Ideas – Journalism
IDEAS
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. [George Bernard Shaw]
The ability to express an idea is well nigh as important as the idea itself. [Bernard Baruch]
… the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good. [H.L. Mencken]
Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. [T.H. Huxley]
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas. [A.N. Whitehead]
Man’s claim to have progressed far beyond his fellow animals must be supported, not by his search for food, warmth, and shelter (however ingeniously conducted) but by his penetration into the very fabric of the Universe. It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the Universe itself, that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas. [Fred Hoyle]
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. [John Cage]
In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. [Arthur Koestler]
A creative thinker evolves no new ideas. He actually evolves new combinations of ideas that are already in his mind. [William Easton]
Ideas, once born, seemingly have a life of their own. Like germs they breed, spread, mutate, and catch their invaded victims by surprise. When and where an idea originated is often unknown, and many a person believes the idea, as recounted by him, springs unprompted from the recesses of his own mind. A thought drifts as light as thistledown, and sensitive minds responding to its novel vibrations “independently” discover the new idea. [Edward Harrison]
Really good ideas are always good beyond what you anticipated originally. [David Gelernter]
Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of men. [Mortimer Adler]
Acceptance of new ideas is usually contingent on three preconditions: (1) the world must be ready for them; (2) they must be convincingly advocated by a persuasive person or group; and (3) they must be perceived as clearly superior to (or, at least, not in serious conflict with) other widely held beliefs. [Preston Cloud]
The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it – once you can honestly say, ‘I don’t know,’ then it becomes possible to get at the truth. [Robert Heinlein]
You’ve got to be a nomad and pass through ideas as a man passes through towns and countries. [Francis Picabia]
To have original, extraordinary, possibly even immortal ideas, it is sufficient to become so completely estranged from the world and things for a few moments that the most ordinary objects and events appear to be wholly new and unfamiliar, whereby their true nature is disclosed. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
… it is hard to have a good idea if we have little knowledge of the subject, and impossible to have it if we have no knowledge. Good ideas are based on past experience and formerly acquired knowledge. [George Pólya]
New scientific knowledge is like wine in the wedding of Cana: it cannot be used up; the same idea can serve many users simultaneously; and as the number of customers increases, no one need be getting less of it because the others are getting more. [Harold Faber]
All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked. [Mao Tse-tung]
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. [Howard Hathaway Aiken]
IDLENESS
Few women and even fewer men have enough character to be idle. [E.V. Lucas]
It’s a great art to saunter. [Henry David Thoreau]
One of the finest short discussions in English of idleness and procrastination (Rambler 134) was rapidly written in Sir Joshua Reynold’s parlour while the printer’s boy, who had come to pick up a copy of a new essay for the periodical, waited at the door. [Walter Jackson Bate]
This morning I am in a sort of temper indolent and supremely careless: I long after a stanza or two of Thompson’s Castle of indolence. My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fibre all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this side of faintness – if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor – but as I am I must call it Laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibres of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. [John Keats]
Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own innards his own airy Citadel – the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury… It has been an old comparison for our urging on – the Beehive; however, it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the Bee – for it is a false notion that more is gained by receiving than giving – no, the receiver and the giver are equal in their benefits. The flower, I doubt not, receives a fair guerdon from the Bee – its leaves blush deeper in the next spring – and who shall say between Man and Woman which is the most delighted? [John Keats]
Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism ‘goes for’ them. And while such a one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow…
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. it is no use speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough: and they will pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. if they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated: and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright on a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life. [Robert Louis Stevenson]
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle. [Georg Lichtenberg]
To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious. [Samuel Butler]
Let me say that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult, and the most intellectual. [Oscar Wilde]
How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterwards. [Spanish proverb]
I have so often asked myself whether the days on which we are compelled to be idle aren’t the very ones we spend in the deepest activity? Whether our actions themselves, when they come later, are not merely the last afterring of a great movement that takes place in us on inactive days? [Rainer Maria Rilke]
I laugh almost like an insane person when I cast my eye backward on the prospect of my past two years – What a gloomy Huddle of eccentric Actions, and dim-discovered motives! To real Happiness I bade adieu from the moment, I received my first Tutor’s Bill – since that period my Mind has been irradiated by Bursts only of Sunshine – at all other times gloomy with clouds, or turbulent with tempests… I became a proverb to the University for Idleness – the time, which I should have bestowed on the academic studies, I employed in dreaming out wild Schemes of impossible extrication. It had been better for me, if my Imagination had been less vivid – I could not with such facility have shoved aside Reflection! How many and how many hours have I stolen from the bitterness of Truth in these soul-enervating Reveries – in building magnificent Edifices of Happiness on some fleeting Shadow of Reality! My affairs became more and more involved – I fled to Debauchery – fled from silent and solitary Anguish to all the uproar of senseless Mirth! Having, or imagining that I had no stock of Happiness, to which I could look forwards, I seized the empty gratifications of the moment, and snatched at the Foam, as the Wave passed by me. – I feel a painful blush on my cheek, while I write it – but even for the Uni. Scholarship, for which I affected to have read so severely, I did not read three days uninterruptedly – for the whole six weeks, that preceded the examination, I was almost constantly intoxicated! My Brother, you shudder as you read – [Samuel Coleridge]
It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquillity. [Samuel Johnson]
Man stand for long time with mouth open before roast duck fly in. [Chinese Proverb]
The lazy are always wanting to do something. [Vauvenargues]
And in all parts of the earth it is the right to idleness that distinguishes the superior from the inferior classes. It is the intrinsic principle of aristocracy.
