(in roughly chronological order of entry)

Conway's Law (from F.P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, p. 111)
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems
which are copies of the communication structures of these
organizations.

Pascal (from F.P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, p. 123)
Things are always at their best in the beginning.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (from F.P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month,
p. 115) 
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it
frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Popular Mechanics, March 1949, article on the Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Calculator (from L.K. Grover, Quantum Computing, The
Sciences, July/August 1999, p. 24) 
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes
and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum
tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.

FSF: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
To copyleft a program, first we copyright it; then we add distribution
terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to
use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program
derived from it but only if the distribution terms are
unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.

Richard Stallman, speech given in 1986 at the Royal Institute of
Technology in Sweden:
... It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause
that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get
ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just
brightening and the birds starting to chirp, you can get a real
feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you
have done that night.

same:
...But this started to be destroyed when SCRIBE was developed at CMU,
and then was sold to a company. This was very disturbing to a lot of
us at many universities, because we saw that this was a temptation
placed in front of everyone, that it was so profitable to be
uncooperative and those of us who still believed in cooperation had no
weapon to try to compel people to cooperate with us. Clearly, one
after another, people would defect and stop cooperating with the rest
of society, until only those of us with very strong consciences would
still cooperate. And that's what happened.
\
The field of programming has now become an ugly one, where everyone
cynically thinks about how much money he is going to get by not being
nice to the other people in the field, and to the users.
\
I want to establish that the practice of owning software is both
materially wasteful, spiritually harmful to society and evil. All
these three things being interrelated. It's spiritually harmful
because it involves every member of society who comes in contact with
computers in a practice that is obviously materially wasteful to other
people. And every time you do something for your own good, which you
know is hurting other people more that it helps you, you have to
become cynical in order to support such a thing in your mind. And it's
evil because it is deliberately wasting the work done in society and
causing social decay.

same:
``It's no use trying to change those things, they're always going to
be bad. No point even hassling it. I'll just put in my time and
..... when it's over I'LL go away and try not to think about it any
more''. That kind of spirit, that unenthusiasm is what results from
not being permitted to make things better when you have feelings of
public spirit.

same: 
Please refuse to use to use the term ``pirate'' to describe somebody
who wishes to share software with his neighbor like a good citizen.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (p. 182) 
Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since
he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had
never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For
what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in
him.

Kenji Ekuan, Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (p. 23) 
Along with our own myriad deities, we welcome those of all other
religions and entertain and provide for them. There are any number of
examples of gods and goddesses who, having lost favor in their places
of origin, come to Japan where they are overjoyed at the excitement
they stimulate and the gorgeous hospitality received here.

Kenji Ekuan, Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox (p. 33) 
... It was a brilliant inspiration to perceive that the absolute and
typical arrangement would only be possible if a *box* were used. But
why a box? Because desires are myriad and possibilities limitless, its
creator chose a delimited form with an enclosing wall. A myriad of
desires may indeed be set in a well-defined one-foot-square enclosure;
and, having put in everything you can, the box is filled with a sense
of tension.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (p. 219)
... then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one
another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (p. 230)
"I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All
the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are
being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who
are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I
can't even give you hope that it will be different someday -- that
They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's
elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without
mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level -- and be like
you instead, simply here, simply alive..."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (p. 306)
And what sort of lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many
queer cups and saucers inform us.

Wes McCullough, 11/2000
It's not just our apartment, it's my apartment. 

Wes McCullough, 8/2005
Can this quote be stricken from the record? I just don't feel it's up
there with my best stuff.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (p. 344)
... Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more
tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his
cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that
provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee,
civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground
and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (p. 407)
... But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and
his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to
light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to
illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional
inoffensiveness by all to all.

Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter (p. 130)
I replied mildly that men in our country generally couldn't afford
more than one wife at a time. "Earn the money yourself by going to
market," Ava advised. "It only takes a small chicken to start with, if
you're a good trader."

Elenore Smith Bowen, Return to Laughter (p. 260)
What must be, can be endured. Of all the people there, only I knew it
didn't have to be. They had not learned to cry in their anguish, "This
must not be! Surely there must be a way!" That rebellious cry had
encouraged us to find a way. I had been used to mock at visionaries
and reformers. Face to face with the alternative, I was humbled. I
myself was not one who cried, "There must be a way." I had never seen
the need, for I had been born to a pleasant world. But here - where
people said, "It must be as it is. It must be endured": where their
only solution was "Grin and bear it," where I could not say, "This is
the best of all possible worlds" - here I was forced to consider the
possibility that even my world might be improved. I banished the
thought. I had grown fearful of the constant temptation to question my
own values that these people and this world afforded me. 

Junichirou Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (p. 32) 
... These women were in no way reticent about powdering themselves.
Every bit of exposed flesh -- even their backs and arms -- they
covered with a thick coat of white. Still they could not efface the
darkness that lay below their skin. It was as plainly visible as dirt
at the bottom of a pool of pure water. Between the fingers, around the
nostrils, on the nape of the neck, along the spine -- about these
places especially, dark, almost dirty, shadows gathered. But the skin
of the Westerners, even those of a darker complexion, had a limpid
glow. Nowhere were they tainted by this gray shadow. From the tops of
their heads to the tips of their fingers the whiteness was pure and
unadulterated. Thus it is that when one of us goes among a group of
Westerners it is like a grimy stain on a sheet of white paper. The
sight offends even our own eyes and leaves none too pleasant a
feeling.

Jack Weatherford "Blood on the Steppes: Ethnicity, Power, and
Conflict"
(from Spradley, McCurdy, "Conformity and Conflict - Readings in
Cultural Anthropology", p. 267)
"But the Russians stole our identity. We don't even know who we are,"
he responded in a slightly puzzled manner. "The Russians took
everything from us. They took our land and moved us away, and they
took our language. We don't have clothes to wear or even know what
religion we should be. Some people say that we are Muslims, but others
said we were Christians even before the Russians themselves became
Christians. I have seen rocks with pictures of Buddha and monsters
from India; maybe they were our gods. We don't even know why we have
this name. *Karakalpak*, they say it means 'black hat.' Why would we
be called 'black hat people'? Maybe we should wear a black hat, but
what kind? Who knows?"

Penelope Mason, History of Japanese Art (p. 256)
(poem trans. by Penelope Mason, from the Konjaku Monogatari, section
3, Secular Tales of Japan, volume 24, episode 48)
A painting that captures the *mono no aware* of classical Heian works
of literature is The Mirror Seller (fig. 276). It is a day during the
dreary month of the rainy season. The nobleman Oe Sadamoto, serving as
the provincial governor of Mikawa, is asked to look at a mirror which
a young woman has brought to sell. When he opens the box containing
the mirror, he finds a tattered piece of paper on which a poem has
been written. / Today when I looked, / the mirror had become / bright
with tears. / It speaks to us / of the shadows. / After reading the
poem Sadamoto has a sudden realization of the impermanence of life and
renews his resolve to become a priest.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Ch. 98, p. 482) 
... Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did
die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian
coast last voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple
boy, how to splice a rope!

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Ch. 102, p. 502) 
... Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying
shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen
weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither flows the fabric? what palace may
it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay
thy hand!--but one single word from thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the
figures float from forth the loom; the freshet-rushing carpet for ever
slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he
deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too,
who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we
hear the thousand voices that speak through it. For even so it is in
all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible among the
flying spindles; those same words are plainly heard without the walls,
bursting from the opened casements. Thereby have villainies been
detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in all this din of the
great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Ch. 81, p. 409) 
  It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard
from the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again
lowering her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a
Fin-Back, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of
its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout
is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskillful fishermen it is
often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were
now in valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all
sail, made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared
far to leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.
  Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, p. 25
quote from John Selden, c. 1650
The Turks tell their people of a Heaven where there is a sensible
Pleasure, but of a Hell where they shall suffer they don't know
what. The Christians quite invert this order; they tell us of a Hell
where we shall feel sensible Pain, but of a Heaven where we shall
enjoy we can't tell what. 

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, p. 25
As the learned told those who asked, St. Augustine had explained that
the hair shed in life and the fingernails cut would be restored in
full, though invisibly, in the new heavenly body. 

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, p. 24
With a like intent, some modern theologians call belief "the
interruption of faith"--virtually a heresy--because belief implies a
statement or thought "about" the object of faith, which distracts the
mind from being suffused by its reality. 

Thomas Jefferson, 1813 (from http://www.msnbc.com/news/594462.asp?cp1=1)
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispose himself of
it.

Euler, quoted from G. Polya, Induction and Analogy in Mathematics, p. 121
Since the fabric of the world is the most perfect and was established
by the wisest Creator, nothing happens in this world in which some
reason of maximum or minimum would not come to light.

Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule III, source: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/philosophy/kbryson/rulesfor.htm
It would be no good to count heads, and then follow the opinion that
has most authorities for it; for if the question that arises is a
difficult one, it is more credible that the truth of the matter may
have been discovered by few men than by many.

Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule XVI, source: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/philosophy/kbryson/rulesfor.htm
Matters, on the other hand, that do not demand our attention at the
moment, though they are needed for drawing conclusions, are best
represented by very brief symbols rather than by complete
diagrams. For in this way our memory cannot be misled, and at the same
time our thought will not be distracted by having to keep these things
in mind while we are engaged in other deductions.

Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule XVIII, source: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/philosophy/kbryson/rulesfor.htm
To this end only four operations are needed: addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division. The last two of these must, at this
stage, not be performed too often, in order to avoid gratuitous
complications, and also because they can be carried out more easily
later on.

Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land 
Attend me, Ben. Anybody can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a
pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can
look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A *great*
artist can look at an old woman, portray her *exactly* as she is
... and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be
... more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an
armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned
inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless
tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older that
eighteen in her heart ... no matter what the merciless hours have
done. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me --
but it *does* to them. *Look at her.*

"When I was one-and-twenty" A.E. Housman
When I was one-and-twenty / I heard him say again, / `The heart out of
the bosom / Was never given in vain; / 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty /
And sold for endless rue', / And I am two-and-twenty, / And oh, 'tis
true, 'tis true.  


"A Shropshire Lad" A.E. Housman, poem II
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
\                    
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
\
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

"Don Quixote" Miguel de Cervantes, Random House 1950. p. 331-332
You are all now of an Age to chuse the kind of Life you each of you
incline to; or, at least, to enter upon some Employment that may one
Day procure you both Honour and Profit: Therefore I design to divide
all I have into four Parts, of which I will give Three among You, and
retain the Fourth for myself, to maintain me in my old Age, as long as
it shall please Heaven to continue me in this Life. After that each of
you shall have receiv'd his Part, I could wish you would follow one of
the Employments I shall mention to you, every one as he finds himself
inclin'd. There is a Proverb in our Tongue, Which I take to contain a
great deal of Truth, as generally those sorts of Sayings do, being
short Sentences fram'd upon Observation and long Experience. This
Proverb runs thus, *Either the Church, the Sea, or the Court*. As if
it should Plainly say, that whosoever desires to thrive must follow
one of these three; either be a Church-man, or a Merchant and try his
Fortune at Sea, or enter into the Service of his Prince in the Court:
For, another Proverb says, that *King's Chaff is better than other
Mens Corn*. I say this, because I would have one of you follow his
studies, another I desire should be a Merchant, and the Third should
serve the King in his Wars; because it is a Thing of some difficulty
to get an entrance at Court; and though War does not immediately
procure Riches, yet it seldom fails of giving Honour and Reputation.

