old age is a little like obscenity: impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, and then you want to look away

 --- Sally Adee, in a review of Aliya Whiteley's From the Neck Up, New Scientist, 27 October 2021

Excerpt

For many of us, ageing is both science fiction (something that will happen in a future too distant to care about) and gothic horror (it’s coming, and it will be awful).

In this way, old age is a little like obscenity: impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, and then you want to look away.

... Whiteley’s worlds may be icy and gothic, but the people in them are altogether human, and their funny and cantankerous inner lives make them good company. You will miss these grumpy old people: they’re getting too old for this shit, but so, I would wager, are you. 

a work wicked in its end and destination, but in respect of art and contrivance excellent and admirable

 --- Francis Bacon on Daedalus's Labyrinth, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients (1857), XIX. Dædalus, Or the Mechanic

Excerpt:

Many and excellent works, as well in honour of the gods as for the adornment and ennobling of cities and public places, had been built and modelled by him; but it is for unlawful inventions that his name is most famous. For he it was who supplied the machine which enabled Pasiphae to satisfy her passion for the bull; so that the unhappy and infamous birth of the monster Minotaurus, which devoured the ingenuous youth, was owing to the wicked industry and pernicious genius of this man. Then to conceal the first mischief he added another, and for the security of this pest devised and constructed the Labyrinth; a work wicked in its end and destination, but in respect of art and contrivance excellent and admirable.

A wonderfully concise exposition of our ambivalence about tech and technologists.

studying archetypes, mythology and fairytales is a kind of vaccination against archetypal possession

 --- Joseph R Lee, This Jungian Life podcast, episode 172 - Archetypes

When he [CG Jung] or other clinicians began to feel that an individual's psyche was on the verge of a major archetypal activation, he would task them with reading fairytales endlessly, reading mythology endlessly, so that there would be images and structures other than just the personal life within which this archetypal god could inhabit, and minimize the damage to the individual. So I would venture to say that [42:09] studying archetypes, mythology and fairytales is a kind of vaccination against archetypal possession. 

Skill is just recognizing when you’ve gotten lucky

 --- investor Wilmot Kidd, in a profile by Jason Zweig, Meet the Kidd Who Goes Toe to Toe With Warren Buffett, WSJ, Dec 10, 2021.

Last two paragraphs of the story:

When I ask Mr. Kidd if he attributes his long success to luck or skill, he lets out a long, quiet, dry laugh before saying something I don’t think I will ever forget: “Skill is just recognizing when you’ve gotten lucky.”

He explains, “It’s when you’ve been fortunate enough to make an investment in a great company, and suddenly you realize just how very lucky you were, and you buy more. That’s skill, I suppose. That—and holding on to what you have and not chickening out.”

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail.

 --- Becky Chalmers, in A Psalm for the Wild-built (2021), p. 135

Excerpt

“Find the strength to do both,” Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon.

“Exactly,” Dex said.

“But what’s both?”

Dex recited: “ ‘Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what makes us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.’ ”

“Is that from your Insights?” Mosscap asked.

“Yeah,” Dex said.

Well, we all know the Navy's never wrong. But in this case, it was a little weak on bein' right.

 --- Wendell Mayes, line given to Adm. Nimitz-character, played by Henry Fonda, in the movie "In Harm's Way"

Politics is spending your money on my priorities

 --- JP de Vries (yours truly), though I imagine I saw this somewhere once.

A slightly longer version:

Politics is the business of trying to make you live according to my values, including spending your money on my priorities.

nomen est omen

 --- Latin saying, via Jason Zweig's essay in the WSJ, "Donald Trump’s Ageless Advice for Mark Zuckerberg," 5 November 2021

Excerpt

The Latin saying “nomen est omen” can be loosely translated as “your name is your fate.” By renaming itself Meta, Facebook has identified itself inextricably with a metaverse future. In the eyes of the public, the business will become what it is named. That could end up making the company even more of a lightning rod for criticism than it already is.

In another excerpt he compares names with strategies, which resonates for me with mythology: it's easier to grab onto a god's name than to understand what they represent.

That’s because a name is easier to criticize than a strategy, says Margaret Wolfson, founder of River and Wolf LLC, a naming agency in New York. “To talk about a strategy takes a lot more time and analysis,” she says. “But names are handles: They’re easy to grab onto, and criticizing them can turn into a blood sport.” 

