Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
- Charles Babbage
Sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence, makes no coy veiling of her appetite but leers from you to me with all her parts discovered.
- David Jones, "In Parenthesis", on the Battle of the Somme
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the Omnipotent Father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
- Gore Vidal
Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:
- "Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group - and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature."
- "The problem is that the reporting methodologies developed by the modern news media - which privilege factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage to the near exclusion of any other kind - have by error led to a sort of globalized provincialism, whereby we at once know a good deal and don't care very much."
- "This, Auden wants to tell us, is what artists do: they notice stuff; the small and unobtrusive stuff that other people - ploughmen and shepherds, you and me, and journalists in a hurry - miss and yet that is essential to halting our usual indifference and callousness."
- "A contented resignation to a modest condition has come to seem not only a grave error, but possibly a sign of mental illness."
- "This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality."
- "The news hub has the institutional amnesia of a hospital's accident and emergency department: nightly the bloodstains are wiped away and the memories of the dead erased."
- "But we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts."
