Nonfiction Books

"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century -- for several centuries. The three or four years' course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern. [...] [A] new university is just another imitation of all the old universities that have ever been. Educationally we are still for all practical purposes in the coach and horse and galley stage. (pp. 64-65)"

"We have been gradually brought to the pitch of imagining and framing our preliminary ideas of a federal world control of such things as communications, health, money, economic adjustments, and the suppression of crime. In all these material things we have begun to foresee the possibility of a world-wide network being woven between all men about the earth. So much of the World Peace has been brought into the range of -- what shall I call it? -- the general imagination. But I do not think we have yet given sufficient attention to the prior necessity, of linking together its mental organizations into a much closer accord than obtains at the present time. All these ideas of unifying mankind's affairs depend ultimately for their realization on mankind having a unified mind for the job. The want of such effective mental unification is the key to most of our present frustrations. While men's minds are still confused, their social and political relations will remain in confusion, however great the forces that are grinding them against each other and however tragic and monstrous the consequences. (p.57-8)"

"For half a century I have resisted temptations to lecture in America -- if for no reason than the inefficiency of my voice. But the microphone is a great leveller and here I am at last on terms of practical equality with your most audible speakers and very glad indeed of this belated opportunity of talking to you. I want to talk to you about an idea which seems to me to be a very important one indeed. I want to interest you in it, and if possible find out what you think of it. I call that idea for reasons I shall try to make clear as I proceed, The New Encyclopaedism, and the gist of it is that the time is ripe for a very extensive revision and modernization of the intellectual organization of the world. Can I put it more plainly than that? Perhaps I can. Our world is changing and it is changing with an ever-increasing violence. An old world dies about us. A new world struggles into existence. But it is not developing the brain and the sensitiveness and delicacy necessary for its new life. That is the essence of what I have to say. (pp. 39-40)"

"I am not saying ...; what I am saying ... is this, that without a World Encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles. (pp. 34-5)"

"To [the specialist] even more than to the common intelligent man World Encyclopaedia is going to be of value because it is going to afford him an intelligible statement of what is being done by workers parallel with himself. And further it will be giving him the general statement of his own subject that is being made to the world at large. He can watch that closely .... He will be able to criticize the presentation of his subject, to suggest amendments and re-statements. (p. 24)"

"This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organization .... It would do just what our scattered and disoriented intellectual organizations of today fall short of doing. It would hold the world together mentally. (pp. 20-21)"

"The modern World Encyclopaedia should consist of relations, extracts, quotations, very carefully assembled with the approval of outstanding authorities in each subject, carefully collated and edited and critically presented. It would not be a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification and a synthesis. (p. 20)"

"I will introduce a phrase New Encyclopaedism [...] I want to suggest that something -- a new social organ, a new institution -- which for a time I shall call World Encyclopaedia, is the means whereby we can solve the problem of that jigsaw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding, and into effective reaction upon our vulgar everyday political, social and economic life. [...] I am sketching what is really a scheme for the reorganization and reorientation of education and information throughout the world. No less. (p. 17)"

"This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organization. And on the other hand, its contents would be the standard source of material for the instructional side of school and college work, for the verification of facts and the testing of statements -- everywhere in the world. Even journalists would deign to use it; even newspaper proprietors might be made to respect it. (p. 14)"

"My particular line of country has always been generalization of synthesis. I dislike isolated events and disconnected details. I really hate statements, views, prejudices and beliefs that jump at you suddenly out of mid-air. I like my world as coherent and consistent as possible. So far at any rate my temperament is that of a scientific man. And that is why I have spent a few score thousand hours of my particular allotment of vitality in making outlines of history, short histories of the world, general accounts of the science of life, attempts to bring economic, financial and social life into one conspectus and even, still more desperate, struggles to estimate the possible consequences of this or that set of operating causes upon the future of mankind. All these attempts had profound and conspicuous faults and weaknesses; even my friends are apt to mention them with an apologetic smile; presumptuous and preposterous they were, I admit, but I look back upon them, completely unabashed. Somebody had to break the ice. Somebody had to try out such summaries on the general mind. My reply to the superior critic has always been ... "Damn you, do it better." (pp. 3-4)"

"We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction. (p. xvi)"

"There has been ... an enormous waste of human mental and physical resources in premature revolutionary thrusts, ill-planned, dogmatic, essentially unscientific reconstructions and restorations of the social order, during the past hundred years. This was the inevitable first result of the discrediting of those old and superseded mental adaptations which were embodied in the institutions and education of the past. They discredited themselves and left the world full of problems. (p. xiii)"

"Wedge compellingly re-creates the life-or-death atmosphere of the half-century of American confrontation with the Soviet Union. Mr. Riebling succeeds brilliantly as well in persuading the reader that the FBI-CIA conflict was a more important piece of the cold war mosaic than heretofore noted by historians."