Same, p. 655
He that lives long, suffers much.

later, p. 720
Make Virtue the Medium of all thy Actions, and thou wilt have no Cause
to envy those whose Birth gives 'em the Titles of great Men, and
Princes; for Nobility is inherited, but Virtue is acquir'd: and Virtue
is worth more in it self, than Nobleness of Birth.

later, p. 721 (what does this mean?)
Let the Tears of the Poor find more Compassion, though not more
Justice, than the Informations of the Rich.

later, p. 726
And when a Man says, get out of my House; what would you with my Wife?
There's no Answer to be made. And again, whether the Pitcher hit the
Stone, or the Stone the Pitcher, 'tis bad for the Pitcher.

later, p. 727
Alas! the least Snip of my Soul's Nails (as a Body may say) is dearer
to me than my whole Body.

later, p. 733
How miserable is a poor Gentleman, who to keep up his Honour, starves
his Person, fares sorrily, or fasts unseen within his solitary narrow
Apartment; then putting the best Face he can upon the Matter, comes
out picking his Teeth, though 'tis but an honourable Hypocrisy, and
though he has eaten nothing that requires that nice Exercise!

later, p. 763
I shou'd not have believ'd it from any Body but you, though a Barefoot
Friar had sworn it.

later, p. 772
Come, Madam, said he, pray proceed, your Words and your Tears keep us
all in Suspence. I have but few Words more to add, answer'd she, but
many more Tears to shed; ...

p. 778
I have sent you, my Dear Friend, a String of Coral Beads, set in Gold;
I could wish they were Oriental Pearls for you Sake; but a small Token
may not hinder a great one.

p. 787
Be a Father to Virtue, but a Father-in-Law to Vice.

p. 846
Sancho pay'd the Host nobly, but advis'd him either to keep better
Provision in his Inn, or to commend it less.

p. 847
What's here, cried he? Who's that fumbles about me, and untrusses my
Points? 'Tis I, answer'd Don Quixote, I am come to repair thy
negligence, and to seek the Remedy of my Torments. I come to whip
thee, Sancho, and to discharge, in Part at least, that Debt for which
thou stand'st engaged. Dulcinea perishes, while thou livest careless
of her Fate, and I die with Desire. Untruss therefore freely and
willingly: For I am resolv'd, while we are here alone in this Recess,
to give thee at least two thousand Stripes.

p. 884
Consider, Sir, that his Cure can never benefit the Publick half so
much as his Distemper.

p. 900
Whene'er I think what mighty Pain,
    The Slave must bear who drags thy Chain,
Oh! Love, for Ease to Death I go,
    The Cure of Thee, the Cure of Life and Woe.
\
But when, alas! I think I'm sure
    Of that which must by killing cure,
The Pleasure that I feel in Death,
    Proves a strong Cordial to restore my Breath.
\
Thus Life each Moment makes me die,
    And Death it self new Life can give:
I Hopeless and Tormented lie,
    And neither truly Die nor Live.

(Ormsby, John, translator) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/996/996.txt
  When in my mind
I muse, O Love, upon thy cruelty,
  To death I flee,
In hope therein the end of all to find.
\
  But drawing near
That welcome haven in my sea of woe,
  Such joy I know,
That life revives, and still I linger here.
\
  Thus life doth slay,
And death again to life restoreth me;
  Strange destiny,
That deals with life and death as with a play!

"Don Quixote" Miguel de Cervantes, Random House 1950. p. 896
what the Eye ne'er sees, the Heart ne'er rues.

p. 919
I'll lay you a Wager, quoth Sancho, that before we be much older,
there will not be an Inn, a Hedge-Tavern, a blind Victualling-House,
nor a Barber's Shop in the Country, but what will have the Story of
Our Lives and Deeds pasted and painted along the Walls. But I could
wish with all my Heart, though, that they may be done by a better Hand
than the bungling Son of a Whore that drew these.

(need to get correct sentence here; quoted from "http://www.fvacc.org/wwwboard/messages/101.html"
Jesus taught that it is, "Not that which goeth into the mouth [that]
defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth
a man" (Matthew 15:11) .

http://www.sci.fi/~phinnweb/neuro/assassins2.html
The Imam Razi, one of the greatest thinkers of the time, refused to
acknowledge the Assassins as the most advanced theologians: so
Mohammed II sent an envoy to him, promising either a swift death by
dagger or a pension of several thousand gold pieces a year. Suddenly
the learned Imam's discourses seemed to lose their bite. One day, soon
afterwards, he was asked why he did not attack the Assassins as of
old. "Because," said the old man, with a nervous glance around the
assembly where a murderer might lurk, "their arguments are so sharp,
and pointed."

LUTHER BURBANK (http://users.lycaeum.org/~sky/data/aint/304.htm)
It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in
order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at
least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.

Jack Nicholson (http://users.lycaeum.org/~sky/data/aint/303a.htm)
JACK NICHOLSON:
My point of view, while extremely cogent, is unpopular.
\
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
Which is?
\
JACK NICHOLSON:
That the repressive nature of the legalities vis-a-vis drugs are
destroying the legal system and corrupting the police system.
\
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
Let's talk about acting for a minute.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (Bantam Classic Edition, p. 108) 
Now, I do not know whether I take upon myself a task so hard and so
full of difficulties that I shall have to abandon it, or whether I
shall be able to carry it through with perseverance, since my object
is to uphold a view that, as I have said, all writers have opposed.
Whatever the case, I do not believe and never shall believe it wrong
to defend any opinion with reason, without recourse to authority or
force.

Galois' literature examiner at the Ecole Normale (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Galois.html)
This is the only student who has answered me poorly, he knows
absolutely nothing. I was told that this student has an extraordinary
capacity for mathematics. This astonishes me greatly, for, after his
examination, I believed him to have but little intelligence. 

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (p. 74, HarperCollins 2001)
In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by
the suggestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one
moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be
despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from
others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack
individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure
of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it
poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is
in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful
corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the
greatest art.

Barbara G. Myerhoff, "Peyote Hunt - The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians", p. 33, quote from Ram`on Medina Silva
I began to have those dreams. Sometimes it would happen when I was
asleep, sometimes awake, when it was day. It happened one night that
Tayaup`a spoke to me. He said, "Look, son, do not worry. You must grow
a little more so you can go out and become wise, so that you can
support yourself." He said, "Do not worry, son. It will be good with
you one day." I heard everything. I saw my life. And then I was very
happy. I was still a small boy, five, six, seven years old. I would
wake up happy because Tayaup`a would say to me, "You are going to do
this and that and the other. You will make fine things, things of
color. You will understand this and that. It is for this that you were
born." At first, I was frightened. I did not know. I began to reflect.
I began to listen to them, to those old men when they told our
stories, that which is our history.

Albert Hofmann, "LSD - My Problem Child"
Because the enthusiasm necessary for successful endeavors cannot be
commanded, and because the enthusiasm was already present in me as far
as this problem was concerned, I decided to conduct the investigation
myself.

later:
The occurrence in higher plants (i.e., in the morning glory family) of
ergot alkaloids that hitherto had been known only as constituents of
lower fungi, contradicted the experience that certain substances are
typical of and restricted to respective plant families. It is indeed a
very rare exception to find a characteristic group of substances, in
this case the ergot alkaloids, occurring in two divisions of the plant
kingdom broadly separated in evolutionary history.

later:
My studies in the field of hallucinogenic drugs reached a kind of
logical conclusion with the investigations of ololiuhqui. They now
formed a circle, one could almost say a magic circle: the starting
point had been the synthesis of lysergic acid amides, among them the
naturally occurring ergot alkaloid ergobasin. This led to the
synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. The hallucinogenic
properties of LSD were the reason why the hallucinogenic magic
mushroom teonanacatl found its way into my laboratory. The work with
teonanacatl, from which psilocybin and psilocin were isolated,
proceeded to the investigation of another Mexican magic drug,
ololiuhqui, in which hallucinogenic principles in the form of lysergic
acid amides were again encountered, including ergobasin-with which the
magic circle closed.

later: (from Dr. Ernst Freiherrn von Bibra, Die Narkotischen
 Genussmittel und der Mensch)
 The individual who has taken too much hashish, and then runs
 frantically about in the streets and attacks everyone who confronts
 him, sinks into insignificance beside the numbers of those who after
 mealtime pass calm and happy hours with a moderate dose; and the
 number of those who are able to overcome the heaviest exertions
 through coca, yes, who were possibly rescued from death by starvation
 through coca, by far exceed the few coqueros who have undermined
 their health by immoderate use. In the same manner, only a misplaced
 hypocrisy can condemn the vinous cup of old father Noah, because
 individual drunkards do not know how to observe limit and moderation.

later: Goethe:
      "Were the eye not sunny,
      It could never behold the sun;
      If the power of the mind were not in matter,
      How could matter disturb the mind."

later: Ernst Junger 
... But wine is to the new substances as classical physics is to
modern physics. These things should only be tried in small circles. I
cannot agree with the thoughts of Huxley, that possibilities for
transcendence could here be given to the masses.

later:
Aldous Huxley died on 22 November of the same year, on the same day
President Kennedy was assassinated. From Laura Huxley I obtained a
copy of her letter to Julian and Juliette Huxley, in which she
reported to her brother- and sister-in-law about her husband's last
day. The doctors had prepared her for a dramatic end, because the
terminal phase of cancer of the throat, from which Aldous Huxley
suffered, is usually accompanied by convulsions and choking fits. He
died serenely and peacefully, however.
\
In the morning, when he was already so weak that he could no longer
speak, he had written on a sheet of paper: "LSD-try
it-intramuscular-100 mmg." Mrs. Huxley understood what was meant by
this, and ignoring the misgivings of the attending physician, she gave
him, with her own hand, the desired injection-she let him have the
moksha medicine.

later: poem by Walter Vogt 
      Leary in jail
      Gelpke is dead
      Treatment in the asylum
      is this your psychedelic
      revolution?
      Had we taken seriously something
      with which one only ought to play
      or
      vice-versa . . . 

later:
A misuse of knowledge and understanding, the products of searching
intelligence, could not have emerged from a consciousness of reality
in which human beings are not separated from the environment but
rather exist as part of living nature and the universe. All attempts
today to make amends for the damage through environmentally protective
measures must remain only hopeless, superficial patchwork, if no
curing of the "Western entelechy neurosis" ensues, as Benn has
characterized the objective reality conception. Healing would mean
existential experience of a deeper, self-encompassing reality.

Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of the Reading Gaol", pt. 3 st. 37:
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.

same:
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Under the little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
\
All that we know who lie in goal
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.


Barbara G. Myerhoff, The Peyote Hunt, p. 133
It appears that, for this ritual, sexuality is used to symbolize the
mortal condition which must be set aside for the peyote pilgrims to
become the deities.

Thomas McEvilley, "On the manner of addressing clouds". Artforum 1984.
p. 65
Critics commonly have asserted that music has no content. But clearly
Beethoven presents reality as stormy, turbulent, and full of
passionate striving, while Bach presents it as serene, cool
hyper-realms of sensuous mathematical order. 

