on - and then draws up statements about the regularities that have been observed to hold. This method is essentially empirical. The second method is to start at the other end. Instead of studying first one system, then a second, then a third, and so on, it goes to the other extreme, considers the set of all conceivable systems and then reduces the set to a more reasonable size. This is the method I have recently followed."
"Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments."
"Every stable system has the property that if displaced from a state of equilibrium and released, the subsequent movement is so matched to the initial displacement that the system is brought back to the state of equilibrium. A variety of disturbances will therefore evoke a variety of matched reactions."
"The primary fact is that all isolated state-determined dynamic systems are selective: from whatever state they have initially, they go towards states of equilibrium. These states of equilibrium are always characterised, in their relation to the change-inducing laws of the system, by being exceptionally resistant."
"Many workers in the biological sciences — physiologists, psychologists, sociologists — are interested in cybernetics and would like to apply its methods and techniques to their own specialty. Many have, however, been prevented from taking up the subject by an impression that its use must be preceded by a long study of electronics and advanced pure mathematics; for they have formed the impression that cybernetics and these subjects are inseparable. The author is convinced, however, that this impression is false. The basic ideas of cybernetics can be treated without reference to electronics, and they are fundamentally simple; so although advanced techniques may be necessary for advanced applications, a great deal can be done, especially in the biological sciences, by the use of quite simple techniques, provided they are used with a clear and deep understanding of the principles involved. It is the author’s belief that if the subject is founded in the common-place and well understood, and is then built up carefully, step by step, there is no reason why the worker with only elementary mathematical knowledge should not achieve a complete understanding of its basic principles. With such an understanding he will then be able to see exactly what further techniques he will have to learn if he is to proceed further; and, what is particularly useful, he will be able to see what techniques he can safely ignore as being irrelevant to his purpose."
"Cybernetics was defined by Wiener as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine” — in a word, as the art of steermanship, and it is to this aspect that the book will be addressed. Co-ordination, regulation and control will be its themes, for these are of the greatest biological and practical interest. We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, angle... The new point of view should be clearly understood, for any unconscious vacillation between the old and the new is apt to lead to confusion."
"Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask “what is this thing?” but “what does it do?”... It is thus essentially functional and behaviouristic. Cybernetics deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. The materiality is irrelevant... The truths of cybernetics are not conditional on their being derived from some other branch of science. Cybernetics has its own foundations."
"Cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others... [There are] two peculiar scientific virtues of cybernetics that are worth explicit mention. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system... The second peculiar virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in the biological world!"
"The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of "difference", either that two things are recognisably different or that one thing has changed with time. Its range of application need not be described now, for the subsequent chapters will illustrate the range abundantly. All the changes that may occur with time are naturally included, for when plants grow and planets age and machines move some change from one state to another is implicit. So our first task will be to develop this concept of "change", not only making it more precise but making it richer, converting it to a form that experience has shown to be necessary if significant developments are to be made."
"By a state of a system is meant any well-defined condition or property that can be recognised if it occurs again. Every system will naturally have many possible states."
"[T]he concept of “”, so simple and natural in certain elementary cases, becomes artificial and of little use when the interconnexions between the parts become more complex. When there are only two parts joined so that each affects the other, the properties of the feedback give important and useful information about the properties of the whole. But when the parts rise to even as few as four, if every one affects the other three, then twenty circuits can be traced through them; and knowing the properties of all the twenty circuits does not give complete information about the system. Such complex systems cannot be treated as an interlaced set of more or less independent feedback circuits, but only as a whole. For understanding the general principles of dynamic systems, therefore, the concept of feedback is inadequate in itself. What is important is that complex systems, richly cross-connected internally, have complex behaviours, and that these behaviours can be goal-seeking in complex patterns."
"As shorthand, when the phenomena are suitably simple, words such as equilibrium and stability are of great value and convenience. Nevertheless, it should be always borne in mind that they are mere shorthand, and that the phenomena will not always have the simplicity that these words presuppose."
"There comes a stage, however, as the system becomes larger and larger, when the reception of all the information is impossible by reason of its sheer bulk. Either the recording channels cannot carry all the information, or the observer, presented with it all, is overwhelmed. When this occurs, what is he to do? The answer is clear: he must give up any ambition to know the whole system. His aim must be to achieve a partial knowledge that, though partial over the whole, is none the less complete within itself, and is sufficient for his ultimate practical purpose"
"The fundamental questions in regulation and control can be answered only when we are able to consider the broader set of what it might do, when “might” is given some exact specification."