"Well researched, wittily written, full of good judgments. In a large and growing field, WEDGE will join the shelf of those few books which meet both standards of scholarship and expectations for insight and entertainment at a high level."

"A surprisingly fresh, coherent, well-written and persuasive analysis. Striking conclusions, a succession of colorful adventurers, and highly provocative speculations which have the unsettling ring of plausibility."

"There are few books that adequately cover this subject. Much of what passes for 'the literature' is overblown, conspiracy-addled and fragmented. But Mark Riebling, a historian, has made a valiant effort to piece it all together in Wedge. The fact that he has taken great pains to avoid using anonymous sources is just one of a number of reasons why serious students of this nation's haywire-rigged counterintelligence effort should read Wedge. Refreshingly unlike most spy literature, the cumulative effect of his tales is staggering."

"A lively and engaging narrative of interagency bungling, infighting, malfeasance and nonfeasance, providing fresh and well-rounded portraits of well-known (and ought-to-be-well-known) agents—drawing on scores of original and rewarding interviews."

"A brilliant book. Outstanding research and superlative presentation of the dramatis personae. An anecdotal and extremely well written account—as informative as any treatise and as entertaining as the best espionage novels."

"If Riebling's thesis—that the FBI-CIA rivalry had 'damaged the national security and, to that extent, imperiled the Republic'—was provocative at the time, it seems prescient now, with missed communications between the two agencies looming as the principal cause of intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."

"I’d eventually come around to the view of the Manhattan Institute’s Mark Riebling that a full half-century’s worth of national disasters... had been enabled or exacerbated by turf-battling between the FBI and CIA."

"Riebling’s analysis has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the intelligence situation."

"Riebling's concern for the rivalry and competitive nature of the relationship between the intelligence community is frequently commented upon in studies of intelligence estimates."

"That such a phrase as The American Way of Life could no longer be uttered uncynically, at the end of what was once called The American Century, could be conceived as the consequence of various national traumas, and to catalog them was to review, for the large part, the circumstances of interagency strife. Japanese dive-bombers in the Hawaiian dawn; atomic bomb secrets stolen by Soviet spies; failure to prevent or properly investigate the death of a young President; an inability to understand student protest during the Vietnam War; the Watergate coverup; the blowing of CIA's illegal Iran-Contra networks; a bank raid that exposed U.S. complicity in arming Iraq; spy scandals which showed that our secrets were not safe; the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocents on a beautiful September morning—in such episodes could be discerned the FBI–CIA war, both as symptom and cause of an unmistakable national weakness."

"Every Government inquiry into intelligence, from the first Pearl Harbor inquiry to the 1992 Iraq-Gate probe, cited interagency non-coordination as a major problem to be solved. Failure to solve it damaged the national security of the Republic, and imperiled the Republic itself."

"That CIA counterspies operated in the U.S. for fifty years without greater civil liberties violations than actually occurred was a function of the uniquely American character—a pragmatism far more idealistic than usually recognized."

"American culture has always been tormented by the idea of government secrecy in a way that European nations have never been."

"Why should counterintelligence duties be divided between two agencies? The traditional view is that it was Roosevelt's political instinct, in keeping with the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, that made him avoid concentrating secret powers and overall intelligence responsibility in a single law enforcement agency. In fact, however, the foreign domestic split was originally effected on bureaucratic, not constitutional grounds. The issues of political dictatorship and division of intelligence jurisdictions have nothing inherently to do with each other. The civil liberties argument, which equates these two issues, is to that extent false."

"After more than fifty years of rivalry, Agency people are still perceived by FBI agents as intellectual, Ivy League, wine drinking, pipe smoking, international relations types, sometimes aloof. The Bureau's people are regarded by CIA as cigar smoking, beer drinking, door-¬knocking cops. What kind of restructuring might overcome such stereo-typical perceptions especially when they are generally true?"