Osamu Dazai, "The Setting Sun". Trans. Donald Keene. New Directions
Publishing, 18th printing. p. 35
"It must be a terrible ordeal for you." Mother's tone was warmly
understanding. It was her love which gave me the strength to make all
the rest of the calls, this time without once weeping.
    Wherever I went the people sympathized and attempted to console me.
Mr. Nishiyama's young wife -- I say young but she's already about
forty -- was the only one who rebuked me. "Please be careful in the
future. You may belong to the nobility, for all I know, but I've been
watching with my heart in my mouth the way you to have been living,
like children playing house. It's only a miracle you haven't had a
fire before, considering the reckless way you live. Please be sure to
take the utmost care from now on. If there had been a strong wind last
night, the whole village would have gone up in flames."
    I felt the truth of Mrs. Nishiyama's accusation. Things were
really exactly as she described, and I couldn't dislike her in the
least for having scolded me. Mother had tried to comfort me by making
the joke about the firewood being for burning, but supposing there had
been a strong wind, the whole village might have burned down, just as
Mrs. Nishiyama said. If that had happened, not even my suicide could
have served as sufficient apology, and my death would not only have
caused Mother's but have blackened forever my Father's name. I know
that the aristocracy is now not what it once was, but if it must
perish in any case, I would like to see it go down as elegantly as
possible. I couldn't rest in my grave if I died in atonement for
having started a fire. 

Osamu Dazai, "The Setting Sun". Trans. Donald Keene. New Directions
Publishing, 18th printing. p. 66-67
When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was
precocious. When I acted like an idler, people started the rumor that
I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn't write a novel, people said
I couldn't write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar.
When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor that I was rich.
When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type.
But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they
started the rumor that I was faking suffering.
    The world is out of joint.

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (p. 178, HarperCollins 2001)
The work had great success, which induced Grimmelshausen to add a
sixth book to the original five, and this is the reason why it cannot
be called a masterpiece: the latter portions were written under the
spell of the contemporary romances. Simplicissimus turns hero in the
literal sense; he wins honors and travels as far as Turkey, losing
along the way his appealing character and our interest.

Victor Turner, forward to The Peyote Hunt, p. 10 (Barbara G. Myerhoff)
"... This process of inversion itself stands for a process of creative
de-differentiation, a seminal undoing, which in implicit Huichol
thought endows the pilgrims with power to renew their social and
personal lives. They become, transiently, gods, founders, initiators,
unencumbered by the cultural baggage they normally rely upon and
prize. This is the moment of peril which cannot last but without which
their culture would have no dynamism.
"Paradoxically, the Huichol pilgrims, transformed into gods, become
essentially more human in their relationships with one another on the
pilgrim way and during their brief stay in the inverse world of
Wirikuta. This relationship is a *communitas*, which I have called "a
direct, immediate, and total confrontation of human identities"
(Turner 1969b: 132). By inverting the verbal and nonverbal symbols
which accomplish the segmentation of concrete, historical,
idiosyncratic individuals into roles and statuses in the secular
world, the pilgrims are liberated from the normative constraints of
that world and attain not only intimacy but also a degree of personal
vision into the "meaning of things" on the way and at the world's end.
Social structure separates men from gods, heaven from earth; social
anti-structure transiently but potently reunites them."

http://www.jimgeary.com/scrab/CGPFAQ.HTM#QQ1
Here is what I have dubbed the Fundamental Theorem of email
Forwarding:
\
No information can simultaneously be so important as to necessitate
bulk email forwarding and yet have no other medium for conveyance than
bulk email forwarding.

Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale. Taken from Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence p. 228
I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty; for
there is nothing the between but getting wenches with child, wronging
the ancientry, stealing, fighting, drinking.

Roger Bacon, c. 1260, quoted from Lynn White, Jr., "Medieval Technology & Social Change" p. 134
Machines may be made by which the largest ships, with only one man
steering them, will be moved faster than if they were filled with
rowers; wagons may be built which will move with incredible speed and
without the aid of beasts; flying machines can be constructed in which
a man ... may beat the air with wings like a bird ... machines will
make it possible to go to the bottom of seas and rivers.

Osama bin Laden, from audio message broadcast on an Arab television station 2003/2/11
Your wish to the crusaders should be as came in this verse of
poetry: "The only language between you and us is the sword that will
strike your necks."

Mark Vonnegut, "The Eden Express". 1975 Praeger Publishers, Inc. First Edition
p. 74
Things were still unbearably beautiful. I got this giddiness in my
stomach and walked around completely overwhelmed by the incredible
loveliness of the trees and the sky and the moss, infinitely delicate
worlds within worlds, and people's faces and the way they moved and my
own body and what a perfect machine it was and the stove and the
floors and our funky house. And everything fit together so perfectly.
It wasn't just in the way things looked. It was in the sounds of the
wind and the stream and the way things felt, the ground gushing ever
so slightly under my feet, the way everything smelled. It's
everywhere, it's everywhere. And it keeps getting better and better.
And I think to myself, Look Ma, no drugs.

p. 92
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
Insanity is the price of eternal vigilance.

p. 106
At first I'd had to strain to hear or understand them. They were soft
and working with some pretty tricky codes. Snap-crackle-pops, the
sound of the wind with blinking lights and horns for punctuation. I
broke the code and somehow was able to internalize it to the point
where it was just like hearing words. In the beginning it seemed
mostly nonsense, but as things went along they made more and more
sense. Once you hear the voices, you realize they've always been
there. It's just a matter of being tuned to them.

p. 117
I got up and went into the bathroom. The mirror in there was the best
way to broadcast back to planet earth.
  "First I'd like to thank all the billions of people, animals, and
plants who made this possible."

Larry Wall, Perl Apocalypse 3 (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/10/02/apocalypse3.html)
My overriding design principle has always been that the complexity of
the solution space should map well onto the complexity of the problem
space. Simplification good! Oversimplification bad! Placing artificial
constraints on the solution space produces an impedance mismatch with
the problem space, with the result that using a language that is
artificially simple induces artificial complexity in all solutions
written in that language.

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 385 (Harvest in Translation, 1994)
"What terrifies you most in purity?" I asked.
"Haste," William  answered.

Michael Crawford, http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/14/154022/753
I became very determined that the voices were going to stop. They
really bothered me. I worked hard to determine the difference between
real people talking and my voices. After a while I was able to find a
difference, although a disturbing one - the voices were more
convincing to me than what real people actually said. The concreteness
of my hallucinations' apparent reality always struck me immediately,
before I ever heard what they said.

later:
Probably the worst part of all about being paranoid is when the
paranoid has a real enemy, and that enemy uses the paranoid's illness
against them. You might beg others for help, but the person who is
trying to hurt you is easily able to convince them that your
complaints are just delusions, and so your pleas fall on deaf ears.

later:
The psychologist who did my intake at Dominican Hospital in 1994 told
me that in many more traditional cultures, the schizoaffective people
are the shamans. If you wonder why there are no more miracles as in
the Biblical days, it's because we lock our prophets up in mental
hospitals.

Umberto Eco, "A Theory of Semiotics", p. 7
Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can
be used in order to lie.

Charles S. Peirce, "Values in a Universe of Chance", ed. Philip P.
Wiener (Dover 1966 P. 11)
But if materialism without idealism is blind, idealism without
materialism is void.

Joseph Strauss, Chief Engineer of the Golden Gate (source: New Yorker Oct 13, 2003, p. 54)
As harps for the winds of heaven,
My web-like cables are spun;
I offer my span for the traffic of man,
At the gate of the setting sun.

Dr. Jerome Motto, who served on part of two golden gate bridge suicide barrier coalitions (source: New Yorker Oct 13, 2003, p. 59)
I went to this guy's apartment afterward with the assistant medical
examiner. The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare
apartment. He'd written a note and left it on his bureau. It said,
"I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the
way, I will not jump."

Daved Sedaris, "Tricked", The New Yorker, Nov 3, 2003, p. 53
For months I had protected and watched over these people, and now,
with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and
ugly. The shift wasn't gradual but immediate, and it provoked an
uncomfortable feeling of loss. We hadn't been friends, the Tomkeys and
I, but still I had given them the gift of my curiosity. Wondering
about the Tomkey family had made me feel generous, but now I would
have to shift gears, and find pleasure in hating them. The only
alternative was to do as my mother had instructed, and take a good
look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred
inward, and while I was determined not to fall for it, it was hard to
shake the mental picture snapped by her suggestion: Here is a boy
sitting on a bed, his mouth smeared with chocolate. He's a human
being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so
that others may be denied. Were this the only image in the world,
you'd be forced to give it your full attention, but fortunately there
were others. This stagecoach, for instance, coming round the bend with
a cargo of gold. This shiny new Mustang convertible. This teen-age
girl, her hair a beautiful mane, sipping Pepsi through a straw, one
picture after another, on and on until the news, and whatever came on
after the news.

Boris Nemtsov, personal correspondence to David Remnick, "Post-Imperial Blues", The New Yorker, Oct 13, 2003 p. 78
Revolutions eat their young, to say nothing of their young
politicians.


Arthur Rimbaud, "Season in Hell" quoted in The New Yorker, Nov 17, 2003, p. 154.
Dear Satan, you who so delight in a writer's inability to describe or
inform - watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the
damned.

Ruth Franklin, "Arse Poetica", New Yorker, Nov 17 2003, p. 158
Are the Africa letters actually "sacrilege," as Camus believed?
Certainly, they do not paint a complimentary portrait of Rimbaud,
revealing an almost completely unreflective and mercantile - in a
word, prosaic - man. Critics have tended to dismiss the second phase
of his life, to pretend that Rimbaud in Africa was literally "someone
else." No real poet, they worry, could have abandoned his art without
so much as a glance back.
\
But the more difficult question that Rimbaud's life raises is what to
make of an artist whose career ends before he reaches maturity. It is
disconcerting that a teen-ager should have created the fantastic
visions of "Le Bateau Ivre," the surrealism of "Voyelles," the imagery
of the Illuminations - and then dispensed with poetry altogether. The
life of the artist should be the most compelling bildungsroman of all;
the portrait of an artist as a young man implies that he has already
grown older. The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the
birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of
one.

Emerson
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a
disease of the intellect.

Emerson
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Eminem, "Say What You Say", The Eminem Show
A lot of truth is said in jest.

Atul Gawande, "The Mop-Up", The New Yorker 2004/1/12, p. 36
They would have to be trained in how to administer the vaccine, and
provided with transportation, vaccine, and insulated coolers and ice
packs to keep the vaccine cold. And they would have to fan out and
vaccinate every child under five years of age. Anything less than
ninety-percent coverage of the target population would be considered a
failure. 
/
I asked him how many people that would involve.
/
He checked his budget sheet. The plan, he said, was to employ
thirty-seven thousand vaccinators and four thousand health-care
supervisors, rent two thousand vehicles, supply more than eighteen
thousand insulated vaccine carriers, and have the workers go door to
door to vaccinate 4.2 million children. In three days.

Umberto Eco, "A Theory of Semiotics", p. 20
There is an old joke according to which two dogs meet in Moscow, one
of them very fat and wealthy, the other pathetically emaciated. The
latter asks the former: "How can you find food?". The former
zoosemiotically replies, "That's easy. Every day, at noon, I enter the
Pavlov Institute and I begin to salivate: immediately afterward a
conditioned scientist arrives, rings a bell and gives me food."