"[Constraint] is a relation between two sets, and occurs when the variety that exists under one condition is less than the variety that exists under another."
"When a constraint exists advantage can usually be taken of it."
"Further, as every law of nature implies the existence of an invariant, it follows that every law of nature is a constraint."
"The concept of "variety" [is] inseparable from that of "information.""
"The most basic facts in biology are that this earth is now two thousand million years old, and that the biologist studies mostly that which exists today."
"Variety can destroy variety."
"Its importance is that if R[egulator] is fixed in its channel capacity, the law places an absolute limit to the amount of regulation (or control) that can be achieved by R, no matter how R is re-arranged internally, or how great the opportunity in T. Thus the ecologist, if his capacity as a channel is unchangeable, may be able at best only to achieve a fraction of what he would like to do. This fraction may be disposed in various ways —he may decide to control outbreaks rather than extensions, or virus infections rather than bacillary — but the quantity of control that he can exert is still bounded. So too the economist may have to decide to what aspect he shall devote his powers, and the psychotherapist may have to decide what symptoms shall be neglected and what controlled."
"Throughout, we shall be exemplifying the thesis of D. M. MacKay: that quantity of information, as measured here, always corresponds to some quantity, i.e. intensity, of selection, either actual or imaginable"
"Duration of selection. At this point a word should be said about how long a given act of selection may take, for when actual cases are examined, the time taken may, at first estimate, seem too long for any practical achievement. The question becomes specially important when the regulator is to be developed for regulation of a very large system. Approximate calculation of the amount of selection likely to be necessary may suggest that it will take a time far surpassing the cosmological; and one may jump to the conclusion that the time taken in actually achieving the selection would have to be equally long. This is far from being the case, however."
"General systems theory is considered as a formal theory (Mesarovic, Wymore), a methodology (Ashby, Klir), a way of thinking (Bertalanffy, Churchman), a way of looking at the world (Weinberg), a search for an optimal simplification (Ashby, Weinberg), didactic method (Boulding, Klir, Weinberg), metalanguage (Logren), and profession (Klir)."
"W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models."
"The brilliant British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mathematician Ross Ashby was one of the pioneers in early and mid-phase cybernetics and thereby one of the leading progenitors of modern complexity theory. Not one to take either commonly used terms or popular notions for granted, Ashby probed deeply into the meaning of supposedly self-organizing systems. At the time of the following article, he had been working on a mathematical formalism of his homeostat, a hypothetical machine established on an axiomatic, set theoretical foundation that was supposed to offer a sufficient description of a living organism's learning and adaptive intelligence. Ashby's homeostat had a small number of essential variables serving to maintain its operation over a wide range of environmental conditions so that if the latter changed and thereby shifted the variables beyond the range where the homeostat could safely function, a new 'higher' level of the machine was activated in order to randomly reset the lower level's internal connections or organization... Like the role of random mutations during evolution, if the new range set at random proved functional, the homeostat survived, otherwise it expired..."
"[A] famous photograph... showing McCulloch (1898–1969) and Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) with British Cyberneticians Ross Ashby (1903–1972) and Grey Walter (1910–1977), first appeared in de Latil (1953) with the caption "The four pioneers of Cybernetics get together in Paris", and encapsulates a view of the development of cybernetics that has slowly become more accepted: that there were important British contributions from the outset."
"What is the use of ultra-stable systems which have the property that if you subject them to some influence, they change to an equilibrium state but don't even remember where they were? Warren McCulloch was a great fan of Ashby, and so finally I asked him, "Well, why do you think this is so important?" And he said, "Because he explains it so clearly." I went back and read Design for a Brain again and couldn't but agree with McCulloch that Ashby had managed to explain something more clearly than everyone else put together. The fact that the systems didn't do anything was a little bit disappointing, but that was as nothing compared to the clarity. So, if you want to explain something, you should read Design for a Brain and use that as a model for your next paper."
"Twenty-six years ago knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on the subject in any language, in the seven centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years of correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they were dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernoy revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. She expressed it in writing more than a year before publication of Duvornoy's book."