Finally, where is there greater pleasure, greater endurance, intensity, and spirit of enjoyment? In women, whose role we term passive? Or, in men, in whom the transition from impatient fury to boredom is more rapid than the transition from good to evil?
Really, we shouldn’t neglect the study of idleness so criminally, but make it into an art and a science, even into a religion! In a word: the more divine a man or work is, the more it resembles a plant; of all the forms of nature, this form is the most moral and the most beautiful. And so the highest, most perfect mode of life would actually be nothing more than pure vegetating. [Friedrich Schlegel]
In idleness there is a perpetual despair. [Thomas Carlyle]
‘Sluggard’ – why it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]
There are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen. [James Hilton]
INFORMATION
The digitization of information in all its forms will be probably be known as the most fascinating development of the twentieth century. [An Wang]
… we have to begin to view the universe as ultimately constituted not of matter and energy, but of pure information. [Michael Talbot]
At a time when people are being bombarded daily with more and more headlines and more and more information, they are, ironically, becoming less informed. [Henry Luce]
The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow. [Stanislaw Lem]
All information looks like noise until you break the code. [Neal Stephenson]
All the innumerable substances which occur on earth – shows, ships, sealing-wax, cabbages, kings, carpenters, walruses, oysters, everything we can think of – can be analysed into their constituent atoms.… It might be thought that a quite incredible number of different kinds of atoms would emerge from the rich variety of substances we find on earth. Actually the number is quite small. The same atoms turn up again and again, and the great variety of substances we find on earth result, not from any great variety of atoms entering into their composition, but from the great variety of ways in which a few types of atoms can be combined. [James Jeans]
Incidentally, you will not find the tired word “blueprint” in this book, after this paragraph, for three reasons. First, only architects and engineers use blueprints and even they are giving them up in the computer age, whereas we all use books. Second, blueprints are very bad analogies for genes. Blueprints are two-dimensional maps, not one-dimensional digital codes. Third, blueprints are too literal for genetics, because each part of a blueprint makes an equivalent part of the machine or building; each sentence of a recipe book does not make a different mouthful of cake. [Matt Ridley]
Knowledge is not the same as information. Knowledge is information that has been pared, shaped, interpreted, selected, and transformed; the artist in each of us daily picks up the raw material and makes of it a small artefact – and at the same time, a small human glory. Now we have invented machines to do that, just as we invented machines to extend our muscles and our other organs. In typical human fashion, we intend our new machines for all the usual purposes, from enhancing our lives to filling our purses. If they scourge our enemies, we wouldn’t mind that either…
The reasoning animal has, perhaps inevitably, fashioned the reasoning machine. With all the risks apparent in such an audacious, some say reckless, embarkation onto sacred ground, we have gone ahead anyway, holding tenaciously to what the wise in every culture at every time have taught; the shadows, however dark and menacing, must not deter us from reaching the light. [Edward Feigenbaum and Paula McCorduck]
It’s raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air… The DNA content must be a small proportion of the total, so why did I say it was raining DNA rather than cellulose? The answer is that it is the DNA that matters. The cellulose fluff, although more bulky, is just a parachute, to be discarded. The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all, is in aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Not just any DNA, but DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks are, literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. They are there because their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; its raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be plainer if it were raining floppy discs. [Richard Dawkins]
[Molecules of living things] are put together in much more complicated patterns than the molecules of nonliving things, and this putting together is done following programmes, sets of instructions for how to develop, which the organisms carry around inside themselves. Maybe they do vibrate and throb and pulsate with “irritability,” and glow with “living” warmth, but these properties all emerge incidentally. What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a “spark of life.” It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don’t think of fire and sparks and breath.
Think instead of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology. [Richard Dawkins]
It becomes plausible that information belongs among the great concepts of science such as matter, energy and electric charge. [Norbert Wiener]
As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. [Benjamin Disraeli]
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. [Franklin P. Adams]
Human complexity cannot be generated by thirty thousand genes under the old view of life embodied in what geneticists literally called (admittedly with a sense of whimsy) their ‘central dogma’: DNA makes RNA makes protein – in other words, one direction of causal flow from code to message to assembly of substance, with one item of code (a gene) ultimately making one item of substance (a protein), and the congeries of proteins making a body. Those 142,000 messages no doubt exist, as they must to build the complexity of our bodies. Our previous error may now be identified as the assumption that each message came from a distinct gene.
