Literature

"The scribe trained in counting is deficient on clay. The scribe skilled with clay is deficient in counting."

"Impact Factor is not a perfect tool to measure the quality of articles but there is nothing better and it has the advantage of already being in existence and is, therefore, a good technique for scientific evaluation. Experience has shown that in each specialty the best journals are those in which it is most difficult to have an article accepted, and these are the journals that have a high impact factor. Most of these journals existed long before the impact factor was devised. The use of impact factor as a measure of quality is widespread because it fits well with the opinion we have in each field of the best journals in our specialty. ... In conclusion, prestigious journals publish papers of high level. Therefore, their impact factor is high, and not the contrary."

"Citation data and analysis should always be used in combination with other indicators when evaluating departments or individuals. For nation by nation comparisons, there is very little controversy about the use of citation indicators. Further, they have been used in the USA to evaluate 5,000 departments at the leading universities. Similar research assessment exercises are performed in the UK."

"I would like to comment on the statement by Prof. H-J. Oestern and Prof. J. Probst of the German Trauma Society which appeared in the October 1997 issues of your journal as well as the Anaesthesist. The authors assert that the work of German specialists in these fields is published "primarily" in German language journals. And without any supporting data they assert that the impact factor is not appropriate for judging scientific achievements in trauma surgery and most important that "its use leads to an unjustified disadvantage in comparison with other fields." Where has it been written that such comparisons should be made? In a series of unrelated assertions, none of which are supported by data, claims of bias are made repeatedly. Would these authors assert that German scientists, even in trauma surgery, do not publish in the international journals? In 1997, scientists from Germany published over 77,000 papers in Science Citation Index covered journals -- almost 7.8% of the total ISI database. About 12,000 of those articles were published in German."

"It is absurd to make invidious comparisons between specialist journals and multi-disciplinary general journals like Nature and NEJM. To compare journals you should stick to a particular category as is explained very carefully in the Guide to Journal Citation Reports."

"In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man."

"I do think that our perception of reality is fragmentary, and in 20th-century literature, it's totally normal to not describe reality as something whole and completely transportable and explicable. That's been accepted in novels. But genre films always pretend that reality is transportable, which means that it is explicable."

"The Western misreading of the Soviet system was largely the product of a simple reflex. The Soviet order — indeed, the practice of communism everywhere — was seen as a form of "progressive" hostility to established Western politics and, particularly, economics. It seemed to represent a new system that had rid itself of the market, of exploitation. Whatever its doubtless temporary — or invented — faults (so the thinking went), the Soviet ideology stood for a better world. Thus many Western writers, including Lion Feuchtwanger, Henri Barbusse, and even Romain Rolland, the sensitive follower of Gandhi, spoke out in defense of the purges."

"I have blurbed so many books that they fill a bookcase in my apartment."

"Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers."

"In 2002, I’d finally finished my own decade-long basic science project, and I was getting ready to publish my book A New Kind of Science. In recognition of his early support, I’d mentioned Murray in my long list of acknowledgements in the book, and I thought I’d reach out to him and see if he’d like to write a back-cover blurb. (In the end, Steve Jobs convinced me not to have any back-cover blurbs: “Isaac Newton didn’t have blurbs on the Principia; nor should you on your book”.)"

"Many writers who have hit the best-seller lists or won major awards have a strict policy of not writing blurbs."

"Everywhere, unthinking mobs of "independent thinkers" wield tired clichés like cudgels, pummeling those who dare question “enlightened” dogma. If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Clichés begin arguments, they don’t settle them."

"I never taught of book burning, no matter how they were silly, mendacious or propaganda-like because I guide myself by the principle that every book burning was just an introduction to burning (of people) at the stake."

"All books written in Sanskrit and Marathi, whatever their subject matter, were seized by the Inquisition and burnt on the suspicion that they might deal with idolatry. It is probable that valuable non-religious literature dealing with art, literature, sciences, etc., was destroyed indiscriminately, as a consequence. These activities had been initiated in Goa even before the establishment of the Inquisition."

"For when Alexander conquered the kingdom of Darius the king, he had all [the books] translated into the Greek language. Then he burnt all the original copies which were kept in the treasure-houses of Darius, and killed everyone whom he thought might be keeping any of them. Except that some books were saved through the protection of those who safeguarded them."