"From this patient, and from others like her, I have learnt that seemingly epileptic reactions in adolescents can indicate the latter's capacity to step out of time. In such cases the apparent epileptic tendency disappears as the patient matures."
"The pain was maddening. You should pray to God when you're dying, if you can pray when you're in agony. In my dream I didn't pray to God, I thought of Roger and how dearly I loved him. The pain of those wicked flames was not half so bad as the pain I felt when I knew he was dead. I felt suddenly glad to be dying. I didn't know when you were burnt to death you'd bleed. I thought the blood would all dry up in the terrible heat. But I was bleeding heavily. The blood was dripping and hissing in the flames. I wished I had enough blood to put the flames out. The worst part was my eyes. I hate the thought of gong blind. It's bad enough when I'm awake but in dreams you can't shake the thoughts away. They remain. In this dream I was going blind. I tried to close my eyelids but I couldn't. They must have been burnt off, and now those flames were going to pluck my eyes out with their evil fingers. I didn't want to go blind. The flames weren't so cruel after all. They began to feel cold. Icy cold. It occurred to me that I wasn't burning to death but freezing to death."
"She continued, 'Theirs was a religion of freedom and joy and not pervaded by fanatical and morbid asceticism as some people would have us believe.' Here again I feel she is absolutely right. The critics of Catharism fail to distinguish between the Parfait and the ordinary croyant. The latter were not required to fast and mortify the flesh any more than the average Hindu or Roman Catholic, even though both Hindu and Catholic priests may regularly practise asceticism as well as meditation and other such disciplines."
"Though I cannot claim to be an authority on the subject, I myself have been horrified at the way in which reputable historians have accepted as evidence isolated statements by one peasant extracted under interrogation and torture."
"In other words, gurus generalize from their own experience. Some gurus are inclined to believe that all humanity should accept their vision: others allege that, when the last trump sounds, their own followers will be saved, whilst the majority of mankind will remain unredeemed. This apparently arrogant assumption is closely connected with certain features of personality displayed by a variety of gurus."
"We must consider the possibility that the conviction expressed by gurus is less absolute than it appears in that their apparent confidence need boosting by the response of followers. As we shall see, some gurus avoid the stigma of being labelled insane or ever of being confined in a mental hospital because they have acquired a group of disciples who accept them as prophets rather than perceiving them as deluded."
"Constructing or adopting a belief system in which one is either God's prophet or God himself inflates the ego to monstrous proportions. Koresh was more deeply concerned with religion, Jim Jones with racial equality and an egalitarian society. But both compensated for isolation and lack of love in childhood by becoming infatuated with power, and both ended up with delusions of their own divinity."
"Gurdjieff then suddenly announced that he was going to Tuapse, on the Black Sea. The dutiful de Hartmanns followed. Their account of an exhausting nocturnal walk forced on them by Gurdjieff in spite of the fact that they were unsuitably clad and also dead tired is a striking example of the autocratic and unreasonable demands which Gurdjieff made on his followers which they nevertheless slavishly obeyed. Olga de Hartmann's feet were so swollen and bleeding that she could not put on her shoes and had to walk barefoot. Thomas de Hartmann had missed a night's sleep because he had been ordered to stay on guard. Their limbs ached and they were both exhausted; but they went on nevertheless."
"Gurdjieff was a dictator. He had the capacity so completely to humiliate his disciples that grown men would burst into tears. He might then show the victim special favour. He demanded unques tioning obedience to his arbitrary commands. For example, he once suddenly announced that none of his followers might speak to each other within the Institute. All communication must be by means of the special physical movements he had taught them. Gurdjieff sometimes imposed fasting for periods up to a week without any lessening of the work load. His authority was such that his followers convinced themselves that these orders were for their own good. Those less infatuated are likely to think that, like other gurus, Gurdjieff enjoyed the exercise of power its own sake."
"Reading his discourses made me realize that Rajneesh was a sad loss. He had an extraordinary range of knowledge and a vision of how life should be lived, but he proved incapable of following his own precepts."
"In 20th-century England, an individual announcing that he was the son of God and would return after death in glory would probably attract psychiatric attention; but earlier generations might have regarded such claims as unsurprising."