We may envision several kinds of solutions for generating many times more messages than genes, and future research will target this issue. In the most reasonable and widely discussed mechanism, a single gene can make several messages because genes of multicellular organisms are not discrete and inseparable sequences of instructions. Rather, genes are composed of coding segments (exons) separated by noncoding regions (introns). The resulting signal that eventually assembles the protein consists only of exons spliced together after elimination of introns. If some exons are omitted, or if the order of splicing changes, then several distinct messages can be generated by each gene.
The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. The commercial effects will be obvious, as so much biotechnology, including the rush to patent genes, has assumed the old view that ‘fixing’ an aberrant gene would cure a specific human ailment. The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioural, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene ‘for’ the trait in question.
But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late-seventeenth-century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of those parts and from simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (Analysis literally means ‘to dissolve into basic parts’) The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems – predicting eclipses or the motion of the planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again – and when will we ever learn? – we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems ,we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?
The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology – and for two major reasons.
First, the key ingredient for evolving greater complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code – and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.
Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems. Our thirty thousand genes make up only one percent or so of our total genome. The rest – including bacterial immigrants and other pieces that can replicate and move – originated more as accidents of history than as predictable necessities of physical laws. Moreover, these noncoding regions, disrespectfully called ‘junk DNA’, also build a pool of potential for future use that, more than any other factor, may establish any lineage’s capacity for further evolutionary increase in complexity. [Stephen Jay Gould]
INNER-MELODY
Music did this for Charles Ives, too, before it did it for me. In the 113 Songs, he envisages” that any man, sitting on his porch looking out toward the mountains with the sun setting, could hear his own symphony. [John Cage]
… the continuous melody of our inner life – a melody which will go on, indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence. Our personality is precisely that. [Henri Bergson]
We can let it have its way, or we can direct it to our will; we can force it into new paths, or we can rehearse familiar works; we can listen to it, or we can relegate it to our subconscous; but we can never get rid of it. For one so endowed – or so burdened – to live is to live music. [Edward Cone]
… because every soul is a rhythmic knot. [Mallarmé]
There is a further sense in which music is the expression of an experience – experience here meaning any larger unit composed of separate experiences at the present moment or retained in the memory, and ‘expression’ meaning an event in the imagination in which the experience throws its reflection into the world of music as it has developed in history – a world in which all means of expression have been brought together in a continuous historical tradition. In this creation of the imagination, then, there is no rhythmic figure and no melody that is not related to experience, and yet the whole is something more than expression. For this world of music, with its inexhaustible possibilities of beauty and significance, is always in existence, always continues in history and is always capable of endless further development. It is in this world, and not in the world of his own feelings, that the musician lives.
It is useless to enquire of the music historian how human experience is converted into music. It is precisely this transmutation that is the highest achievement of music – the fact that what takes place in the composer’s imagination as something opaque, indeterminate, often unconscious, involuntarily achieves limpid expression in musical figures. There is no division between music experience, no question of two worlds or of any transformation from one world to another. Genius means living in the world of music as if it alone existed: it means forgetting all existence, all suffering in this world of sound, yet including all this. One does not deal with a single, determined progression from experience to music. The listener who experiences and as it were assimilates music – some memory, some floating image, some vague mood from the past reaching over into the ecstatic moment of creation – may find that what initiates the process is some rhythmic invention or some sequence of harmonies, or perhaps some experience. In the whole world of the arts musical creation is the most rigorously tied to technical rules and at the same time the freest form of emotional expression…
The point of departure is the actual world of sound itself, with all its various potentialities of beauty and expressiveness, historically developed in music, seized on by the musician while he is still a child, something always present to him, something into which all his experiences are transformed, something that he repeatedly encounters – a world into which his innermost being enters in order to find expression so that life, with all its joys and sorrows, exists for the artist primarily in his music. Here again memory presents itself as current meaning. Life’s miseries, as such, are too overwhelming to allow his imagination to range freely, but echoes and dreams of the past are the airy material – remote from the solid earth – from which the gossamer shapes of music issue.
There are aspects of life that can find expression as rhythm, as melody, as harmony, as forms of succession, rising and falling temper of mind, continuity, durability, the extension in depth of the interior life subsisting in harmony. [Wilhelm Dilthey]
… sequences of notes cannot imitate feelings in all their dimensions. Instead of this they are content to hint at what may be called the form, or essence, of those feelings, ie at stillness and movement, fastness and slowness, wealth of component parts and emptiness, to give only a few examples. In referring to such things as these music can be extremely precise. [M. Dessoir]
The psychological data from the period preceding birth, in which the infant discovers nothing from his own impressions but the regular rhythm of the mother’s heart and his own, illuminate the means used by nature to inculcate in man a musical feeling… It is understandable that the child’s equilibrium in the mother’s body comes into play when the sense of rhythm and measure appear. A much further-reaching consideration is connected to the statement that the musical has its origin before birth: the musical is an indestructible inheritance of the human being. It inhabits every human being since Adam and Eve because – and this is the core of my proposition – music might make use of noise, but it is just as often mute. it can be heard, but it can also be seen. It is essentially rhythm and measure and as such is deeply anchored in the human being. [Georg Groddeck]
The psychic resonance of the listener adapts itself to all this. Indeed all moments and modes of experience mentioned above occur in our external, everyday lives. We experience, for example, the resolution of dissonance in a thousand different forms – when the sun breaks through the clouds, when a quarrel is made up, when we are relieved of physical need, when doubts are dispelled or an inner conflict resolved. And it is the same in the case of other modes of interior experience associated with movements in sound, also familiar in every sphere of everyday life.