"The fundamentalist forces in Kashmir that were in the processes of spreading their tentacles opened their agenda with the declaration of war on books that were not of Islamic brand and hue... The Jammaat-i-Islami as the rabid fundamentalist organisation launched a campaign to ransack libraries in the educational institutions and flared ban on books which did not correspond to their fake knowledge about man, world and God. The Kashmir university funded by the University Grants Commission and headed by the Governor of the state was denuded of two thousand books including the works of Milton, G.B. Shaw, Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and tomes on Hindu Philosphy in a Nazi style. ... The library of the Information Centre run by Government of India was looted by the progeny of Halaku Khan and set on fire. ... The Muslim marauders could not but suppress their innate urge and proclivity to loot, plunder and arson the properties and estates left behind by the fleeing Pandits. They desecrated and destructed their temples, harvested their crops and annexed their lands and to cap it all looted and burnt their books as repositories of learning and knowledge"

"World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.""

"It is not surprising therefore that many Muslim heroes in their hour of victory just set libraries to flames. They razed shrines to the ground, burnt books housed in them and killed Brahman, Jain and Buddhist monks who could read them. The narrative of Ikhtiyaruddin Bakhtiyar Khalji’s campaigns in Bihar is full of such exploits... Similarly, only one instance may be given to show how the Indians tried to protect their books from marauding armies. In the Jinabhadra-Sureshwar temple located in the Jaisalmer Fort in Rajasthan, I saw a library of Jain manuscripts called Jain Cyan Bhandar located in a basement, 5 storeys deep down, each storey negotiated with the help of a staircase, and in each floor manuscripts are stacked. The top of the cell is covered with a large stone slab indistinguishable from other slabs of the flooring to delude the invader. Such basement libraries set up for security against vandalism are also found in other places in Rajasthan."

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where one begins by burning books, one will end up burning people.)"

"Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter."

"Sultan Sikander (Aurangzeb) was the most bigoted of the Sultans, and burnt the books of the Hindus whenever and wherever he got them."

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course."

"It is an inconvenient truth that early-7th-century Islamic book-burners copied 4th-century Christians."

"Burning the Bible was an intentional act: it happened all over Germany, in public for all to see, and both those who perpetrated the act and those who watched it perceived it as a transgression whether they supported or opposed the burning."

"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

"Going all the way back to the twenties, the horror movies of the Silent Era with Lon Chaney, there's alot of twisted people. The monster was just a mutilated person. When people came back from World War I they came back without limbs. They came back in somewhat-living pieces."

"What is almost universally true of horror is that it’s been used as a tool to express social and political discontent for the marginalized since its creation. It’s a kind of popcorn propaganda that’s allowed writers and filmmakers to voice their anxieties while couching them in titillating narratives that would fly below any political censors."

"As far back as 1794, for instance, women like Ann Radcliffe were writing the original Final Girls, like the character of Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho, who escapes vengeful, domineering men in a creepy old castle to become an autonomous woman. Radcliffe paved the way for Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart"), Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and, of course, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). These authors were popular in their time, but they’ve remained a collective compass for much of the horror to follow, and what they all have in common are concerns with ethics. Horror stories are, at their hearts, morality tales."

"Horror is barely ever on the side of the powerful or the mean. The good writers and filmmakers of the genre can tap into our very real fears and follow them to their logical conclusions."

"Better an end with horror than a horror without end."

"...murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibalism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism ... and virtually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality and horror."

"72% of people report watching at last one horror movie every 6 months, and the reasons for doing so, besides the feelings of fear and anxiety, was primarily that of excitement. Watching horror movies was also an excuse to socialise, with many people preferring to watch horror movies with others than on their own. People found horror that was psychological in nature and based on real events the scariest, and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied rather than what they could actually see."

"The horror experience is most scary when the player really isn’t sure whether their character is going to live or die – death and survival need to be on a constant see-saw. If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies. Creating that situation is vital. Also, I don’t want to just stand there shooting dozens of enemies. Die! Die! Die! I don’t have the energy for that."

"During those times when anxiety is slowly increasing, regions of the brain involved in visual and auditory perception become more active, as the need to attend for cues of threat in the environment become more important. After a sudden shock, brain activity is more evident in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making, enabling a rapid response. However, these regions are in continuous talk-back with sensory regions throughout the movie, as if the sensory regions were preparing response networks as a scary event was becoming increasingly likely. Therefore, our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threat, and horror movies exploit this expertly to enhance our excitement, explains Researcher Matthew Hudson."

