Quotes

“How are you treated today, as a former Stasi man?’ I ask. I would like to find out why he is disguised as a westerner.‘The foe has made a propaganda war against us, a slander and smear campaign. And therefore I don’t often reveal myself to people. But in Potsdam people come up and say’—he puts on a small sorry voice—‘“You were right. Capitalism is even worse than you told us it would be. In the GDR you could go out alone at night as a woman! You could leave your apartment door open!”’You didn’t need to, I think, they could see inside anyway.‘This capitalism is, above all, exploitation! It is unfair. It’s brutal. The rich get richer and the masses get steadily poorer. And capitalism makes war! German imperialism in particular! Each industrialist is a criminal at war with the other, each business at war with the next!’ He takes a sip of coffee and holds his hand up to stop me asking any more questions.‘Capitalism plunders the planet too—this hole in the ozone layer, the exploitation of the forests, pollution—we must get rid of this social system! Otherwise the human race will not last the next fifty years!’There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent. And it becomes clear as he speaks that socialism, as an article of faith, can continue to exist in minds and hearts regardless of the miseries of history. This man is disguised as a westerner, the better to fit unnoticed into the world he finds himself in, but the more he talks the clearer it becomes that he is undercover, waiting for the Second Coming of socialism.

Anna Funder, Stasiland: stories from behind the Berlin Wall, London, 2003, p. 86

In 1905. Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker rejected the sterilization act of the Pennsylvania legislature with the ringing broadside: “It is plain that the safest and most effective method of preventing procreation would be to cut the heads off of the inmates.” (Not long afterward, Pennypacker wise­ cracked down a raucous political audience: “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”)

Daniel J. Kevles, In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 109

To Engels’s mind, there was nothing in math that was not already in nature; mathematics was simply a reflection and an explanation of the physical world. As a result, he attempted to crowbar all sorts of mathematical models into his system of dialectics. “Let us take an arbitrary algebraic magnitude, namely /a,” /begins one passage in /Dialectics of Nature. /“Let us negate it, then we have /-a /(minus /a). /Let us negate this negation by multiplying /-a /by /-a, /then we have /+a, /that is the original positive magnitude, but to a higher degree, namely to the second power.” As the Trotskyist scholar Jean van Heijenoort points out, this is all horribly confused: to take just one example, ‘’negation" in Engels’s usage can refer to any number of differing mathematical operations. Worse was to come as Engels, playing the reductive philistine, dismissed complex numbers and theoretical mathematics—those parts of theoretical science that went beyond a reflection of natural phenomena—as akin to quackery: “When one has once become accustomed to ascribe to the [square root of] -1 or to the fourth dimension some kind of reality outside of our own heads, it is not a matter of much importance if one goes a step further and also accepts the spirit world of the mediums.”

Tristan Hunt, Marx's general: The revolutionary life of friedrich engels, New York, 2010, pp. 286-287

At some magical moment during that first year, it happened: the lift generated by paid advertising exceeded the gravity of costs. And at that point, like the Wrights’ aeroplane, the New York Sun took flight, and the world was never really the same again.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads, New York, 2016, p. 14

Raymond [Lull] married an early age; and, being fond of pleasure, he left the solitudes of his native isle, and passed over with his bride into Spain. He was made Grand Seneschal at the court of King James, and led a gay life for several years. Faithless to his wife, he was always in the pursuit of some new beauty, till his heart was fixed at last by the lovely but unkind Ambrosia de Castelo. This lady, like her admirer, was married; but, unlike him, was faithful to her vows, and treated all his solicitations with disdain. Raymond was so enamoured, that repulse only increased his flame; he lingered all night under her windows, wrote passionate verses in her praise, neglected his affairs, and made himself the butt of all the courtiers. One day, while watching under her lattice, he by chance caught sight of her bosom, as her neckerchief was blown aside by the wind. The fit of inspiration came over him, and he sat down and composed some tender stanzas upon the subject, and sent them to the lady. The fair Ambrosia had never before condescended to answer his letters; but she replied to this. She told him that she could never listen to his suit; that it was unbecoming in a wise man to fix his thoughts, as he had done, on any other than his God; and entreated him to devote himself to a religious life, and conquer the unworthy passion which he had suffered to consume him. She, however, offered, if he wished it, to show him the fair bosom which had so captivated him. Raymond was delighted.

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, Richard Bentley, 1841

When you do a thing, do it with the whole self. One thing at a time. Now I sit here and eat. For me nothing exists in the world except this food, this table. I eat with the whole attention. So you must do—in everything.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, quoted in James Moore, Gurdjieff: anatomie d'un mythe : biographie, Paris, 1991, p. 261

Thought a lot about the trip to Dublin. The atmosphere of seediness and decay about the city, and the feeling of utter provinciality combined to make me feel depressed. There is something terribly doomed about the Irish. They’ve got the poetry—you can hear it in their speech and feel it in their art: but they need the organising genius to prosper. They need the English. They need a nation of shopkeepers, mercenary philistines, to counterbalance them: And ironically they reject them (quite reasonably of course judging from the past) but one sees that Wales would go irrevocably to the same kind of arable-ism if she severed her ties with England.