We thus possess, at least potentially, an unlimited store of memories, images, thoughts in whose very nature it lies to work in us and stir us just as do sounds, and the total aggregate of movements in sound. We might say that we possess, at least potentially, a number of ‘notes’ ready to vibrate in sympathy with the notes that we actually hear. And because they are ready, they will in fact vibrate and be heard, more richly or less richly according to the emotive power of the notes that we hear and their inherent varieties of spiritual movement. None of all this needs to reach our consciousness in detail. These manifold vibrations amalgamate to form an atmosphere which reaches our consciousness in the form of a mood, or the feeling of some definite mode of our general mental activity.
This mood is also tied to the sounds. It is the radiation of the movement that is inherent in the sounds and belongs to them for the sake of that relationship. Hearing the sounds, and according to the intensity of my identification with them and my ability to lose myself in them, I can experience that atmosphere and at the same time experience myself in it – and thus in the sounds.
In this way I find in music passion and tranquillity, longing and joy, exultation and grief, deep determination and light-hearted gaiety, hostility and reconciliation. I find in it my own ideal self, speaking to me from the notes or expressing itself in them, in their harmonies and sequences. I am this self, that is to say the self that has identified itself with the sounds – not simply imagined self, but real ie a self actually experienced, a self that experiences a fully-rounded interior history in the sound structures that occur in succession and form themselves into musical units. The essence of music lies this interior history. [Theodor Lipps]
Our perception of a melody as something continuous is an illusion; but so is the stream of consciousness of which music is said to be an analogue. The inner clocks of the body inform us when it is time to eat, time to sleep, and so on, thus providing us with a subliminal, intermittent awareness of time’s passage: the inner flow of life referred to earlier. Momentary discomforts make us aware of digestive and excretory processes which for the most part proceed without conscious awareness. But, just as consciousness of bodily processes is intermittent, so is consciousness of mental processes. This is so clearly the case that I am not sure whether it is legitimate to speak of being aware of a mental process.
Although we may describe what goes on in our own minds as continuous, the ‘stream of consciousness,’ we cannot actually perceive this. It is more like a stream of unconsciousness, with elements we call conscious floating like occasional twigs on the surface of the stream. When something occurs to us, a new thought, a linking of perceptions, an idea, we take pains to isolate it, to make it actual by putting it into words, writing it down, stopping the ‘flow’ of mental activity for the time being as we might reach out and grab one of the twigs floating past.
We like to describe the processes of though as continuous, as a ‘train of thought’ inexorably proceeding by logical steps to a new conclusion. Yet, what many thinkers describe is more like floundering about in a slough of perplexity, a jumble of incoherence, relieved by occasional flashes of illumination when a new pattern suddenly emerges. Ordered, coherent progression of though is a retrospective falsification of what actually happens. [Anthony Storr]
In turn, our perceptions, the immediacy of our perceptions of harmony and of discord would seem to correspond not only to our readings of inner states of personal being, but also to that of the social contract and, ultimately, of the cosmos (that ‘music of the spheres’). The energy that is music puts us in felt relation to the energy that is life; it puts us in a relation of experienced immediacy with the abstractly and verbally inexpressible but wholly palpable, primary fact of being. The translation of music into meaning that is entirely musical, carries with it what somatic and spiritual cognizance we can have of the core-mystery (how else is one to put it?) that we are. And that this energy of existence lies deeper than any biological or psychological determination. Thus we do seem to harbour at the threshold of the unconscious, at depths precisely unrecapturable by speech and the logic of speech, intimations, incisions in the synapses of sensibility, of a close kinship between the beginnings of music and those of humanly-enacted meaning itself. A world without music is, strictly considered, outside our persuasions of order and desire. It need not be a dead world in the geological or biological sense. But it would be explicitly inhuman…
We know of music as we know the spark and pressure at the centre of our own selves (or, perhaps, as we know of our own sleep). But we have no defining, systematic grasp of its constant, enormous impact. We can say that music is time organized, which means ‘made organic’. We can say that this act of organization is one of essential freedom, that it liberates us from the enforcing beat of biological and physical-mathematical clocks. The time which music ‘takes’, and which it gives as we perform or experience it, is the only free time granted us prior to death. We can speculate, and have done so from the ancient rhapsodes to the neurophysiologists of today, on possible concordances – themselves a musical borrowing – between bodily rhythms and subliminal cadences on the one hand, and the structural conventions of music on the other. But where it is not metaphor, almost everything said remains, in a chasteningly etymological sense, verbiage.