There are two types of programming languages; the ones that people
bitch about and the ones that no one uses.
 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

Ian Parker, "The Real McKee", New Yorker, Oct 20 2003, p. 82
Robert McKee, the screenwriting instructor, was having lunch the other
day at the back of a dark Irish bar on Lexington Avenue. He had just
told two hundred people in a Hunter College lecture hall that there
were five elements without which a thriller was probably not a
thriller: cheap surprise; a false ending; the protagonist shown to be
a victim; a speech made in praise of the villain; and a
hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain scene.

later, p. 92
He referred to "What Evil Means to Us", by C. Fred Alford, a
political-science professor at the University of Maryland, whose
thesis is that "doing evil is an attempt to transform the terrible
passivity and helplessness of suffering into activity".

later, p. 102, Rebecca Mead, "The Almost It Girl"
She admires Demi Moore for leaving the business for a few years and
taking her family off to Idaho, and says that she can imagine doing
the same thing at some point. But before she can escape she has to
arrive.

Christopher Caldwell, New Yorker, Mar 1, 2004 (p. 92)
You await a spouse who combines the kindness of your mom, the wit of
the smartest person you met in grad school, and the looks of someone
you dated in 1983 (as she was in 1983) ... and you wind up spending
middle age by yourself, watching the Sports Channel at 2 AM in a
studio apartment strewn with pizza boxes.

Kay Redfield Jamison, "An Unquiet Mind", Vintage Books, 1996 (p. 24)
The patient, in the meantime, stared through me for a very long time.
Then turning sideways so she would not see me directly, she explained
why she was in St. Elizabeths. Her parents, she said, had put a
pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red
balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be
silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that
she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball
would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her
head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if
I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole
thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball
mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her
eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I
never found out what the silver ball meant.

p. 117
Sometimes, after I had told him that I simply had to be alone, he
would call me later, at one or two o'clock in the morning, to see how
I was doing. He could tell from my voice what state I was in, and,
despite my pleas to be left alone, he would insist on coming over.
Often this was in the guise of "I can't sleep. You wouldn't refuse to
keep a friend company, would you?" Knowing full well that he was only
checking up on me, I would say, "Yes. Trust me. I can refuse. Leave me
alone. I'm in a foul mood." He would call back again in a few minutes
and say, "Please, please, pretty please. I really need the company. We
can go somewhere and get some ice cream." So we would get together at
some ungodly hour, I would be secretly and inexpressibly grateful, and
he somehow would have finessed it so that I didn't feel like I was too
huge a burden to him. It was a rare gift of friendship.

p. 151 (poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from An Unquiet Mind)
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain; 
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, - so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

p. 214 (quote from Melville)
Beneath those stars is a universe of gliding monsters.

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 179
I sat back letting my mind work without pushing it. Push your mind too
hard and it will fuck up like an overloaded switchboard, or turn on
you with sabotage ... And I had no margin for error. Americans have a
special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in
their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into
their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.

Nathan Leopold, "Life Plus 99 Years", p. 72
It was that same day that Mr. Darrow had told me he was going to show
those newspaper "fellers" -- going to show them that he could keep his
pants up without galluses. That's one argument he didn't win. I didn't
want him pleading for my life *sans* galluses. I was determined that
when, in the heat of oratory, his thumbs sought their habitual place
of rest, hooked under his galluses, they'd find it. I still wasn't
anxious that the sentence be life rather than death. I was anxious
that our side win. I begged him to postpone his demonstration until
after his speech.

p. 72
But if I were asked to name the two men who, in my opinion, came
closest to preaching the pure essence of love - love for the human
race - I think I'd feel compelled to name Jesus of Nazareth and
Clarence Darrow.
\
Clarence Darrow's speech in my defense lies before me as I write this.
But I am not going to quote it. It has been done so many times. It has
been issued separately in a little brochure. It is included in every
collection of famous speeches in the courts. The interested reader can
easily find it. Perhaps I have a subconscious resistance to putting
that majestic piece of prose beside my commonplace narrative.

p. 73
At nineteen, I was an economist. I didn't believe that anything should
go to waste. If I were to be hanged - and it looked very much as if I
might be - that event, too, should be prevented from being a total
waste. I could think of two things I would do to prevent it. First, I
would make a speech from the gallows which would incorporate all my
thinking, which would be a distillate of my philosophy. How callow can
you get?
\
But more than that, I could use myself as a laboratory animal. There
were a number of people who believed in the truth of spiritualism. I
didn't. I didn't have any doubts about it: it was a fake. But I
couldn't prove it. The rigorous proof of a general negative
proposition is always impossible. But I could add my mite of evidence.
Before my execution I would prepare a list of questions which, if I
survived as a conscious entity in the hereafter and if it were
possible to communicate through a medium with people still alive, I
would attempt to answer after my death. I'd take elaborate precautions
to protect the secrecy of the questions. No one should know what they
were; they should be locked in a safe-deposit vault. Then, after my
death, anyone who wished could attempt to communicate with my spirit.
If someone claimed to have done so, the questions on the list would be
in existence to prove or disprove his claim. Perhaps I got the idea
from Mr. Darrow. I know he made arrangements for someone to attempt to
communicate with him after his death. At any rate, the idea seemed
important to me. It kept me busy.

p. 78
If Judge Caverly meant literally what he said in his opinion, the
whole elaborate psychiatric defense presented in our behalf and the
herculean efforts of our brilliant counsel were of no avail. The only
thing that influenced him to choose imprisonment instead of death was
our youth; we need only have introduced our birth certificates in
evidence!

p. 79
In the courtroom, after the verdict was read, I had had time only to
shake hands with Mr. Darrow and to thank him and forgive him for
saving my life; then we were hustled off back to jail.

p. 79
Dick and I were rather pleased than not at this change of our
quarters, for the death cell, while not precisely luxurious, still was
far more comfortable than the regular cells.

Clarence Darrow, closing arguments of the trial of Leopold and Loeb
I feel that I should apologize for the length of time I have taken.
This case may not be as important as I think it is, and I am sure I do
not need to tell this court, or to tell my friends that I would fight
just as hard for the poor as for the rich. If I should succeed in
saving these boys' lives and do nothing for the progress of the law, I
should feel sad, indeed. If I can succeed, my greatest reward and my
greatest hope will be that I have done something for the tens of
thousands of other boys, for the countless unfortunates who must tread
the same road in blind childhood that these boys have trod; that I
have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice
with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

Judge Caverly, decision of the trial of Leopold and Loeb
It would have been the path of least resistance to impose the extreme
penalty of the law. In choosing imprisonment instead of death, the
court is moved chiefly by the consideration of the age of the
defendants...Life imprisonment may not, at the moment, strike the
public imagination as forcibly as would death by hanging; but to the
offenders, particularly of the type they are, the prolonged suffering
of years of confinement may well be the severer form of retribution
and expiation.

Allen Ginsburg, Howl, p. 14
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
    the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
    the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
    and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
    sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
    threads of the craftsman's loom

same:
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
    incantations which in the yellow morning were
    stanzas of gibberish

Federico Garcia Lorca
In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday, Penguin Books, p. 17
'I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out
even with an apology,' said Gregory very calmly. 'No duel could wipe
it out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only
one way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I
am going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to *prove*
to you that you were wrong in what you said.'
\
'In what I said?'
\
'You said that I was not serious about being an anarchist.'

same, p. 23 '... First of all, what is it really all about? What is it
you object to? You want to abolish Government?'
\
'To abolish God!' said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. 'We do
not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that
sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the
Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny
all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and
treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly
sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man!
We hate Rights and we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.'

same, p. 41
The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more
did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time
the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty
well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

same, p. 43
'The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,' pursued the
policeman. 'The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.'

same, p. 45
'... We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are
the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember
the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the
dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most
dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my
heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they
merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the
property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect
it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to
destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect
marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even
ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as
marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a
greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what
seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself,
their own as much as other people's.'

same, p. 149
'Do you see this lantern?' cried Syme in a terrible voice. 'Do you see
the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You
did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey,
twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There
is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was
not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and
rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy
mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this
one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where
your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.'

H. P. Lovecraft
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds
sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of
the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in
the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in
unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

Johnny Cash?, The Wall
There's never been a man ever shook this can
But I know a man who tried
The newspapers called it a jailbreak plan
But I know it was suicide
I know it was suicide

David Denby, "Drinking and Driving," The New Yorker, Oct 25, 2004, p. 96
Thomas Haden Church, from the NBC series "Wings," has been all too
well cast as a second-rate TV actor; his Jack really is a bit of a
dull fellow, but he loves Miles and believes in him, and that belief
frees Miles to confront the worst in himself and to find a bottom to
his self-pity.

same
When he talks about his beloved Pinot grape - it's thin-skinned,
difficult to handle, but potentially sublime - he's talking about
himself, of course, but we feel that he's posing, that he's
extravagantly demanding of life so that he will always fail, and that
he would rather fail than pull himself together and make the best of
what he's got.

Philip K. Dick, "A Scanner Darkly", Vintage Books, 1991 (p. 93)
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters
and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty
and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms
and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that
in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes - and in a year in which an
outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County - and
when they saw what it was and explained, she had said the words that
had become for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and
despised:
\
If I had known it was harmless
I would have killed it myself.
\
That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in
their straight foes, assuming they had foes; anyhow, a person like
well-educated-with-all-the-financial-advantages Thelma Kornford became
at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day,
pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to
her perplexity.

same, p. 187:
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions looking
down at him disapprovingly.
\
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern
expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it
carried an enormous scroll.
\
"You're going to read me my sins," Charles Freck said.
\
The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
\
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, "and it's going to take a
hundred thousand hours."
\
Fixing its many compound eyes at him, the creature from between
dimensions said, "We are no longer in the mundane universe.
Lower-plane categories of material existence such as 'space' and
'time' no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the
transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in
shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end."

Rachel Cohen, "Can You Forgive Him?", The New Yorker, Nov 8, 2004 (p. 65)
Ignoring Mill's finest hours, those given to articulating a doctrine
of human liberty resolutely opposed to Carlyle's dark visions, the
historian still wasn't sure what had happened between him and his
friend. "Many's the time," Carlyle said to Norton, "I've thought o'
writin' to him and sayin' 'John Mill, what is it that parts you and
me?' But that's all over now."

Burkhard Bilger, "God Doesn't Need Ole Anthony", The New Yorker, Dec 6, 2004 (p. 79)
Anthony has never expected his preaching to become popular. "It costs
you your hopes and dreams," he says. But he believes that if just a
few more people in every community shared his values they could
transform society. There are some three hundred thousand churches in
the United States and, on any given night, some six hundred thousand
homeless people. If every church could adopt just one or two of the
homeless, he says, a seemingly intractable problem might be solved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle
For Carlyle the hero was somewhat similar to Aristotle's "Magnanimous"
man - a person who flourished in the fullest sense. However, for
Carlyle, unlike Aristotle, the world was filled with contradictions
with which the hero had to deal. All heroes will be flawed. Their
heroism lay in their creative energy in the face of these
difficulties, not in their moral perfection. To sneer at such a person
for their failings is the philosophy of those who seek comfort in the
conventional. Carlyle called this 'valetism', from the expression 'no
man is a hero to his valet'.

Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol
For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
  That in the spring-time shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
  With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
  Before it bears its fruit!

same
Yet each man kills the thing he loves 
   By each let this be heard, 
Some do it with a bitter look, 
   Some with a flattering word, 
The coward does it with a kiss, 
   The brave man with a sword!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
In the later Roman jurisprudence, from which many of our modern laws
descend, verbal injuries are dealt with in the edict under two heads.
The first comprehended defamatory and injurious statements made in a
public manner (convicium contra bonos mores). In this case the essence
of the offence lay in the unwarrantable public proclamation. In such a
case the truth of the statements was no justification for the
unnecessarily public and insulting manner in which they had been made.
The second head included defamatory statements made in private, and in
this case the offence lay in the imputation itself, not in the manner
of its publication. The truth was therefore a sufficient defence, for
no man had a right to demand legal protection for a false reputation.
Even belief in the truth was enough, because it took away the
intention which was essential to the notion of injuria.