"The existence of major FBI CIA problems has typically been denied by the parties in power, while the sins of previous generations are acknowledged readily. In this, both sides have been much like the Soviet rulers they spent so long fighting attacking past administrations as bankrupt and moribund, in order to make the present seem more perfect."

"On croit que la nutrition est une cause majeure dans au moins 35% des cas de cancers. Certains auteurs avancent même le chiffre de 60%."

"Talent is no accident of birth."

"Most of these beautiful children would eventually become adults filled with suspicion, treachery, dishonesty, injustice, hatred, misery, gloom. Why? Why couldn't they be brought up to maintain the beauty of their souls? There must be something wrong with education."

"I had learned to realize how precious children of four and five were, and wanted to become as one of them."

"What is man's ultimate direction in life? It is to look for love, truth, virtue and beauty. That goes for you, for me, for everyone."

"In today's society a good many people seem to have the idea that if one is born without talent, there is nothing he can do about it; they simply resign themselves to what they consider their "fate". Consequently they go through life without living it to the fullest or ever knowing life's true joy. That is man's greatest tragedy."

"Hope halt te heorte hal, hwet-se þe flesch drehe; as me seið, "Ȝef hope nere, heorte tobreke.""

"The unknown author writes with a fresh and simple style, with a natural gift for description and character-drawing. It enjoyed for three centuries an immense popularity; almost at once it became available in Latin and French translations; it became a classic."

"The most important prose work of its period and moreover one of the most charming pieces in the whole of M[iddle] E[nglish] literature, the Riwle must certainly be read."

"Of þis boc redeð hwen ȝe beoð eise euche dei leasse oðer mare. Ich hopie þet hit | schal beon ow, ȝef ȝe hit redeð ofte, swiðe biheue…elles Ich hefde uuele bitohe mi muchele hwile. Me were leouere, Godd hit wite, do me toward Rome þen forte biginnen hit eft forte donne."

"Hwet is word bute wind?"

"Of lutel muchel waxeð."

"Women are hardly ever known in their true light, though they may love men, or become indifferent toward them; may give them delight, or abandon them; or may extract from them all the wealth that they may possess."

"In our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me of the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don’t believe my poor father, Brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims."

"Various taxonomies of season, landscape, times, gunas or qualities (and their material bases), tastes, characters, emotions, essences (rasas), etc., are basic to the thought-work of Hindu medicine and poetry, cooking and religion, erotics and magic… Even the Kama-Sutra is literally a grammar of love, which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects. Genders are genres. Different body-types and character-types obey different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings."

"The Kama Sutra is neither exclusively a sex manual nor, as also commonly believed, a sacred or religious work. It is certainly not a tantric text. In opening with a discussion of the three aims of ancient Hindu life – dharma, artha and kama – Vatsyayana's purpose is to set kama, or enjoyment of the senses, in context. Thus dharma or virtuous living is the highest aim, artha, the amassing of wealth is next, and kama is the least of three."

"The Kama Sutra was composed, according to the precepts of Holy Writ, for the benefit of the world, by Vatsyayana, while leading the life of a religious student, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the Deity."

"The extent of the love of women is not known, even to those who are the objects of their affection, on account of its subtlety."

"A man may resort to the wife of another, for the purpose of saving his own life, when he perceives that his love for her proceeds from one degree of intensity to another. These degrees are ten in number, and are distinguished by the following marks: 1. Love of the eye 2. Attachment of the eye 3. Constant reflection 4. Destruction of sleep 5. Emaciation of the body 6. Turning away from objects of enjoyment 7. Removal of shame 8. Madness 9. Fainting 10. Death"

"A man who is of a low mind, who has fallen from his social position, and who is much given to traveling, does not deserve to be married; neither does one who has many wives and children, or one who is devoted to sport and gambling, and who comes to his wife only when he likes."

"A girl who is called by the name of one of the twenty-seven stars, or by the name of a tree, or of a river, is considered worthless, as also a girl whose name ends in "r" or "l". But some authors say that prosperity is gained only by marrying that girl to whom one becomes attached and that therefore no other girl but the one who is loved should be married by anyone."