What we know is the relevant power. Folktale and metaphysics, myth and psychotherapy, Eros and religious rites, share the knowledge that music can literally madden, that it can make violence vibrant, that it can console, exalt, heal, that it can wake Lear out of crazed blackness. There are cadences, chords, modulations which break or mend the heart, or, indeed, mend it in the breaking. There are tone-relations which make us strangers to ourselves or, on the contrary, impel us homeward. There are andantes (Mahler’s trick of transcendence) which seem to break open the prison house of the ego and to make us one with the tidal peace of being. There are scherzos (too many in Mozart) in which laughter is perfectly real and, at the same time, where laughter is a last, unconquerable sadness. Melodies – I have cited the conviction that they are ‘the supreme mystery on man’ – can arch across an abyss or they can, as it were, pulse underground, unsettling all foundations. All these, however, are lame banalities. [George Steiner]
I would like to make clear something else: that we simply open up rather than create links between specific musical processes and certain feelings or states of being – sadness, joy, or wanting to dance. When that opening happens, one is modulated unceasingly by the music – whether one wants that or not. Whether we are aware of this or not, we are modulated by a specific piece of music in a specific way. We become this music up to a certain point, and we will never be the same again once we have heard that music. I should like to make people aware that they are even changed when they unsuspectingly enter an aeroplane, opening a newspaper or looking out of the window whilst music pours out of loudspeakers. Their molecules are modulated by the vibrations. That changes their electrical system and is never to be reversed. Everyone should be aware of whether what passes through his or her body is acoustic junk or something more refined. [Karlheinz Stockhausen]
In a part of our experiment not included in this study we dealt in greater detail with inner musical activity; we found that most people produce music by themselves for one or two hours a day, mainly by varying what they know or by combining the known tunes according to their tastes. In addition, if we also take into account music we just hear each day as background, it becomes evident music is practically a permanent part of most people’s everyday mental activity. [Sági and Vitányi]
INSECTS
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? [E.M. Cioran]
When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry-red, and the seas shall be frozen over, and the ice-cap shall have crept downward to the equator from either pole, and no keels shall cut the waters, nor wheels turn in mills, when all cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the very last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antenna in the glow of the worn-out sun, representing the sole survival of animal life on this our earth, — a melancholy “bug”. [W.J. Holland]
My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun… they are the sun’s kisses. [Alexander Scriabin]
INSPIRATION
Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty.
I composed the overture to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note.
I wrote the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of its opening in the theatre itself, where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stage-hands who were instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out of the window bodily. {Gioacchino Rossini]
I can’t write without the stimulus of something already written – old articles of my own, people’s notebooks, or literary magazines. [Cyril Connolly]
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special gift. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-critique, have brought me my ideas. [Albert Einstein]
A cigarette butt lying in the ashtray, a patient white trouser button looking up from a puddle in the street, a submissive bit of bark that an ant drags through the high grass… a page of a calendar, towards which the conscious hand reaches to tear it forcibly from the warm companionship of the remaining block of pages – everything shows me its face, its innermost being, its secret soul, more often silent than heard. [Vassily Kandinsky]
Although it is the human figure which interests me most deeply, I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles, etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the seashore – but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw. Out of the millions of pebbles passed in walking along the shore, I choose to see with excitement only those which fit in with my existing form-interest at the time. A different thing happens if I sit down and examine a handful one by one. I may then extend my form-experience more, by giving my mind time to become conditioned to a new shape. [Henry Moore]
You see the shape of a tree, the way a pebble falls or is formed, and you are astounded to discover that dumb nature makes an effort to speak to you, to give you a sign, to warn you, to symbolize your innermost thoughts. [Eileen Agar]
Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it. [Gordon L. Glegg]
Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind; as it is related of Lord Chatham, that he was accustomed to read in Bailly’s Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
It is important to remember that one germ may be as good as another. Among those I have cited I forgot to include the most startling: a sheet of white paper, an idle moment, a slip of the tongue, a misreading, a pen that is pleasant to hold. [Paul Valéry]
I begin my paintings under the effect of a shock which I feel and which takes me out of reality. This shock might be caused by a small thread coming loose from the canvas, a droop of water falling, or the imprint that my finger leaves on the polished surface of this table. [Joan Miró]
… for the poet a falling handkerchief can be the lever with which he will raise a whole universe. [Apollinaire]
The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand. They didn’t waste time waiting for inspiration. [Ernest Newman]
It is in the midst of the city that one writes the most inspiring pages about the country. [Jules Renard]
If I am walking along the beach and my eye catches a sea-worn and sunbleached knot of wood whose shape and colour strongly appeal to me, the act of identification (which may in any case have a psychological explanation) makes that object as expressive of my personality as if I had actually carved the wood into that shape. Selection is also creation. Nothing is so expressive of a man as the fetishes he gathers round him – his pipe, his pens, his pocket-knife – even the pattern of his suit. Art in its widest sense is an extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs. [Herbert Read]
Botticelli did not like landscape painting, regarding it as a ‘limited and mediocre kind of investigation.’ He said contemptuously that ‘by throwing a sponge soaked with different colours at a wall one can make a spot in which a beautiful landscape can be seen.’ This earned him a severe admonition form his colleague Leonardo da Vinci:
‘He is right: one is bound to see bizarre inventions in such a smudge; I mean that he who will gaze attentively at that spot will see in it human heads, various animals, a battle, rocks, the sea, clouds, thickets, and still more: it is like the tinkling of a bell which makes one hear what one imagines. Although that stain may suggest ideas, it will not teach you to complete any act, and the above-mentioned painter paints very bad landscapes.