Colm Toibin, Love in a Dark Time, p. 139 (about Francis Bacon)
Most of what he said about his work was enlightening and helpful;
sometimes, however, it was the opposite. He refused to recognize that
certain images he created had a powerful significance, perhaps for
good reasons wanting to maintain a sort of purity of purpose, at least
in theory. When he put a swastika on a figure's armband, for example,
he insisted it was for entirely formal, pictorial purposes, and had
nothing to do with Nazi Germany. He also insisted that the cages he
made for some of his figures helped him solve a problem of form in the
painting and had no meaning beyond that. He said that he was
fascinated by the Crucifixion, not because of its religious, or indeed
anti-religious, possibilities as much as for 'the very fact that the
central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated
position, which gives it from a formal point of view, greater
possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same
level'.

Repo Man
Duke: The lights are growing dim Otto. I know a life of crime has led
 me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what
 I am.
Otto: That's bullshit. You're a suburban white punk just like me.
Duke: Yeah, but it still hurts.

Memorials and Other Papers V1, by Thomas de Quincey
The case was this: I neglected my dress in one point habitually; that
is, I wore clothes until they were threadbare--partly in the belief
that my gown would conceal their main defects, but much more from
carelessness and indisposition to spend upon a tailor what I had
destined for a bookseller. At length, an official person, of some
weight in the college, sent me a message on the subject through a
friend. It was couched in these terms: That, let a man possess what
talents or accomplishments he might, it was not possible for him to
maintain his proper station, in the public respect, amongst so many
servants and people, servile to external impressions, without some
regard to the elegance of his dress.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey
At any rate, he who summons me to send out a large freight of
self-denial and mortification upon any cruising voyage of moral
improvement, must make it clear to my understanding that the concern
is a hopeful one. At my time of life (six-and-thirty years of age) it
cannot be supposed that I have much energy to spare; in fact, I find
it all little enough for the intellectual labours I have on my hands,
and therefore let no man expect to frighten me by a few hard words
into embarking any part of it upon desperate adventures of morality.

DSM-IV-TR, p. 578 (autogynephilia, description)
Some men, for example, masturbate while picturing themselves as nude
women, focusing on their imagined breasts and vulvas; others
masturbate while picturing themselves engaged in some stereotypically
feminine activity such as knitting.

Eugene Silberberg, Wing Suen, "The Structure of Economics, A Mathematical Analysis", p. 253
This admittedly extreme view of the role of theorizing is not lightly
taken. The reason is that the *stupidity* hypothesis and the
*disequilibrium* or *slow adjustment* hypothesis are consistent with
all observable behavior and therefore are unable to generate refutable
implications. Anything in the world can be explained on the basis that
the participants are stupid, or ill-informed, or slow to react, or are
somehow in disequilibrium, without theories to describe the alleged
phenomena. These terms are metaphors for a lack of useful theory or
the failure to adequately specify the additional constraints on
consumers' behavior.

Colm Toibin, "Love in a Dark Time", p. 84 (of Oscar Wilde)
He invented self-invention.

Colm Toibin, "Love in a Dark Time", p. 150 (in section on Bacon, quoted from issue of "Documents", Bataille)
The slaughter-house arises out of religion in the sense that the
temple of distant epochs served a double function, being used at the
same time for supplication and for killings. From this resulted a
disturbing coincidence between mythological mysteries and the
lugubrious grandeur of places where blood flows.

Colm Toibin, "Love in a Dark Time", p. 161 (quoting Francis Bacon)
The artist's studio isn't the alchemist's study where he searches for
the philosopher's stone - something which doesn't exist in our world -
it would perhaps be more like the chemist's laboratory, which doesn't
stop you imagining that some unexpected phenomena might appear; quite
the opposite, in fact.

Thomas De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater", Oxford University Press, p. 5
If a man "whose talk is of oxen," should become an Opium-eater, the
probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) - he will
dream about oxen: whereas, in the case before him, the reader will
find that the Opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and
accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of *his* dreams (waking or
sleeping, day-dreams or night-dreams) is suitable to one who is in
that character,
\
  Humani nihil a se alienum putat.*
*("he deems nothing human alien to him"; from Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, 77)

same, p. 19 (of a Mr. Brown, or Brunell, who was offering De Quincey free lodging in London after he had run away)
But who, and what, meantime, was the master of the house himself?
Reader, he was one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments
of the law, who - what shall I say? - who, on prudential reasons, or
from necessity, deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too
delicate a conscience: (a periphrasis which might be abridged
considerably, but *that* I leave to the reader's taste:) in many walks
of life, a conscience is a more expensive incumbrance, than a wife or
a carriage; and just as people talk of "laying down" their carriages,
so I suppose my friend, Mr --- had "laid down" his conscience for a
time; meaning, doubtless, to resume it as soon as he could afford it.
The inner economy of such a man's daily life would present a most
strange picture, if I could allow myself to amuse the reader at his
expense.

same, p. 20
Being myself at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of
the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female
peripatetics who are technically called Street-walkers.

Colm Toibin, "Love in a Dark Time", p. 171 (quoting Elizabeth Bishop)
Because of my era, sex, situation, education etc I have written so far
[in 1964], what I feel is a rather "precious" kind of poetry, although
I am very much opposed to the precious. One wishes things were
different, that one could begin all over again.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Baltasar Graci'an, 1647
*Don't express your ideas too clearly.* Most people think little of
what they understand, and venerate what they do not.

DSM-IV-TR, p. 527
Individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder score toward the upper
end of the distribution on measures of hypnotizability and
dissociative capacity. There are reports of variation in physiological
function across identity states (e.g., differences in visual acuity,
pain tolerance, symptoms of asthma, sensitivity to allergens, and
response of blood glucose to insulin).

Thomas Wolfe, "Of Time and the River" (1935)
O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in
all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days,
the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss,
but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching
in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our
loneliness.

"Imagine a school with children that can read or write, but with teachers who cannot, and you have a metaphor of the Information Age in which we live. "
-Peter Cochrane (from http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/)

Michal Pollan, "The Botany of Desire", p. 119
The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing
instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally
poisoned. Witches and sourcerers cultivated plants with the power to
"cast spells" - in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion
recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna,
hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita Muscaria), and the skins of
toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These
ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying
ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginally using a
special dildo. This was the "broomstick" by which these women were
said to travel.

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (Wyatt Mason, "Rimbaud Complete", p. 197)
Science, the new nobility. Progress. The world turns. Why wouldn't it?
\
Numerical visions. We close in upon the *Animus*. What I say is
irrefutable, oracular. I understand, and not knowing how to explain
myself but in pagan words, I'd be better off shutting my mouth.

later:
We're off! The march, the burden, the desert, the boredom, the anger.
\
What flag will I bear? What beast worship? What shrine besiege? What
hearts break? What lies tell? - And walk through whose blood?

later:
In cities, mud suddenly seemed red and black, like a mirror when a
lamp is moved through an adjoining room, like treasure found in a
forest. Good luck, I cried, and I saw a sky flooded with smoke and
flame; and to my left, to my right, all the world's riches burned like
a billion thunderbolts.

later:
I saw myself in front of an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping
incomprehensible sorrows and forgiving them, like Joan of Arc:
"Priests, professors, masters: you falter bringing me to justice. I
was never one of you; I was never Christian; my race *sang* upon the
rack; I don't understand your laws; I have no moral compass, I'm a
beast: you falter..."

later:
I bury the dead in my belly.

Paul Hoffman, "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" (?)
"What do you think?" I finally asked. [Erdos] shook his head from side
to side. "It's okay," he said. "Except for one thing. . . . You
shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine," he said. "It's
not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are
thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take
drugs to succeed."

Friedrich Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil"
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you.

Charles Peirce, Illustrations of the Logic of Science, "The Essential Writings", p. 123
Logicality in regard to practical matters is the most useful quality an animal
can possess, and might, therefore, result from the action of natural selection;
but outside of these it is probably of more advantage to the animal to have his
mind filled with pleasing and encouraging visions, independently of their
truth; and thus, upon unpractical subjects, natural selection might occasion a
fallacious tendency of thought.

Janet Malcolm, "Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession", p. 57
Janet Malcolm: Since ambition is the problem?
\
Aaron Green (pseudonym): Right. There's no question about it. Ambition
is the problem. But I think you'd be surprised by what the ambition is
about. It isn't just getting out there and killing my father. That's
just part of it. There are other things, too. Well, I'll be frank.
It's the desire to be a beautiful woman. You'll find all kinds of
surprises in analysis.
\
Janet Malcolm: Somehow, that doesn't surprise me about you.

Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Climate of Man - I", The New Yorker, April 25, 2005, p. 56
Perovich noted that the earth's climate system is so vast that it is
not easily altered. "On the one hand, you think, It's the earth's
climate system, it's big; it's robust. And, indeed, it has to be
somewhat robust or else it would be changing all the time." On the
other hand, the climate record shows that it would be a mistake to
assume that change, when it comes, will come slowly. Perovich offered
a comparison that he had heard from a glaciologist friend. The friend
likened the climate to a rowboat: "You can tip and then you'll just go
back. You can tip it and just go back. And then you tip it and you get
to the other stable state, which is upside down."

Captain Oates, Terra Nova Expedition to Antarctica (last words)
I am just going outside - I may be some time.

Edward G. Nilges, from Amazon.com Review of Janet Malcolm, "Psychoanalysis"
Janet writes before developments in cognitive neuropsychiatry and
drugs that have regressed the psychiatric profession to about the time
of the phrenology that so outraged Hegel, by so reifying mental states
in the sick and the normal as to be absurd.

Trent Reznor, "Up above it - Trent Reznor Sees the Light", Vice Magazine, Vol 12 No 3
I remember being on stage in '94-'95, which was this tour where it
felt like we could do no wrong. I was like, "I'm going on the road for
two and a half years. I'll just put my shit in storage." I remember
being on stage, seeing all these people with their arms in the air,
relating to my music, and just thinking, "You fuckers all get to go
home to your lives. This is my life. I'm a thing now. I'm not a person
anymore."

Friedrich Nietzche, "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life", quoted from Michael Pollan, "The Botany of Desire"
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know
what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest,
digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to
day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus
neither melancholy nor bored....
\
A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of
your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like
to answer, and say, 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to
say' - but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.

