Essayists From The United States

"Nobody wants to say, at least not for publication, that we live in a society that cares as much about the humanities as it cares about the color of the rain in Tashkent."

"That’s what’s remarkable about our current circumstances: the poverty of our imagination. We haven’t had a new political idea in 50 years. And the reason is that we talk about money, instead of about ideas, or feeling or emotion. Reading this book Dawn of Everything gives me reason to feel that men at one time had the imagination to create a future fit for human beings, instead of a future fit for machines, which is what we’ve got going now. I mean, the belief in money, like the belief in technology, in and of itself, is a revolution in the direction of the world made by and for machines. We have to figure out a way to make a future fit for human beings. And that is the problem that we’re confronting at the moment. And the more that we look for the answer in money, the less likely we are to find it."

"We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible."

"Seeking the invisible through the imagery of the visible, the Americans never can get quite all the way to the end of the American dream."

"Good intentions, like mother’s milk, are a perishable commodity. As wealth accumulates, men decay, and sooner or later an aristocracy that once might have aspired to an ideal of wisdom and virtue goes rancid in the sun, becomes an oligarchy distinguished by a character that Aristotle likened to that of “the prosperous fool”—its members so besotted by their faith in money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing that it cannot buy.”"

"The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being."

"Happily, at least for the moment, the society is rich enough to afford the staging of the fiction of democracy as a means of quieting the suspicions of a potentially riotous mob with the telling of a fairy tale. The rising cost of the production — the pointless nominating conventions decorated with 15,000 journalists as backdrop for the 150,000 balloons - reflects the ever-increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time-zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be said to exist."

"Since the eighteenth century the immense expansion of the worlds wealth has come about as a result of a correspondingly immense expansion of credit, which in turn has demanded increasingly stupendous suspensions of disbelief."

"His purpose is therapeutic. A man at play with the freedoms of his mind, believing that it is allegiance to the truth and not the flag that rescues the citizens of a democracy from the prisons of their selfishness and greed, Twain aims to blow away with a blast of laughter the pestilent hospitality tents of a society making itself sick with its consumption of “sweet-smelling, sugar-coated lies.”"

"Money ennobles rich people, and corrupts poor people. Money in sufficient quantity entitles its possessor to the reverence and respect owed to the statue of George Washington. Money is the sacred elephant, always in the room, never to be addressed or seen, but whose will is done on earth as it is in Heaven."

"What kind of people do we wish to become, and how do we know an American when we see one? Is it possible to pursue a common purpose without a common history or a standard text?"

"Surely they knew that the very idea of the future came in an American box - complete with instructions for assembling a Constitution, a MacDonald's hamburger franchise, a row of Marriot hotels and a First Amendment."

"In 1994, Duarte first reported on solid-state dye laser oscillators."

"After some algebra, a successive formula can be derived from Duarte's original equation."

"Another connection with Newton's pioneering work on spectra has been found by Duarte in modern quantum optics."

"The sciences revolted under the guidance of several student activists, Frank Duarte in particular... we were fortunate that Duarte somehow established close links to the Federal Government, which was now the source of all funds."

"From an interferometric perspective, there are no mysteries... and no paradoxes... in the physics of quantum entanglement."

"One of Ward's few close friends at Macquarie is... Frank Duarte... the two make an odd couple - the restrained rather distant Englishman and the intense, earnest South American."

"Ward was vocal in his denunciation of the trivia that filled up Senate agendas… suitably then, it was a close student associate of Ward’s, physics Ph. D. student Frank Duarte, who began to mobilize student opinion in favor of a change."

"Personally, I find the concept of a "final theory," or a "theory of everything," rather limiting. The fun of discovery will most likely last as long as the human race continues."

"The EPR claim of an "all values" spread in the coordinate depends on an idealized absolute and exact measurement of p with \Delta p\ = 0. Since this is physically impossible, the claim of "no physical reality" can be negated."

"Multiple-prism arrays were first introduced by Newton (1704) in his book Opticks. In that visionary volume Newton reported on arrays of nearly isosceles prisms in additive and compensating configurations to control the propagation path and the dispersion of light. Further, he also illustrated slight beam expansion in a single isosceles prism."

"The longer the cavity and the narrower the beam waist, the better the beam quality of the laser emission, or |\langle x | s \rangle|^2\ = \sum_{j=1}^\N\,\Psi(r_j)^2\ +2 \sum_{j=1}^\N\,\Psi(r_j)\bigg(\sum_{m=j+1}^\N\,\Psi(r_m)cos(\Omega_m-\Omega_j)\bigg)"

"The most efficient and practical interpretation of quantum mechanics is... no interpretation at all."

"As noted previously Bell's theorem is completely disconnected from the physics leading to |\psi\rangle_+, |\psi\rangle_-, |\psi\rangle^+, and |\psi\rangle^- ."