‘To be universal and to please dissimilar tastes, dark and gently shaded sections must both be found in one composition. In my opinion it does not harm to remember, when you stop to contemplate the spots on walls, certain aspects of ashes on the hearth, of clouds or streams;and if you will consider them carefully you will discover most admirable inventions which the painter’s genius can turn to good account in composing battles (both of animals and men), landscapes or monsters, demons and other fantastic things that will do credit to you. Genius awakes to new inventions in these indistinct things, but one must know how to depict all the members not included there, such as the parts of animals and aspects of landscape, rocks and vegetation.’
On 10 August 1925 an overpowering visual obsession led me to discover the technical means which gave me a wide range for putting Leonardo’s lesson into practice. Departing from a childhood memory in the course of which a false mahogany panel facing my bed played the role of optical provocateur in a vision of near-sleep, and finding myself one rainy day in an inn by the sea-coast, I was struck by the obsession exerted upon my excited gaze by the floor – its grain accented by a thousand scrubbings. I then decided to explore the symbolism of this obsession and, to assist my contemplative and hallucinatory faculties, I took a series of drawings from the floorboards by covering them at random with sheets of paper which I rubbed with a soft pencil. When gazing attentively at these drawings, I was surprised at the sudden intensification of my visionary faculties and at the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images being superimposed on each other with the persistence and rapidity of amorous memories.
As my curiosity was more awakened and amazes, I began to explore indiscriminately, by the same methods, all kinds of material – whatever happened to be within my visual range – leaves and their veins, the unravelled edges of a piece of sackcloth, the brushstrokes of a ‘modern’ painting, thread unrolled from a spool, etc, etc…
(Vasari relates that Piero di Cosimo would at times remain plunged in contemplation of a wall on which sick people customarily spat; from the spots he formed equestrian battles, the most fantastic cities and the most magnificent landscapes ever seen; he did the same with clouds in the sky). [Max Ernst]
One rainy day in 1919, finding myself in a village on the Rhine, I was struck by the obsession which held under my gaze the pages of an illustrated catalogue showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, and paleaontologic demonstration. There I found brought together elements of figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties in me and brought forth an illusive succession of contradictory images, double, triple, and multiple images, piling up on each other with the persistence and rapidity which are peculiar to love memories and visions of half-sleep.
These visions called themselves new plane, because of their meeting in a new unknown (the plane of non-agreement). It was enough at that time to embellish these catalogue pages, in painting or drawing, and thereby in gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me, a colour, a pencil ark, a landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross-section, a floor, a single straight line signifying the horizon… thus I obtained a faithful fixed image of my hallucination and transformed into revealing dramas my most secret desires – from what had been before only some banal pages of advertising. [Max Ernst]
INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet get the work done. [Linus Torvalds]
The measure of our intellectual capacity is the capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems. [C.W.Churchman]
Intellect does not attain its full force until it attacks power. [Madame de Staël]
A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance. [Gian Carlo Menotti]
I happen to feel that the degree of a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can bring to bear on the same topic. [Lisa Alther]
No difference of position, rank, or birth is so great as the gulf between the countless millions who regard and use their brains only as the servant of their bellies, that is to say, as an instrument for the aims of their will, and those exceedingly few and rare individuals who have the courage to say: No, my mind is too good for that; it should be active merely for its own purpose, for comprehending the marvellous and multicoloured spectacle of this world, in order later to reproduce it in some form as a picture or an explanation, according to the disposition of the individual who for the time being carries such a mind. These are the truly noble and the real noblesse of the world; the others are serfs, glebae adscripti… [Arthur Schopenhauer]
How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence?… One can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. I’ll call ‘Society of Mind’ this scheme in which a mind is made of many smaller processes. We’ll call them agents. Each agent by itself can only do some simple thing which needs no mind or thought at all. Yet where we join those agents in societies – in certain very special ways – that leads to true intelligence. [Marvin Minsky]
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence — or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly’s wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.… [Arthur C. Clarke]
Nothing has instilled in more melancholy in me than the discovery that the number of intelligent men is extremely small.