Janet Malcolm, "Psychoanalysis - The Impossible Profession", p. 16
(from "a letter that Schiller wrote in 1788 in reply to a friend who had complained of meager literary production", quoted by Freud in "The Interpretation of Dreams")
The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint
imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more
concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the
creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of
the ideas as they come pouring in - at the very gateway, as it were.
Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very
fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes
after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem
equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason
cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought
long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other
hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me -
relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and
only then does it look them through and examine them in mass.... You
critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or
frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to
be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter
duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You
complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and
discriminate too severely.

same, p. 26
In "Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis" (1912),
Freud describes the special way of listening to the patient that the
psychoanalyst must learn. It is as different from ordinary listening
as the patient's free association is different from ordinary talking;
in fact, it is a counterpart of free association. "It consists simply
in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in
maintaining the same 'evenly suspended attention' (as I have called
it) in the face of all that one hears," Freud writes, and he cautions
the analyst not to let anything - therapeutic ambition above all - get
in the way of the aimless, Zen-like state of desirelessness in which
he listens, bending "his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward
the transmitting unconscious of the patient."

same, p. 32
The new "structural theory" accounted for the new element by
conceiving of the mind in terms of three psychic agencies: the ego,
the id, and the superego, which stand for reason, passion, and
conscience, and whose fate it is to be locked in perpetual conflict.
In this view, the neurotic is a person whose ego has become weakened
by the conflict with its internal enemies as well as by its
responsibilities as the mind's emissary to external reality. (The
psychotic is someone whose ego has abdicated from this responsibility -
as it does nightly in normal people in the psychosis known as
dreaming.) The analyst comes to the aid of the beleaguered ego and
joins forces with it against its internal enemies. Invariably, the
cause of the trouble, the start of the debility, is traced back to
childhood - to a particular, fateful, universal experience called the
Oedipus complex. The complex describes the shattering, by fear of
castration, of a small boy's dream of making love to his mother, and
the formation of the superego as a permanent memorial to his dread.
"The paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more
immoral than he believes but also far more moral than he knows" (as
Freud wrote in *The Ego and the Id*) arises from this dire early
experience.

same, p. 33
Freud's association of morality with castration anxiety - "the little
lover" of four or five gives up his ambitions toward his mother
*fast*, and forever, when "more or less plainly, more or less
brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values
so highly will be taken away from him" - led him to the inescapable
conclusion that women, to whom the worst had already happened, must be
less moral than men. "I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to
give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically
normal is different from what it is in men," Freud wrote in "Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the
Sexes" (1925).

same, p. 33 (quoting Freud)
"We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by
the denials of the feminist, who are anxious to force us to regard the
two sexes as completely equal in position and worth; but we shall, of
course, willingly agree that the majority of men are also far behind
the masculine idea, and that all human individuals, as a result of
their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in
themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure
masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of
uncertain content."

same, p. 34
While belief in the Oedipus complex is universal among psychoanalysts,
there is a wide disagreement about whether it is indeed the central
experience of childhood and the greatest problem of early life. There
are schools of analytic thought that hold earlier experiences to be
more crucial. The Kleinians, for example, put the action as far back
as the first year of life. They see the first faint stirrings of guilt
in the mewling and puking of six-month-olds - or, rather, they
reconstruct it from the analyses of children and adults - and place
the formation of a moral sense at around nine months, when a baby
enters what they call "the depressive position." This Blakean state
reflects the baby's appalled realization of what he is doing to his
mother as he nurses at her breast - the "hole" he is leaving in her as
he sucks - and his wish to make reparation.

same, p. 76 (Aaron Green)
"I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and
flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate
was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked
rhetorically, 'What would you call an interpersonal relationship where
infantile wishes, and defenses against those wishes, get expressed in
such a way that the persons within that relationship don't see each
other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in
terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts? What
would you call that?' And Bak looked over at me ironically and said,
'I'd call that life.'"

same, p. 80
To [George] Orwell, there was no higher ideal than the humanistic one.
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that
one *is* sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty,
that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be
defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals," Orwell wrote, with
moving irascibility. To the notion that the ordinary man is a failed
saint Orwell retorted, "Many people genuinely do not wish to be
saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to
sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings."

same, p. 37
Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's circle of early analysts, was a still
worse offender than the Master. In his biography of Freud, Jones
reprints a letter that Freud wrote to Ferenczi in 1931 playfully
admonishing him to stop kissing his patients - which in its jocularity
is as interesting for what it reveals about Freud's free-and-easy
attitude toward therapy as for the evidence it furnishes of Ferenczi's
far-outness. "Now picture what will be the result of publishing your
technique," Freud wrote. "There is no revolutionary who is not driven
out of the field by a still more radical one. A number of independent
thinkers in matters of technique will say to themselves: Why stop at a
kiss? Certainly one gets further when one adopts 'pawing' as well,
which, after all, doesn't make a baby. And then bolder ones will come
along who will go further, to peeping and showing - and soon we shall
have accepted in the technique of analysis the whole repertoire of
*demi-viergerie* and petting parties, resulting in an enormous
increase of interest in psychoanalysis among both analysts and
patients...."

same, p. 45
"Suppose an analyst were to fall asleep during a session, or to forget
an appointment with a patient. Should he apologize, explain, and
discuss the reasons for his action with his patient?" Brenner asks in
his book *Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict* (1976). He
gives this rather magnificent answer:
\
Many analysts would say he should ... and their arguments for doing so
are persuasive. Yet I believe the better course to follow is the usual
one of encouraging a patient to express *his* thoughts and feelings
about what has happened. Only in that way can one learn whether a
patient has taken his analyst's mistake as a slight that has offended
and angered him, or as a sign of weakness that allows him to feel
superior and even triumphant, or as a welcome excuse for anger, etc. A
conscientious analyst will naturally regret such a mistake, he will
certainly try, through self-analysis, to discover his unconscious
reasons for having acted as he did, but he will be well advised to
maintain an analytic attitude even to such an event, and not to assume
what it must mean to his patient without hearing what his patient has
to say. It is presumptuous to act the analyst, unbidden, in a social
or family situation. It is a technical lapse to be other than an
analyst in one's relation with an analytic patient.

same, p. 46 (quoting Brenner)
It is true that it often does no harm for an analyst to be thus
conventionally "human". Still, there are times when his being "human"
under such circumstances can be harmful, and one cannot always know in
advance when those times will be. As an example, for his analyst to
express sympathy for a patient who has just lost a close relative may
make it more difficult than it would otherwise be for the patient to
express pleasure or spite or exhibitionistic satisfaction over the
loss.

same, p. 55 (w/ Aaron Green)
I said, "How do you know it was the analysis that changed you, and not
simply the fact of getting older?"
\
That's a very common and firmly held idea," he said. "The idea that
what happens in analysis would have happened anyway - that people
'naturally' change as life goes on, and analysts take credit for
changes they aren't responsible for. I've had thoughts like that
myself about my analysis, and have had to stop myself. I've had to
remind myself of how rigidly determined our lives are - how
predictable and repetitive, how encrusted and hardened, how resistant
to change. If we changed as easily as it's claimed, there wouldn't be
people going into analysis at forty and fifty; they would all have
changed 'naturally' by then into wise, mature, moderately contented
people. A person who goes into analysis in his twenties, as many
people are doing today, can't see this as well as a person who goes
into analysis later on, after his life has become hopelessly,
repetitively unsatisfying, after he has seen himself make the same
mistake over and over again, after he has come to feel how trapped he
is and to understand how little freedom he has. The young person whose
life hasn't taken a course yet can deceive himself into thinking that
his life has unlimited potential, though in fact it is already limited
and determined. I made that mistake earlier, but I'm old enough now to
have a sense of how my life would have gone if I hadn't had analysis.

same, p. 58 (w/ Aaron Green)
"But what is it all about? What are they hiding? What could there be
to hide in an analytic institute?"
\
"I don't know exactly. But I suspect that this kind of peculiar,
suspicious, guilt-ridden behavior has something to do with the
training analysis and its special difficulties. Analysts learn to do
analysis by being analyzed themselves - a rather remarkable method of
professional training. It's as if a surgeon learned to do surgery by
being operated on. And yet the training analysis isn't exactly like
the regular therapeutic analysis, either. An analysis ends when the
patient resolves his transference neurosis - when he finally accepts
the fact that the analyst is *not*, *not*, *not* going to fulfill the
wishes the patient had as a child toward his parents, that it just
isn't going to happen that way, that he must renounce these wishes
toward the analyst and fulfill them in his own life, in his work, in
his attachments, through his children. In other words, that he is an
adult and must put away childish things. Which is *horribly painful*.
O.K. Now, imagine the situation of the candidate when his analysis
ends. Instead of going his way like the ordinary analysand, he joins
the profession of his analyst - joins the very institute of which his
analyst is a member, and begins to make his way up in the hierarchy
his analyst has already reached the top of. As time goes on, the
wishes that the candidate has had to renounce and sublimate - but that
are always there - are powerfully reactivated. He begins to dare hope
that maybe he *will*, after all, be admitted into the parental
bedroom, that he *will* be treated to the secrets of the parents, that
he *will* find out what they 'do' in there, that he *will* be able to
form alliances with one or another of them. Not everyone feels like
that - some people drop out of the institute world and go their own
way - but the majority, like me, for whatever infantilely motivated
reason, hope that they will get into that bedroom: that they will
become training analysts."

same, p. 63 (Aaron Green)
"... I remember once one of my classmates - a very fiery, radicalized
fellow, who has since moved to the suburbs and become dull and rich -
was haranguing a group of us about organizing, when one of the more
authoritarian people on the Educational Committee came into the room.
He listened, and then, looking at my classmate as if he were some
unpleasantness, said silkily, 'Why an organization? The important
thing is to say whatever comes into your mind.' I thought, Son of a
bitch! *But*. *But*. He was right. The motives of student
organizations are nothing if not transferential."

same, p. 64
"The Educational Committee people told me that from twenty to
twenty-five percent of the candidates don't graduate, and that most of
these are asked to resign. How did you feel about the threat of
expulsion when you were a candidate?"
\
"I didn't feel it as a threat, exactly. But the possibility was always
there. I had several friends who were asked to resign."
\
"After a long time in training?"
\
"Yes, sometimes after many years."
\
"What does it mean when someone is dropped?"
\
"I don't know. These things are shrouded in mystery and a tremendous
amount of secrecy - secrecy that is observed not only by the Institute
but by the person dropped. In general, either people founder on their
casework or they are unanalyzable. Character also counts. There was a
man in my class who had a terrible character. He was slick, sharp, he
lied, he wasn't *nice*. It enraged me to see him at the Institute and
to think that he would be practicing analysis. Well, one day he wasn't
there anymore, and I was enormously relieved and glad that he had been
found out and booted."

same, p. 75
I mentioned a paper I had read by Ralph Greenson on "the
non-transference relationship," in which the author relates a number
of horrendous stories about rigid beginning analysts. In one of these
cautionary tales, a beginning analyst comes to his supervisor and
tells him about an oddly unsatisfying session he has had with a
patient who came in with his head swathed in an enormous bandage.
Following strict analytic technique, the young analyst made no comment
on the bandage, and silently waited for the patient to start
free-associating. No associations came: the patient was struck
absolutely speechless by the analyst's unbelievable insensitivity and
inhumanity. IN another example (this one appears in Greenson's book
*The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis*), an anxious young
mother tells her candidate analyst how desperately worried she is
about her ailing baby. The analyst says nothing. His silence and lack
of compassion cause the patient to lapse into a miserable, tearful
silence of her own. Finally, the analyst says, "You're resisting." The
patient quits the analysis, saying to the analyst, "You're sicker than
I am." Greenson, concurring with this opinion, advises the candidate
to seek further analysis.
\
"Yeah", Aaron said. "I know of those stories of Greenson's. They are
very heartrending and affecting and completely off the mark. If you
look at them closely, they just don't hold up. In the case of the
mother with the sick baby, it wasn't the analyst's lack of
'compassion' that caused the patient to break off treatment - it was
his poor analytic technique. There are a hundred things he could have
said to her other than 'You're resisting' which would have been
helpful, which would have led somewhere, but which would have been
neutral. The job of the analyst isn't to offer the patient sympathy;
it's to lead him to insight. It was the same thing with my first case.
The trouble wasn't lack my lack of compassion of the patient but my
lapses from analytic neutrality. It isn't that I should have accepted
the presents she brought me - though maybe I could have refused them
less priggishly - but that I should have analyzed the motive that lay
behind the gift-giving in a more rigorous and thoroughgoing manner."