You may not be interested in X, but X is interested in you

--- (update 13 Dec 2023) the earliest match using “war” attributed to popular author Fannie Hurst by QuoteInvestigator, 2 Aug 2021

--- (original post 4 Nov 2021) attributed to Leon Trotsky for X = "the dialectic" and "war", see Wikipedia entry

From QuoteInvestigator (QI)

The earliest match using “war” located by QI appeared in the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” of Ohio in 1941. The popular author Fannie Hurst used the expression while addressing a “Freedom Day” rally in Cleveland. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:

“We may not be interested in this war, but it is interested in us. I’m not trying to sell it to you, but no one can evade the fact that we are in the path of the storm. We dare not be disunited when liberty, the most precious jewel in our national strongbox, is at stake.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

QI has found no substantive evidence that Leon Trotsky employed the saying about war. QI conjectures that the attribution to Trotsky occurred via a multistep process that began with statements about dialectics.

From Wikipedia, accessed 4 Nov 2021

This was attributed to Trotsky in an epigraph in Night Soldiers: A Novel (1988) by Alan Furst but it may actually be a revision of a statement earlier attributed to Trotsky: "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you." Only a very loose translation of "the dialectic" would produce "war."

...

In a later work, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (2000) by Michael Walzer, the author states: "War is most often a form of tyranny. It is best described by paraphrasing Trotsky's aphorism about the dialectic: 'You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.'"

This statement on dialectic itself seems to be a paraphrase, with the original in In Defense of Marxism Part VII : "Petty-Bourgeois Moralists and the Proletarian Party" (1942) — where Trotsky publishes a letter to Albert Goldman (5 June 1940) has been translated as "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net."

Every group calls other belief-systems myths, its own the truth

 --- Peter Heehs, in "Myth, History, and Theory," History and Theory 33(1), 1–19, https://doi.org/10.2307/2505649, paraphrasing William H. McNeill (I think)

Excerpt

William H. McNeill also is interested in the relationship between historiography and mythology. So-called scientific history, he asserts, is itself the result of a belief system with unquestioned assumptions. All such systems, the scientific included, are mythic. In a world of competing sets of assumptions, each group affirms its own beliefs in order "to live more comfortably, insulated from troublesome dissent." (This is reminiscent of the effort of Hobsbawm's inventors to avoid anxiety in an ever-changing world by linking up with an invariant past.) Every group calls other belief-systems myths, its own the truth; but of course other groups do the same. Formerly historians believed they were in a position to decide which "truth" was true and which was "myth." But this is not possible in the postmodern age. The best historians can do is to try to "attain better historiographical balance between Truth, truths and myth." When historians exert themselves to produce a presentation of "truths" (not Truth) that is credible and intelligible to a given audience, the result is what "might best be called mythistory." (Citation: William H. McNeill, "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History and Historians," American Historical Review 91 (1986), 4, 8.

social progress rests essentially upon death

--- August Comte, quoted by Bobby Duffy in the essay "The Bunk of Generational Talk," WSJ, Oct 22, 2021

From the WSJ piece:

For the 19th-century French sociologist Auguste Comte, the generation was a key factor in “the basic speed of human development.” “We should not hide the fact that our social progress rests essentially upon death; which is to say that the successive steps of humanity necessarily require a continuous renovation…from one generation to the next,” Comte wrote. Generations differ from one another, and that’s a good thing, since it prevents society turning into a “stagnant pond.”

A monkey, in its mother’s eyes, is a gazelle.

 --- an Arabic proverb, quoted in a NYT story about Palestinian olive oil.

“Look, everybody thinks their oil is the best,” he said, “but the olive oil from Rameh is smooth and doesn’t burn. It’s like a ripe fruit: pungent but sweet.”

As Mazen Ali put it, referencing an Arabic proverb, “A monkey, in its mother’s eyes, is a gazelle.” Mr. Ali, 60, is the co-founder of a nonprofit group dedicated to preserving the region’s olive trees. Though he is from the neighboring village of Deir Hanna, even he acknowledged that Rameh’s oil is exceptional.

For the Greek version, see Swish! Swish! Swish! Patrick Leigh Fermor on the Mani olive harvest in the LRB:

‘Stavro,’ [his companion Petro] said as we set off. ‘Deep Mani olives are good. I’m not saying they’re not. But the best are the ones in the Outer Mani. The whole world knows it. It’s not just because I come from those parts – far from it. But it’s everybody’s opinion.’