I am not seeking genius in the next man. By intelligence I mean only that the mind react to happenings with a certain sharpness and precision, that the radish not be perpetually seized by its leaves, that the grey not be confused with brown and, above all, that objects in front of one be seen with a little exactness and accuracy, without supplanting sight by mechanically repeated words. But, ordinarily, one has the impression of living amid somnambulists who advance through life buried in an hermetic sleep from which it is impossible to stir them in order to make them aware of their surroundings. Probably, humanity has almost always lived in this somnambulistic state in which ideas are not a wide-awake, conscious reaction to things, but a blind, automatic habit, drawn from a repertory of formulae which the atmosphere infuses into the individual. [Ortega y Gasset]
The degree of intellect necessary to please us is a fairly accurate measure of the degree on intellect we possess. [Helvétius]
One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. [Oliver Wendell Holmes]
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. [Galileo Galilei]
The mind is like the stomach. It is not how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests. [Albert Jay Nock]
Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. [Susan Sontag]
Lord Birkenhead is very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head. [Margot Asquith]
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. [F. Scott Fitzgerald]
IRRATIONAL
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses. [Francis Bacon]
Irrationality is the square root of all evil. [Douglas Hofstadter]
Keeping an open mind is a virtue – but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. [Carl Sagan]
I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. [Carl Sagan]
Therapists, New Agers and Born Again Christians seldom blink. A blink marks the mind’s registration of a new idea. Converts have no intention of receiving new ideas. They know already all they want to know. [Fay Weldon]
Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic powers of signs and exorcisms… Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery! [Leon Trotsky]
We tend to ascribe an absolute importance to things that cause wholly ‘irrational’ physical effects within us. Of all the facts of experience the ones that count are those which take our breath away, bring a flush to the cheeks, grip our hearts, or cause a dryness in our throats. Such phenomena overshadow all the others and momentarily blot them out. [Paul Valéry]
Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. [Ethan Allen]
The happy do not believe in miracles. [Johann Wolfang von Göethe]
[A summary of New Age beliefs:] There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such thing as objective reality. We make our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of knowing. If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is irrational or mythical. It’s just another faith or belief system or myth, with no more justification than any other. It doesn’t matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as they’re meaningful to you. [Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn]
You speak about Homoeopathy, which is a subject which makes me more wrath even than does Clairvoyance. Clairvoyancy so transcends belief that one’s ordinary faculties are put out of the question, but in homoeopathy common sense and common observation come into play, and both those must go to the dogs, if the infinitesimal doses have any effect whatever. [Charles Darwin]
We obey the same intellectual integrity, when we study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumours of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to be normal, and things of course.” [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
In September of 1996, an international conference was held in Frankfurt, Germany, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of the German physician Samuel Hahnemann’s law of similars, simila similibus curantur, or ‘like cures like,’ which form the basis of homoeopathy.The German health minister, Horst Seehofer, was on hand to greet the conferees. ‘Although there have been many attempts to prove otherwise,’ he told the appreciative audience, ‘the success of homoeopathy cannot be denied.’ In Germany, homoeopathy was now officially sanctioned mainstream medicine.
According to Hahnemann’s law of similars, substances that produce a certain set of symptoms in a healthy person can sure those symptoms in someone who is sick. Although there are similar notions in the writings of Paracelsus in the Middle Ages and in Chinese medicine dating back thousands of years, Hahnemann seems to have reached this conclusion independently while trying to understand how quinine relieves the symptoms of malaria. He tried a little quinine on himself and experienced chills and fever – classic symptoms of malaria. From this single experience, he made the enormous leap to a general principle of medicine. Hahnemann’s similarity approach ran counter to the prevailing medical view at the time, which was to prescribe treatments that appeared to suppress the symptoms. Both the similarity and opposition approaches were pitifully simplistic concepts in an age when knowledge of human physiology was still very primitive.
Hahneman spent much of his life testing natural substances to find out what symptoms they produced and then prescribing them for people who exhibited those symptoms. Although the anecdotal evidence on which he based his conclusions would not be taken seriously today, homoeopathy as currently practised still relies almost entirely on Hahnemann’s listing of substances and their indications for use.
Natural substances, of course, are often acutely toxic. Troubled by the side effects that frequently accompanied his medications, Hahnemann experimented with dilution. As you would expect, he found that with increasing dilution, the side effects could be reduced and eventually eliminated. More remarkable, he also found that the more he diluted the medicine, the more his patients seemed to benefit. He came to the astonishing conclusion that dilution increased the curative power of his medications. He declared this to be his second law, ‘the law of infinitesimals.’ Less is better.
Hahnemann used a process of sequential dilution to prepare his medications. He would dilute an extract of some ‘natural’ herb or mineral, one part medicine to ten parts water, or 1:10, shake the solution, and then dilute it another factor of ten, resulting in a total dilution of 1:100. Repeating that a third time gives 1:1000, etc. Each sequential dilution would add another zero. He would repeat the procedure many times. Extreme dilutions are easily achieved by this method.