same, p. 78 (Aaron Green)
"... I knew I should I have waited to learn what the patient's response
to my lateness was, instead of rushing in with my apology. In my
self-analysis of the lapse, a rather vicious analyst joke came to
mind, which goes like this: A new woman patient comes to a male
analysts office, and he says, 'Take off your clothes and get on the
couch.' She does so, and the analyst gets on top of her. Then he says,
'You can get dressed now and sit in the chair.' She does so, and the
analyst says, 'O.K. We've taken care of my problem. What's yours?'
It's a silly joke and a vicious one, but it gets at something
fundamental. In that situation of being late, I acted like the analyst
in the joke. I put my own interests before those of the patient. I
felt guilty about my lateness, and by apologizing I was seeking
forgiveness from the patient. I was saying to him, 'Let's take care of
my problem - never mind about yours.'"

same, p. 108 (Aaron Green)
"But that *isn't* what the analyst works to achieve with his patients.
This is a popular myth about analysis - that it makes the patient a
clearer thinker, that it makes him wise and good, that people who have
been analyzed know more than other people do. Analysis isn't
intellectual. It isn't moral. It isn't educational. It's an operation.
It rearranges things inside the mind the way surgery rearranges things
inside the body - even the way an automobile mechanic rearranges
things under the hood of a car. It's that impersonal and that radical.
And the changes achieved are very small. We live our lives according
to the repetition compulsion, and analysis can go only so far in
freeing us from it. Analysis leaves the patient with more freedom of
choice than he had before - but how much more? This much: instead of
going straight down the meridian, he will go five degrees, ten degrees
- maybe fifteen degrees if you push very hard - to the left or to the
right, but no more than that."

same, p. 113 (Aaron Green)
"Analyst says to another analyst, 'How are you?' and the other analyst
says, 'I wonder what he meant by that.'"

same, p. 114
"I had a patient once who made me horribly sleepy. I couldn't
understand it at first. She was by no means a boring person. She
associated well, and she was someone I liked and respected - a very
fine, a truly *good* person. So it just didn't seem possible that this
almost suffocating sleepiness could be a reaction to her personally. I
thought it must be the time of day I saw her - but that couldn't be,
because she had different hours on different days. I thought it might
be the result of staying up too late, so I drank black coffee. But the
sleepiness persisted, and finally it dawned on me what it was
all about. I realized that the patient had developed an erotic
transference to me and was defending herself against it by making
herself uninteresting and dreary - as she had done throughout her
childhood with her father, and as she was doing in adult life with the
men with whom (for some strange reason) she could never get into any
sort of satisfying lasting relationship."

same, p. 123 (quoting 1972 paper on transference by Brian Bird)
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial
help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the
analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic
situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise, and
understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they
meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct, and regular
relationship he has ever experienced.... Taken together, the total
*real* value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be
immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that if it goes on and
on, it may have such a real, direct, and continuing impact on the
patient that he can never get deeply involved enough in transference
situations to allow himself to resolve, or even to become acquainted
with, his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble, in a
sense, is that the direct nonanalytical helpfulness of the analytic
situation is far too good! The trouble also is that we as analysts
apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful.

same, p. 139
Waelder is upholding the paradoxical view of psychoanalysis that
Freud, after making his initial discoveries, adopted and maintained
throughout his life - and that Ferenczi was the first to challenge -
namely, that the ability of psychoanalysis to alleviate human
suffering is contingent upon its being conducted strictly as a
scientific experiment; the less the analyst tries to help the patient,
the more likely it is that he will do so.

same, p. 157
Aaron said that, thanks to the analysis, the patient had been able to
marry, and that one day she came in and said that because of her new
husband's work schedule she would take her vacation in July that year,
instead of at the usual time, in August. Aaron reminded her that
August was the designated vacation month, and that if she took her
vacation in July she would still have to pay for the sessions she
missed. She found this intolerable; he wouldn't back down; and she
left the analysis.
\
We had debated this incident many times before, and I had always taken
the patient's side. Although Aaron was formally entitled to the money
for the missed appointments in July, it seemed to me that he would
have done better (morally and strategically) to have been less
obdurate. (The choice was his - by this time she was a private patient
paying regular fees, rather than a Treatment Center patient.) Aaron
agreed that he may not have acted prudently; he acknowledged that his
perennial problem about fees, his desire for money, and his anger
toward the patient may have caused him to act precipitately. "*But*,"
he said, "but. The real issue was not the money itself, and my real
blunder wasn't that I charged her for the missed sessions. My blunder
was that I didn't understand and interpret the transference soon
enough. I didn't point out to her that she was taking flight because
she couldn't face her painful feeling of love toward me. I didn't
convince her that the money she wouldn't part with was the
phallus-child she wanted from me." Before I could protest this
outlandish rationalization Aaron leaned forward intently and said, in
a new tone of voice, "I know what you're going to say. I can see the
derision in your face. And what is happening here is something that
never ceases to amaze me - other analysts have commented on it, my
analyst has commented on it - namely, that the insights of
psychoanalysis are never taken for granted from one generation to the
next. Each generation has to make the original discoveries afresh! You
can't just say that Freud discovered something and now it will be
taught and transmitted as accepted knowledge, the way the findings of
physics and biology and chemistry are transmitted. *That doesn't
happen in psychoanalysis.* This boggles my mind. Why can't the next
generation accept what Freud found out? Because you're challenging me.
Thinking, intelligent people like you challenge what Freud found out.
Why not challenge the theory of natural selection? What you're
challenging, of course, is the centrality of the infantile sexuality
and of the Oedipus complex in adult psychic life. That's what you're
challenging, and that's what thinking, intelligent people challenge.

p. 148 (Aaron Green)
"Freud, by the way, said just the opposite of himself. He said that as
he grew older he found himself less interesting. In one of his letters
to Jung he said, 'One learns little by little to renounce one's
personality.'"

"American Pie", wikipedia entry 2005/5/19
Asked what "American Pie" meant, McLean once replied, "It means I
never have to work again."

Blogging the Fifth Nail, Joseph Duncan (child rapist)
As I watch history unfold, I am compelled to help keep it on course.

Anonymous, Republican poster from Spanish Civil War
If you tolerate this your Children will be next
http://library.brandeis.edu/specialcollections/SpanishCivilWar/posters.html#file://posters.html/ANON
{Artist: [ANON.]
Text: Madrid. The "military" practice of the rebels. If you tolerate this your Children will be next.
Sponsor: Ministerio de Propaganda.
Imprint: V[s.l.], [s.n.]
Date: [s.d.]
Notes:
Dimensions: 66 x 50 cm.
BUSCW: 76}

Pythagoras, from Wikipedia entry, quoting Jon Wynne-Tyson, "The extended circle", quoting Ovid
As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living
beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre
animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of
murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.

Corinthians, book 1, 13:12
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I
know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Christopher Alexander (source: WikiQuote)
There is central quality which is the root criterion of life and
spirit in a man, a town a building, or a wilderness. This quality is
objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

Christopher Alexander (source: WikiQuote)
High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains
for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help
create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social
life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they
are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and
they damage light and air and view.

Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind, Disk 2, Track 1, Conspiracy Theories (XXX get correct version)
Adam Smith - you know, you're supposed to worship Adam Smith but not
read him - Adam Smith once said something like, "If you find two
businessmen talking to each other, they're probably engaged in some
sort of conspiracy against the public interest."

REPORTER:       I'd like to direct this question to messrs. Lennon and
McCartney. In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. And they
referred to "Day Tripper" as being about a prostitute...
PAUL:   Oh yeah.
REPORTER:       ...and "Norwegian Wood" as being about a lesbian.
PAUL:   Oh yeah.
REPORTER:       I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it,
and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is
being written today.
PAUL:   We were just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians,
that's all.

Christopher Alexander, "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", p. 10
The architectural decisions made within a style are safe from the
nagging difficulty of doubt, for the same reason that decisions are
easier to make under tradition and taboo than on one's own
responsibility.

same, p. 11
We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may
be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as
in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical
capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course,
the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands
attention, not denial.

same, p. 24
With this in mind, I should like to recommend that we should always
expect to see the process of achieving good fit between two entities
as a negative process of neutralizing the incongruities, or irritants,
or forces, which cause misfit.

same, p. 27
The task of design is not to create form which meets certain
conditions, but to create such an order in the ensemble that all the
variables take the value 0. The form is simply that part of the
ensemble over which we have control. It is only through the form that
we can create order in the ensemble.

Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, p. 83
Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence. They
work on the things they can do something about. The nature of their
energy is positive, enlarging and magnifying, causing their Circle of
Influence to increase.
\
Reactive people, on the other hand, focus their efforts in the Circle
of Concern. They focus on the weakness of other people, the problems
in the environment, and circumstances over which they have no control.
Their focus results in blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive
language, and increased feelings of victimization. The negative energy
generated by that focus, combined with neglect in areas they could do
something about, causes their Circle of Influence to shrink.

Anthony Lane, "Space Case", The New Yorker, May 23, 2005, p. 95
The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating
figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to
understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years
of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay,
gold-plated Jeeves.
\
No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a
brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would
know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in "Gremlins"
when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A
fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which
the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the
role of cosmic shrink - squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room,
where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps
having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might
suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have
been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. "Train yourself
to let go of everything you fear to lose," he says. Hold on, Kermit,
run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a
long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie
with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are
you saying that you'd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger?
Also, while we're here, what's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in
the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a
day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are."
Break me a fucking give.

Charles MacKay, LL.D. "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", p. 55
But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which shewed, more
completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one
started by an unknown adventurer, entitled, "A company for carrying on
an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."
Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be
impossible to believe that any person would could have been duped by
such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful
inroad upon the public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that
the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of
100l. each, deposit 2l. per share. Each subscriber, paying his
deposit, would be entitled to 100l. per annum per share. How this
immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform
them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars
should be duly announced, and a call for made for the remaining 98l.
of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man
opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and
when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one
thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was
thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to
be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the
Continent. He was never heard from again.

Swift, quoted in Charles MacKay, LL.D. "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", p. 56
Subscribers here by thousands float,
    And jostle one another down,
Each paddling in his leaky boat,
    And here they fish for gold and drown.
\
Now buried in the depths below,
    Now mounted up to heaven again,
They reel and stagger to and fro,
    At their wits' end, like drunken men.
\
Meantime, secure on Garraway cliffs,
    A savage race, by shipwrecks fed,
Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs,
    And strip the bodies of the dead.

Sandra Tsing Loh 2005 Caltech Commencement Address
Think of Elizabeth Taylor. When asked what advice she had for
tomorrow's actors, she said just two words: "Take Fountain." Fountain
is a lesser known boulevard in Hollywood, a great short cut across
town.

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 186
"Sir, now you are fishing. Not informing."

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 232
This hypnagogic condition. Attention-faculty diminished so that
twilight state obtains; world seen merely in symbolic, archetypal
aspect, totally confused with unconscious material. Typical of
hypnosis-induced somnambulism. Must stop this dreadful gliding among
shadows; refocus concentration and thereby restore ego center.