"What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end."

"Women occupy a privileged place in horror film. The horror genre is a site of entertainment and excitement, of terror and dread, and one that relishes in the complexities that arise when boundaries – of taste, of bodies, or reason – are blurred and dismantled. It is also a site of expression and exploration that leverages the narrative and aesthetic horrors of the reproductive, the maternal and the sexual to expose the underpinnings of the social, political and philosophical othering of women. This is a consistent point of interest, even across the breadth of an already diverse genre and into that which might otherwise be deemed ‘the horrific’."

"Gynaehorror, as I will demonstrate, is horror that deals with all aspects of female reproductive horror, from the reproductive and sexual organs, to virginity and first sex, through to pregnancy, birth and motherhood, and finally to menopause and post-menpause. While my focus is horror film- the space in which such horror makes itself most visible, most fecund, even- this term is one that might be applied more broadly to connect visual representation and aesthetic expression to wider issues of sociocultural and philosophical analysis. This book offers a feminist interrogation of gynaehorror, but also offers a counter-reading of the gynaehorrific, that both accounts for and opens up new spaces within a mode of representation that has often been accused (and, in many cases, rightfully so) of being misogynistic. This is not to try to rehabilitate certain long-standing modes of imagery and narrative whose dominant register can, perhaps, be broadly coloured as anti-woman, but to explore the spaces between and within these modes that might offer more interesting ways of thinking through representation, cinematic expression, the reproductive and the nominally – and monstrously – feminine."

"The horror genre has changed throughout the years depending on what’s going on in the world. A lot of feminists will say the slasher films where women were being butchered were, in some ways, because women were becoming emancipated. They think killing women was a reaction to that, but a lot of times the women, in the end, were the heroes and the only one who lived so it had a feminist edge there. Then when we were all afraid of nuclear weapons there were all these films with Sci-Fi edge things that had been created out of nuclear waste. Who knows, they will always find something that is scary that is relevant to what we are going through. The resurgence of the Mummy came around when the gulf war was going on because people have always found the Middle East kind of mysterious. I think society can breathe “death”, as The Crypt Keeper would say, into horror."

"I've seen horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."

"I was the first publisher in these United States to publish horror comics. I am responsible, I started them. Some may not like them. That is a matter of personal taste. It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid."

"That is real horror and blood. When the Second World War finished I was 23 and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I’d seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much."

"I will make this city an object of horror and something to whistle at. Every last one passing by it will stare in horror and whistle over all its plagues."

"I look before me at my lighted candles, I don’t want to turn around and see with horror How quickly the dark line is lengthening, How quickly the candles multiply that have been put out."

"Recent history has reminded us that racial terror makes for an effective freak show, as anyone following the cycle of police shooting, to protest, to grand jury acquittal already knows. H.P. Lovecraft once wrote of the difference between "mere physical fear" and "cosmic fear": the difference between being grossed out and, in the cosmic extreme, of having one’s sense of how the world works upended. True horror is cosmic fear. It’s there when I pass by cops at night, or when there’s a Confederate flag waving from the truck of a customer in the same restaurant as me. Horror, as Lovecraft described it, beckons "unexplainable dread." Keyword: unexplainable. Racism is no mystery. But whether it’s in store, at any given moment, certainly is."

"“Jokes and horror work on the same mechanism,” said writer Ellis. “Tension and release. For me, it’s more of an instinct for what a scene needs, and listening to the characters speak."

"The work of horror, it has been argued, is to uncover what a repressive culture like ours would hope is dead and buried. But as far as public discourse is concerned, black culture — more often being repressed than doing the repressing — doesn’t have room or patience for fantasy."

"When I finally took my husband to see Pet Sematary a few months ago, I looked over during the film, and my husband had his hands over his face...it was too funny. Women are wired to give birth, so maybe there's something in us that makes us more immune to horror, films with girls in bikinis getting raped and killed make me angry, but a really chilling horror film where it really gets under your skin and like it really could happen, those are the ones I like."

"Most of the books published during the five-year period leading up to, during, and after the invasion [of Mexico] were war-mongering tracts. Euro-American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national and nationalist writers, not as colonialists."