Kenneth Williams and Russell Davies, The Kenneth Williams diaries, London, 1993, p. 361

Went to bed reflecting on the difficulty age has in pretending. It’s easier for youth & middle age to cheat despair, but after 60 life’s utter futility becomes cruelly obvious. The whole con is exposed & you see that there is not going to be any happy ending, contentment, or fulfilment… just a waiting for death as the final, sole, and only relief.

Kenneth Williams and Russell Davies, The Kenneth Williams diaries, London, 1993, p. 764

Gorbachev did not set out to change the world, but rather to save his country. In the end, he did not save the country but may have saved the world.

David Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, New York, 2009, p. 174

Experience as a member of many committees in Cambridge and elsewhere has taught me the desirability of retiring before one has become too ‘ga-ga’ to realize just how ‘ga-ga’ one is becoming. I am now approaching the end of my 83rd year, and prudence and laziness combine in advising me not to expose myself further in print.

C. D. Broad, Preface, Preface, pp. 13–16, p. 15

One might hold that nothingness as a natural state is derivative from a very powerful force toward nothingness, one any other forces have to overcome. Imagine this force as a vacuum force, sucking things into nonexistence or keeping them there. If this force acts upon itself, it sucks nothingness into nothingness, producing something or, perhaps, everything, every possibility.

Robert Nozick, Philosophical explanations, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 123

I think about this every time I hear someone say something like “I lost all respect for Steven Pinker after he said all that stupid stuff about AI”. Your problem was thinking of “respect” as a relevant predicate to apply to Steven Pinker in the first place. Is he your father? Your youth pastor? No? Then why are you worrying about whether or not to “respect” him? Steven Pinker is a black box who occasionally spits out ideas, opinions, and arguments for you to evaluate. If some of them are arguments you wouldn’t have come up with on your own, then he’s doing you a service. If 50% of them are false, then the best-case scenario is that they’re moronically, obviously false, so that you can reject them quickly and get on with your life.

Scott Alexander, Rule Thinkers In, Not Out, Slate Star Codex, February 27, 2019

Some people feel ashamed when doing this kind of math with human lives. I feel ashamed when not doing it.

Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, London, 2018, p. 138

The genomic evidence of the antiquity of inequality—between men and women, and between people of the same sex but with greater and lesser power—is sobering in light of the undeniable persistence of inequality today. One possible response might be to conclude that inequality is part of human nature and that we should just accept it. But I think the lesson is just the opposite. Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements. Evidence of the antiquity of inequality should motivate us to deal in a more sophisticated way with it today, and to behave a little better in our own time.

K. Helmut Reich, How could we get to a more peaceful and sustainable human world society? The role of science and religion, Zygon, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, p. 246

A young soldier wakes up in his army barracks one morning and begins acting very strangely. He spends all his time searching, looking under, in, behind—everywhere—in an obsessive search for something. When his commanding officer asks what is going on, the soldier says, “Sir, I’m looking for a piece of paper.” “Did you lose it?” “No, sir.” “What is it?” “I don’t know, sir.” “Well, what does it look like?” “I don’t know, sir.” After a lot of fruitless questioning like this, the officer gives up. Meanwhile the soldier keeps searching everywhere.Finally, after a few days of this incessant searching, the officer sends the soldier over to the psychiatrist who asks, “Well, what seems to be the problem?” Again the soldier says “Well, I’m trying to find a piece of paper.” As the psychiatrist asks him questions, the soldier goes through all the papers on the psychiatrist’s desk, looks in the waste basket, on the shelves, under the rug, and so on. He continues to search everywhere for the paper, incessantly. Finally after several days of this, the psychiatrist gives up and says, “Well, son, I think the Army’s been a little too rough on you. I think we had better give you a psychiatric discharge.” He fills out the discharge form, and as the hands it over, the soldier says excitedly, “There it is!”

Steve Andreas, Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be, Utah, 2002, p. 26

I have a dream that one day, people who refuse to bet on their statements will be viewed with greater contempt than those who bet and lose. Who’s with me?

EconLog, 2009

Es asombrosa la cantidad de mujeres que prefieren una conversación inteligente a una musculatura sólida.

Tomás Eloy Martínez, El cantor de tango, Buenos Aires, 2004, p. 69

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

George Orwell, Coming up for air, San Diego, 1939, ch. 3

It’s been said that you should never share your problems with others because 80% of people don’t care about your problems anyway, and the other 20% are kind of glad that you’ve got them in the first place.

Brian Tracy, Eat that frog! 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time, London, 2016, p. 73

You don’t need to be the most beautiful or most wealthy person to get the most desirable partner; you just need to be more attractive than all the other women or men in your network. In short, the networks in which we are embedded function as reference groups[.]

James Fowler, The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, New York, 2009, p. 74