"The intimate relation between interference and diffraction has its origin in the interference equation itself."

"Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission... he applies that physics to... dye molecules... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser."

"The Dirac notation, though originally applied to the propagation of single particles, also applies to describing the propagation of ensembles of coherent, or indistinguishable, photons."

"All the indistinguishable photons illuminate the array of N slits, or grating, simultaneously. If only one photon propagates, at any given time, then that individual photon illuminates the whole array of N slits simultaneously."

"Regardless of the prophetic value of Dirac’s description [on interference] his was probably the first discussion... including a coherent beam of light. In other words, Dirac wrote the first chapter in laser optics."

"The two photons are entangled and according to local realism, their polarization planes should become independent... a typical EPR situation. Already in 1948, observations... agreed with quantum mechanics, not with local realism."

"The Venetians had never been more than formally and outwardly allegiant to the Church from at least their second treaty with Islam in the mid-fifteenth century. The highest pinnacle of their ethics was that of dealing fairly with each other, and since there was at the same time no sweeter music to Venetian ears than the scream of outrage from the outsider who had discovered too late that he had been cheated, this left them little that they felt they ought to say in the confessional. Most of them seem to regard the now obvious downfall of almost all of human civilization as a plot to divert the tourist trade to some other town—probably Istanbul, which they still referred to as Constantinople."

"This senseless advance of expensively trained and equipped men to certain and complete slaughter—men who as usual not only had no idea of what they were dying for, but had been actively misled about it—made about as much military sense as the Siege of Sevastopol or the Battle of the Marne. Certainly it was spectacular, but intellectually it was not even very interesting."

"One thing you learn fast in the munitions business is that it’s a very good idea to stay off battlefields."

"He wore the expression of a man who has heard all this before, and is not enjoying it any better the second time."

"“Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges,” Father Selahny intoned abruptly. As was the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed mythologies and folklores, and long after it was too late to do anything about it."

"Perhaps indeed Jehovah is not dead, But mere retir’d, withdrawn or otherwise Contracted hath, as Zohar subtle saith, His Essence Infinite; and, Epicurean, waits The outcome vast with vast indifference."

"A common thief with a gun in his hand isn’t half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite."

"You’ll remember I told you I was interested in the history of science. That involves trying to understand why there wasn’t any science for so long, and why it went into eclipse almost every time it was rediscovered. I think I know why now. I think the human mind goes through a sort of cycle of fear. It can only take so much accumulated knowledge, and then it panics, and starts inventing reasons to throw everything over and go back to a Dark Age…every time with a new, invented mystical reason."

"“Impossible!” Father Domenico cried, though choking with the dust of the exploded crucifix. “It is written that in that war you will at last nature conquered and chained!”"

"The first thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around laymen."

"One death is as good as another, if death is what you are courting."

"They had all been things, not people, to each other, which after all is the only sensible and fruitful attitude in a thing-dominated world. (Except, of course, for Father Domenico, whose desire to prevent anybody from accomplishing anything, chiefly by wringing his hands, had to be written off as the typical, incomprehensible attitude of the mystic—a howling anachronism in the modern world, and predictably ineffectual.) And in point of fact none of them—not even Father Domenico—could fairly be said to have failed. Instead, they had all been betrayed. Their plans and operations had all depended implicitly upon the existence of God—even Jack, who had entered Positano as an atheist, had been reluctantly forced to grant that—and in the final pinch, He had turned out to have been not around any more after all. If this shambles was anyone’s fault, it was His."

"The express pulled into the Stazione Termini in Rome five minutes ahead of schedule with a feminine shriek. Ruiz found a porter with no difficulty, tipped him the standard 100 lire for his two pieces of luggage, and gave directions. The priest’s Italian was adequate, but hardly standard; it made the facchino grin with delight every time Ruiz opened his mouth. He had learned it by reading, partly in Dante, mostly in opera libretti, and consequently what he lacked in accent he made up for in flowery phrases; he was unable to ask the way to the nearest fruit stall without sounding as though he would throw himself into the Tiber unless he got an answer."

"Now that I'm a free agent I mean to make my own choices, and explain them to nobody if that’s what pleases me."

"But now the shots began—not many, but one shot is a fusillade if there have been no shots before."

"In retrospect, each of the steps toward this abyss seemed irrevocable, and yet they had all been so small!"

"Telepathy and intelligence appear to be incompatible from the evolutionary point of view—if you’ve got one, you don’t seem to need the other, and they may even be evolutionary enemies."

"Yet the closer he came to it, the more alert he felt; it was as though he were paying more and more attention to fewer and fewer things, so that at the heart of the mystery he would paradoxically be totally intent upon nothing at all."

"“Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.” “In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested. “It seems to be based on reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period."