"Few subsequent gurus seem to have matched the simplicity and directness of Jesus′s message; but it must be remembered that we have very little information. If the world had possessed a detailed biographical account of Jesus, an authentic picture of what he was like as a man, it is quite possible that Christianity would not have been estabished as a world religion."
"In the ebb and flow of battle there are usually only brief flashes of bravery before the brave become the dead."
"I bring everything I know to whatever I write, and I believe the same of other writers. A person’s complete life experience forms the basis of authorial voice, in my opinion. To hold back any part makes a narrative feel contrived."
"When it comes to bodies, there is violence done every day. I did not think of body horror as a sub-genre when writing it, but I think the body is a source of great anxiety to each of us. So you shave (legs, armpits, or chin), taking a blade to yourself; perhaps you exercise, causing yourself pain; perhaps you fast or diet, denying yourself; perhaps your job means you have to stay awake. If you think about it, life itself consists of low-levels of body horror all the time. To write fiction, we just exaggerate some of what happens naturally…"
"If you want pure science, crack open a textbook or buy a journal. Fiction is about people. To foreground people as opposed to science does not weaken the genre, it opens it up. Insisting on one incarnation of a phenomenon is antiscientific. Science observes phenomena and incorporates new manifestations into the corpus. “Real” science fiction reminds me of certain academics who are ossified in their little knowledge fiefdoms. The human factor is messy. The human factor cannot be quantified with P-values and Confidence Intervals. This horrifies some readers and writers, but I love it. There is nothing wrong with foregrounding science, but there is room in genre for every flavour. More variety leads to more fans. That can’t be a bad thing."
"Protagonists don’t have to be likable. They just have to be compelling. The key characteristic of a protagonist, whether they are conventionally good or evil, is that the reader must be interested in knowing what they will do next, or how they will respond to what happens to them. I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much I detest all that ‘hero’s journey’ crap…"
"The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep."
"Life needs courage above all other virtues; but perhaps the greatest of all human courage is forgiveness."
"Human earnestness, so fearfully direct, so anxious to improve, builds monuments to house the living God and kills him dead within an ornamental prison."
"Images "stand in" to represent what is in fact unknowable, non-ceptual and non-evidential to us, who are negatively situated on this side of consciousness. Such images can only be real in themselves, however, in so far as they represent, or re-present, the eternal reality of THAT. When they become real in themselves, then we are only over-stating them and have become idolaters guilty of the error of the Sanskrit word upadhi, which is treating THAT as if it is only this, and so confusing the lesser with the greater."
"THAT was the frame of reference for the Druids, which is what makes them so different from our experience now, which is determined, not by the truth of THAT, but by our anxious need for more security, more gain, less loss, and more power over the other."
"Trees hold their living energy in a specially vivid and visual image of design: forest and clearing, root and branch, seed and fruit, spring and autumn, each tells the rhythm of a balanced and cyclical harmony."
"We learn one lesson from the seed that diamonds have never taught us. For seeds, unlike diamonds, are for spending--for throwing away, almost. For unless the seed falls into the ground, dying buried in the darkness of the earth for due season, there can be no spring nor harvest. The image of the seed is the living message of truth for all of us: that death of some kind is the cause of all renewal. 'Death', albeit in inverted commas, is a cause; and life its consequence. Thus sleep is a little death: but so are looking and listening, which require a condition of self-emptying, or 'dying to know', before communication from the other can be received. So, 'expiring' with every breath, we may grow continuously, until the time arrives when we must all experience the irreversible state of change, called death."
"Charles Tannock, Vice-President of the Human Rights subcommittee of the European Parliament, had written in a 2005 editorial that, “The world cannot afford a second Afghanistan in Bangladesh, where Huji (Harakat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh or HuJI-B -- Movement of Islamic Holy war/Bangladesh) members are believed to have given sanctuary to many Taliban fighters after the fall of their regime… All of Asia’s powers, including China and Japan, will have to play a part in stopping Bangladesh’s drift into fanaticism and chaos. The rest of the world should support them before it is too late.” Tannock pointed out that a massive rise in the number of madrasas (Islamic seminaries) “financed by Saudi and Gulf money — totaling roughly 64,000 and operating under the same fundamentalist Deobandi Islam that inspired the Taliban — is part of a clear effort to change Bangladesh’s culture of religious tolerance.” Tannock’s fear and assessment were both on target as 2006 saw an increase in violence and worsening condition in Bangladesh."