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 165
Shock! Hexagram Fifty-one!
\
God appears in the sign of the Arousing. Thunder and lightning. Sounds
- he involuntarily put his fingers up to cover his ears. Ha-ha! Ho-ho!
Great burst that made him wince and blink. Lizard scurries and tiger
roars, and out comes God Himself!
\
What does it mean? He peered about his living room. Arrival of - what?
He hopped to his feet and stood panting, waiting.
\
Nothing. Heart pounding. Respiration and all somatic processes,
including all manner of diencephalic-controlled autonomic responses to
crisis: adrenaline, greater heartbeat, pulse rate, glands pouring,
throat paralyzed, eyes staring, bowels loose, et al. Stomach queasy
and sex instinct suppressed.
\
And yet, nothing to see; nothing for body to do. Run? All in
preparation for panic flight. But where to and why? Mr. Tagomi asked
himself. No clue. Therefore impossible. Dilemma of civilized man; body
mobilized; but danger obscure.
\
He went to the bathroom and began lathering his face to shave.

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 180
"Don't underevaluate the possibility suggested by the esteemed
importer. He is a shrewd personage. You and I - we have no awareness
of the vast number of uneducated. They can obtain from mold-produced
identical objects a joy which would be denied to us. We must suppose
that we have the only one of a kind, or at least something rare,
possessed by a very few. And, of course, something truly authentic.
Not a model or replica." He continued to gaze past Childan, at empty
space. "Not something cast by the tens of thousands."

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 183
"Paul. One moment." He fingered the bit of jewelry; it had become
slimy with sweat. "I - am proud of this work. There can be no
consideration of trashy good-luck charms. I reject."
\
Once more he could not make out the young Japanese man's reaction,
only the listening ear, the mere awareness.
\
"Thank you, however," Robert Childan said.
\
Paul bowed.
\
Robert Childan bowed.
\
"The men who made this," Childan said, "are American proud artists.
Myself included. To suggest trashy good-luck charms therefore insults
us and I ask for apology."
\
Incredible prolonged silence.
\
Paul surveyed him. One eyebrow lifted slightly and his thin lips
twitched. A smile?
\
"I demand," Childan said. That was all; he could carry it no further.
He now merely waited.
\
Nothing occurred.
\
Please, he thought. Help me.
\
Paul said, "Forgive my arrogant imposition." He held out his hand.

Philip K. Dick, "The Man in the High Castle", p. 42
And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the
victims of history. They identify with God's power and believe they
are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some
archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot
tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris,
not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion
between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not
eaten God; God has eaten man.

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (Wyatt Mason, "Rimbaud Complete", p. 206)
"His kisses and his warm embraces were a heaven, a dark heaven, into
which I had entered, and where I would have preferred to have
remained: poor, deaf, mute, blind."

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell (Wyatt Mason, "Rimbaud Complete", p. 206)
"Immediately, in the wake of his absence, I felt both gripped by
vertigo and thrown into the most unbearable darkness: death. I made
him swear he wouldn't leave me. He swore a lover's promise twenty
times over. It was as meaningless as when I said, 'I understand you.'"

Johnny Cash - Streets Of Laredo
"Then go write a letter to my grey-haired mother,
"An' tell her the cowboy that she loved has gone.
"But please not one word of the man who had killed me.
"Don't mention his name, and his name will pass on."

British graffiti
http://www.immortalia.com/html/books-OCRed/1730s-bog-house-miscellany/part-1-3rd-edition/index.htm
On a Window in Mainwaring's coffee-house, Fleet-Street. Omnia Vincit Amor.
If Kisses were the only Joys in Bed,
Then Women would with one another wed.

same, Rumford on a Window.
When full of Pence, I was expensive,
And now I've none, I'm always pensive.

same, Rebus on Miss Har-ring-ton.
The Pleasure of the Sportsman's Chace;
The Pledge in Matrimonial Case,
With Twenty Hundred Weight beside,
Name her I wish to make my Bride.

Wikipedia, BJAODN, from Talk:Adolf Hitler
In any encyclopedia Hitler should be given a fair judgement.
\
He was not a blood-thirsty murderer. Rather a loving family man. He
liked a animals and was kind to them.
\
Anyway, we so often say that a person who shows kindness to animals can't be a bad person.
\
Besides he had done a lot of good for the Germans, at least before the WW2 broke out.
\
Oh, and he enjoyed paying prostitutes to shit on him.

Brakhage
The sky is the corpse of God, and the stars are maggots.

Paul Erdos, from Paul Hoffman, "The Man who Loved Only Numbers", p. 4
The SF created us to enjoy our suffering. The sooner we die, the
sooner we defy His plans.

David Lenson, "On Drugs", p. 28, Regents of the University of Minnesota 1995
The current model of the mind, then, is first and foremost a matter of
practical economics. The fact that the 1980s wave of drug testing
began in the workplace is indicative of a need to maintain the
vocational ideal of a well-programmed mind capable of prospective
action based on retrospective knowledge. But since empiricism assumes
the validity of perception (regardless of the source of that
perception), it is not the place of the downloading mind to
discriminate among incoming data except on the basis of what is
functionally useful to it. In a more general way as well, the
ideological apparatus of the state can program the population with
"public information" in the form of words or images. A person who
downloads a great deal of this stuff is said to be "well-informed."
But since the empirical version of the mind possesses no inherent
means of distinguishing between "natural" data (Dalmations, ottomans,
cold weather) and artificial ones like television images, a population
that unquestioningly accepts this model is open to ideological
downloading as well. An altered mode of consciousness, especially one
that reinforces the notion that the mind can actually form or even
change reality, might become resistant to an unexamined acceptance of
"whatever's coming in." It is precisely that lack of examination which
Consumerism counts on for its hegemony. If the subject-object
relationship is not problematized, then it is simply not a problem.
But drugs threaten to roil these clear waters.

same, p. 35
Where "straight" ethics, despite the herculean efforts of philosophy
and theology throughout the centuries, has not become more than a set
of codifications and collectivizations of social conventions and
values, the imperatives of addiction are absolutely objective, with
that objectivity reinforced by biochemistry. Indeed, a chemical
dependency (or some other obsession) may be necessary to achieve *any*
set of imperatives strong enough to compete successfully with social
convention. The addict knows that without the drug and its attendant
social activities, he or she must revert to "straight" civilizational
rules, which are less instructive and certain than the decrees of
psychic chemistry. One of the characteristics of drug withdrawal is
not knowing what to do at any given moment, or not wanting to do
anything.

Thomas De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater", p. 46
The pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of; more than I wished
to remember: but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of
spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become
oppressive to contemplate. Now Saturday night is the season for the
chief, regular, and periodic return of rest to the poor: in this point
the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge a common link of
brotherhood: almost all Christendom rests from its labours. It is a
rest introductory to another rest: and divided by a whole day and two
nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I feel always, on a
Saturday night, as though I also were released from some yoke of
labour, had some wages to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. 
For the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a scale as
possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy was so entire, I used
often, on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth,
without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the
markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a
Saturday night, for laying out their wages. Many a family party,
consisting of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two of his
children, have I listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways
and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or the price of
household articles. Gradually I became familiar with their wishes,
their difficulties, and their opinions. Sometimes there might be heard
murmurs of discontent: but far oftener expressions on the countenance,
or uttered in words, of patience, hope, and tranquility. And taken
generally, I must say, that, in this point at least, the poor are far
more philosophic than the rich - that they show a more ready and
cheerful submission to what they consider as irremediable evils, or
irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without
appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion
upon the matter in discussion, which, if not always judicious, was
always received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, or
expected to be so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was
reported that onions and butter were expected to fall, I was glad:
yet, if the contrary were true, I drew from opium some means of
consoling myself.

same, p. 49
In after years, however, when my cheerfulness was more fully
re-established, I yielded to my natural inclination for a solitary
life. And, at that time, I often fell into these reveries upon taking
opium; and more than once it has happened to me, on a summer-night,
when I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could
overlook the sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the
great town of Liverpool, at about the same distance, that I have sate,
from sun-set to sun-rise, motionless, and without wishing to move.
\
I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmenism, quietism, &c. but *that*
shall not alarm me. Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our wisest
men: and let my readers see if he, in his philosophical works, be half
as unmystical as I am. -- I say, then, that it has often struck me
that the scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place in such
a reverie. The town of Liverpool represented the earth, with its
sorrows and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, nor wholly
forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded
over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the
mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I
stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the
tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted
from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting
from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of
life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the
intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon
calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if
resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities,
infinite repose.

same, p. 50
The years of academic life are now over and gone - almost forgotten: -
the student's cap no longer presses my temples; if my cap exist at
all, it presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as happy as
myself, and as passionate a lover of knowledge. My gown is, by this
time, I dare to say, in the same condition with many thousands of
excellent books in the Bodleian, viz. diligently perused by certain
studious moths and worms: or departed, however (which is all that I
know of its fate), to that great reservoir of *somewhere*, to which
all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, tea-kettles, &c. have
departed (not to speak of still frailer vessels, such as glasses,
decanters, bed-makers, &c.) which occasional resemblances in the
present generation of tea-cups, &c. remind me of having once
possessed, but of whose departure and final fate I, in common with
most gownsmen of either university, could give, I suspect, but an
obscure and conjectural history. The persecutions of the chapel-bell,
sounding its unwelcome summons to six o'clock matins, interrupts my
slumbers no longer: the porter who rang it, upon whose beautiful nose
(bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in retaliation, so many Greek
epigrams, whilst I was dressing, is dead, and has ceased to disturb
any body: and I, and many others, who suffered much from his
tintinnabulous propensities, have now agreed to overlook his errors,
and have forgiven him. Even with the bell I am now in charity: it
rings, I suppose, as formerly, thrice a-day: and cruelly annoys, I
doubt not, many worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their peace of mind:
but as to me, in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice no
longer (treacherous, I call it, for, by some refinement of malice, it
spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if it had been inviting one to
a party): its tones have no longer, indeed, power to reach me, let the
wind sit as favourable as the malice of the bell itself could wish:
for I am 250 miles away from it, and buried in the depth of mountains. 
And what am I doing amongst the mountains? Taking opium. ...

same, p. 59
Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 18 miles from town - no
spacious valley, but about two miles long, by three quarters of a mile
in average width; the benefit of which provision is, that all the
families resident within its circuit will compose, as it were, one
larger household personally familiar to your eye, and more or less
interesting to your affections. Let the mountains be real mountains,
between 3 and 4000 feet high; and the cottage, a real cottage; not (as
a witty author has it) "a cottage with a double coach-house:" let it
be, in fact (for I must abide by the actual scene), a white cottage,
embowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession
of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round the windows through
all the months of spring, summer, and autumn - beginning, in fact,
with May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, however, *not* be
spring, nor summer, nor autumn - but winter, in his sternest shape. 
This is a most important point in the science of happiness. And I am
surprised to see people overlook it, and think it matter of
congratulation that winter is going; or, if coming, is not likely to
be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as
much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies
can possibly afford us. Surely every body is aware of the divine
pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o'clock,
warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains
flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are
raging audibly without,
\
    And at the doors and windows seem to call,
    As heav'n and earth they would together mell;
    Yet the least entrance find they none at all;
    Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.
        - Castle of Indolence.

same, p. 64
Now, for the most part, analytic studies are continuous, and not to be
pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for
instance, intellectual philosophy, &c. were all become insupportable
to me; I shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine
feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the
time when I grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this
further