The dilution limit is reached when a single molecule of the medicine remains. Beyond that point, there is nothing left to dilute. In over-the-counter homoeopathic remedies, for example, a dilution of 30X is fairly standard. The notation 30X means the substance was diluted one part in ten and shaken, and then this was repeated sequentially thirty times. The final dilution would be one part medicine to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts of water. That would be far beyond the dilution limit. To be precise, at a dilution of 30X you would have to drink 7,874 gallons of the solution to expect to get just one molecule of the medicine.
Compared to many homoeopathic preparations, even 30X is concentrated. Oscillcoccinum, the standard homeopathic remedy for flu, is derived from duck liver, but its widespread use in homoeopathy poses little threat to the duck population – the standard dilution is an astounding 200C. The C means the extract is diluted one part per hundred and shaken, repeated sequentially two hundred times. That would result in a dilution of one molecule of the extract to every 10400 molecules of water – that is, 1 followed by 400 zeros. But there are only about 1080 (1 followed by 80 zeros) atoms in the entire universe. A dilution of 200C would go far, far beyond the dilution limit of the entire visible universe!
Hahnemann was presumably unaware that he was exceeding the dilution limit in his preparations. That calculation requires a knowledge of Avogadro’s number, an important physical constant that allows you to calculate the number of molecules in a given mass of a substance. Although he was contemporary with Avogadro, Hahnemann published his major work, Organon der Rationellen Heilkunde, in 1810, one year before Avogadro advanced his famous hypothesis. It would, in fact, be another half century before other physicists actually determined Avogadro’s number.
It is not difficult to see why Hahnemann became a popular physician. At that time in Europe, as in the United States, physicians still treated patients with bleeding, purging, and frequent doses of mercury and other toxic substances. If Hahnemann’s infinitely dilute nostrums did no good, at least they did no harm, allowing the patient’s natural defences to correct the problem. As Hahnemann’s reputation grew, patients expected to be cured by him. Belief evoked the placebo effect and allowed their body’s own repair mechanisms to function unimpaired by stress. [Robert Park]
Reason has always existed, but not always in reasonable form. [Karl Marx]
A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgement based upon it. [Bertrand Russell]
JOURNALISM
The first law of journalism – to confirm existing prejudice rather than contradict it. [Alexander Cockburn]
The true aim of the daily newspaper does not consist in following history step by step in its unpredictability, but in slyly sauntering along in order to show that nothing that happens requires that our ideas truly change. Far from being enslaved to the ‘cult of fact,’ the newspaper transforms every event into the support of a value system. It is not, nor can it be, interested in a news item’s ‘truth value,’ but only in its symbolic effectiveness. [Franco Moretti]
All magazines slavishly follow a line of thinking, and as a result they despise thought. [Antonin Artaud]
The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can’t hear yourself speak. [Georg Lichtenberg]
It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed. [Walter Benjamin]
Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. [G.K.Chesterton]
An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen. [Irving Babbitt]
There they are, millions of them waiting with pennies in their hands. Anyone can get those pennies who will give them what they want. Evidently the new readers do not want the old-fashioned newspapers. They cannot understand them and have not time enough to read them. They have not concentration enough to wade through their voluminous reports. Their minds demand scraps. News can be treated in a way that will please them; make them feel they know all about everything, instead of suggesting to them, as existing papers did, that everything was very difficult to understand, that nothing could be discussed or reported except at great length. [Lord Northcliffe]
The genius of the age is that of journalism. Journalism throngs every rift and cranny of our consciousness. It does so because the press and the media are far more than a technical instrument and commercial enterprise. The root-phenomenology of the journalistic is, in a sense, metaphysical. It articulates an epistemology and ethics of spurious temporality. Journalistic presentation generates a temporality of equivalent instantaneity. All things are more or less of equal import, all are only daily. Correspondingly, the content, the possible significance of the material which journalism communicates, is ‘remaindered’ the day after. The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform. Political enormity and the circus, the leaps of science and those of the athlete, apocalypse and indigestion, are given the same edge. The utmost beauty or terror are shredded at close of day. We are made whole again, and expectant, in time for the morning edition. [George Steiner]
It is impossible to scan any periodical, of whatever day, month or year, without finding in every line of it evidence of the most appalling human perversity, together with the most surprising boasts of probity, goodness and charity and the most shameless assertions concerning progress and civilisation.
Every newspaper, from first line to last, is a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, acts of indecency, tortures, crimes by princes, crimes by nations, crimes by individuals, a debauch of universal villainy.
And this is the disgusting aperitif that the civilised man takes with his breakfast every morning. Everything in this world sweats with crime: the newspaper, the walls and men’s faces.
I do not understand how any clean hand can touch a newspaper without a wince of disgust. [Charles Baudelaire]
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. [George Bernard Shaw]
If a terrorist group wanted to hit Britain, all they’d have to do is kill 100 random celebrities. The country would have a nervous breakdown. [Chris Morris]
Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing. [Thomas Fuller]
