Educators From Italy

"Kodra: Quasi un simbolo generazionale."

"Beatles' "aryan" music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll: it replaced syncopated african rhythm with linear western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles."

"The fact that so many books still name the Beatles "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success: the Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worth of being saved."

"Philosophy is the art of turning solutions into problems"

"Philosophy is the art of saying something incredibly stupid and making it sound incredibly intelligent."

"What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it. (Signature line on his emails)"

"Zappa was not a protester or an activist. He was merely a man who used his brain."

"The ones who do not wander are the ones who are truly lost"

"If an animal spread plastic garbage all over the planet, we would certainly exterminate it."

"We are swimming in the lake in which future generations will drown"

"Trump is not an idiot at all, but those who voted for him are."

"Mass shooters and serial killers are white Christian men, with rare exceptions, and frequently with Anglosaxon last names."

"If the cop honestly felt that this was a young black man (as politically incorrect as it sounds, this is the most violent category of people in the USA in 2014) aiming a gun at him, the cop can hardly be blamed for shooting first."

"Michael Brown was a thug."

"Why are there age limits? why can't i marry a 12-year old? Helen of Troy was 12. Juliet and Cleopatra were still teenagers when they became famous. Most heroines of classic novels and poems were underage by today's laws. Thomas Edison married a 16-year-old. Medical studies show that the best age for a woman to have children is between 15 and 25 (lowest chances of miscarriage, of birth defects and, last but not least, of the woman dying while giving birth); while the worst age is after the mid 30s. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to cement a real friendship with your children; the older you are, the more likely that the "generational gap" will hurt your children's psychology. Therefore it is much more natural to have a child at 16 than at 40."

"Mass culture is a way to escape from the psychological suffering that comes with that insight into the human condition, an escape alternative to the one preached by world religions. Mass culture is a modern invention to escape from existential anguish."

"If you tend to text and skim the surface of the Internet, you indirectly shape your mind to only deal with superficial matters."

"I really think we should modify the law so that one can be sued for defaming not only living people but also the memory and reputation of people who died centuries ago."

"...but defining their sound was Little Girls, an exuberant ska wrapped in an electronic patina, with modernist vocals à la XTC and a touch of dementia."

"The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation."

"Question answers instead of answering questions."

"The most difficult part of finding a solution is to accept that there is a problem"

"When the impossible happens, everybody has a very simple explanation for why it was inevitable"

"I feel that the end of my days is drawing near; my senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honored by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace."

"[Salieri] did not harbor a grudge against Mozart, who eclipsed him; but whenever he spotted a weak point in Mozart he drew his students' attention to it. Thus one day, when I was alone with Salieri, he divulged that Mozart had completely misinterpreted the final scene of the first act in "Titus." Rome is burning; the whole population is in revolt; the music ought to rage and be tumultuous; but Mozart chose a slow, solemn tempo and rather expressed dread and horror. I did not let Salieri confuse me, and still agree with Mozart's views. As far as I know, Salieri missed only one performance of "Don Juan." This work must have interested him particularly; but I have no idea whether he ever commented about it enthusiastically."

"Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition."

"Euclid … manages to obtain a rigorous proof without ever dealing with infinity, by reducing the problem [of the infinitude of primes] to the study of finite numbers. This is exactly what contemporary mathematical analysis does."

"Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal … yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently."

"Many scholars have felt that the Heronian passage [on a pipe-organ moved by an anemourion-like wheel] can be disregarded because it is not confirmed by other writings. Heron presumably mentioned the anemourion in a moment of distraction, forgetting that it had not been invented yet. We know that he was given to such lapses."

"About Archimedes one remembers that he did strange things: he ran around naked shouting Heureka!, plunged crowns into water, drew geometric figures as he was about to be killed, and so on. … One ends up forgetting he was a scientist of whom we still have many writings."

"The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past."

"The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric."

"From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist … is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. … Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?"

"Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection."

"Since UFO stands for "unidentified flying object", the word ufology means approximately "knowledge about unknown flying objects", and is therefore a "science" whose content is void by definition. Similar considerations hold for parapsychology."

"Using complex, constructive, noise-producing abstraction, that is, the Futurist Style. Any action developed in space, any emotion felt, will represent for us the intuition of a discovery."

"In the evening I study a fair.. ..if you could see the pomp and luxury of the merry-go-round and the stands and booths. Everything is decorated in Baroque-style, all gold and silver; there are mirrors, fabrics, and electric lightning. By night the whole thing is fantastic and rowdy. First of all I shall make a small picture and some drawings for illustrations."

"It will interest artists because, in it, I have made a special study of the way of walking of this girl, and, in fact, I have succeeded in giving the illusion that she is in the process of moving forward."

"Villages and valleys pass by [Balla viewed during his train voyage to Düsseldorf in July 1912] and with my friend the binoculars [field glasses] I stare into the closest windows; semi-undressed people who wash themselves, bedding on balconies, clean almost empty rooms, a stupendous white shoulder of a women who, with a nude arm opens a door and goes inside."

"The Rhine, with two long branches, stretches out and loses itself among inlets and hills, the boats of tourists and of industry smoke, white, black, and gray, and small, small, seem almost not to move; the silver clear, transparent water, calm and ordered, contrasts with all the rest.. ..the water gurgles, the sides of the boat are covered in spray, many people greet each other, white handkerchiefs are waved from on high, the hotels, the flags, the inscriptions, the hills and the pointed tips of the bell towers, everything seems unreal, untouchable."

"They [ Boccioni and Severini ] did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress."

"WE MUST DESTROY ALL PASSÉIST CLOTHES, and everything about them which is tight-fitting, colourless, funereal, decadent, boring and unhygienic. As far as materials are concerned, we must abolish: wishywashy, pretty-pretty, gloomy, and neutral colours, along with patterns composed of lines, checks and spots."

"WE MUST INVENT FUTURIST CLOTHES, hap-hap-hap-hap-happy clothes, daring clothes with brilliant colours and dynamic lines. They must be simple, and above all they must be made to last for a short time only in order to encourage industrial activity and to provide constant and novel enjoyment for our bodies."

"Use materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours – the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermillion – and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black."

"And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc."

"We want Futurist clothes to be comfortable and practical Dynamic Aggressive Shocking Energetic Violent Flying (i.e. giving the idea of flying, rising and running) Peppy Joyful Illuminating (in order to have light even in the rain) Phosphorescent Lit by electric lamps."

"As a result we shall have the necessary variety of clothes, even if the people of a given city lack the imagination themselves. The happiness of our Futurist clothes will help to spread the kind of good humour aimed at by my great friend PaIazzeschi in his futurist 'Manifesto against Sadness'."

"Futurism, as it has developed over six years, has solidified and surpassed Impressionism, has proposed plastic dynamism, atmospheric modeling, and the interpenetration of planes and states of mind."

"We [Futurists, Balla and Depero ], seek to realize this total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe by making it more joyful, in other words by an integral re-creation. We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable and the imperceptible. We will find abstract equivalents for all the forms and elements of the universe, and then we will combine them according to the caprice of our inspiration, to shape plastic complexes which we will set in motion."

"Further developing his first synthesis of a speeding automobile, Balla has arrived at the first plastic complex. This has revealed to us an abstract landscape of cones, pyramids, polyhedrons, spirals of mountains, rivers, lights, shadows. In short, there is a deep analogy between the essential force-lines of speed and the essential force-lines of a landscape."