‘So be it,’ Stavro said. He gave me a secret dig with his elbow and the ghost of a wink. I asked Petro where the best in the Outer Mani come from. ‘From Liasínova,’ he answered without hesitation. There was a scarcely audible chuckle from Barba Stavro. I asked Petro where he came from. ‘Me? You mean where do I come from?’ Then, in airy tones of slight surprise at the unexpected coincidence, he said: ‘From there. From Liasínova, that’s to say.’

It was a splendid illustration of local prejudice. But now, after many years and mature consideration, I think there was a lot in what he said. Certainly, the best olives in Greece come from the Outer Mani; and definitely from the region of Liasínova. But from Liasínova itself? I think a truly impartial and objective opinion might place the actual pinpoint of unsurpassable excellence a little further down the coast – only three or four kilometres away. More towards Kardamyli, perhaps.

Patrick Leigh Fermor's house, in case you didn't know, was in Kardamyli :-)

beware the vividness of transient events

 --- Carl von Clausewitz, quoted by Colin Powell, in a profile on Powell by Peter Grier

From the CSMonitor story:

Asked in an interview how he dealt – for years and years – with the firehose of news, opinions, advice, and criticism that washes over any top U.S. official, General Powell quoted one of the U.S. Army’s favorite military theoreticians, 19th-century German Gen. Carl von Clausewitz. 

“There’s a great Clausewitzian expression which says ‘beware the vividness of transient events,’” General Powell said. “There are lots of transient events out there, and I am trying to beware of their vividness.”

Lenni Brenner in an Oct 2001 piece ascribes the quote to Colin Powell’s (with Joseph Persico), autobiography, My American Journey, 1995, p. 419:

I consoled myself with the words of Clausewitz: ‘The vividness of transient impressions must not make us forget that such truth they maintain is of a lesser stamp.'

I haven't been able to track down the original.

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned

 --- widely (but dubiously) attributed to Richard Feynman

Physical objects [are] comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer

Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, 3rd Edition, Harvard University Press (1980), p.  44

Excerpt:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.

Via Galen Strawson, in “Reply to Hocutt,” Philosophical Books (1996), where he wrote, “Materialism, after all, is a metaphysical hypothesis. As such it is, as Quine memorably observed, ‘comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer’.”

the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces

 --- David Simon, creator-writer-producer of HBO's The Wire, in an interview with Nick Hornby, The Believer, Aug 1, 2007, Issue 46

Excerpt

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

David Simon, from The Believer, Issue 46

 

... woke up and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know

 --- Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November (Moomins, 8), Ch. 5

The first paragraph of Chapter 5, "Hemulen":

The Hemulen woke up and recognized himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know. He felt even tireder than when he went to bed, and here it was—another day which would go on until evening and then there would be another one and another one which would be the same as all days are when they are lived by a Hemulen.

 

it is happening because it makes someone money, and will continuing happening until it stops making someone money

--- Bernard Welt on popular art, in Mythomania, Art Issues Press, 1998, p 7-8 

In context:

Maybe it is part of a general change in American culture that has been welcomed and deplored as a new age of faith, a giddy plunge into the irrational that runs across lines of party and sect, embracing the politics of compassion as well as stern but fuzzy family values, and New Age spirituality along with new-fashioned fundamentalism. It remains to be seen whether this is not an age of bad faith. But I know two things: First, it is happening because it makes someone money, and will continuing happening until it stops making someone money. (Christian evangelism didn't find television as a way of spreading its message; television found evangelism as a way of extending its market.) Second, it has something to do with the hypnotic trance we fell into around the time of Ronald Reagan's first televised address to the nation, when it first occurred to us that we had actually begun living in a movie. Raging neoconservatives or raving multiculturalists, we are still haunted by the Great White Father, and like it or not, we remain in the Age of Reagan until we are freed by the next great paradigm shift.

There was a wood rat called Poot

 --- Tove Jansson, in Comet in Moominland (Moomins, 2), Chapter 8 (h/t Susan T)

Excerpt

“Now we should tell a story,” said Sniff, turning to the smallest of the small creatures. “Do you know one, Little Creep?” 

“Oh, no, really,” whispered the Little Creep, who was terribly shy. “Oh, no, well, really, perhaps.” 

“Well, out with it, then,” said Sniff. 

“There was a wood rat called Poot,” said the Little Creep, looking shyly between her paws. 

“Well, what happened then?” prompted Sniff. 

“The story’s finished now,” said the Little Creep, and burrowed into the moss in confusion. 

They all roared with laughter, and those who had tails beat them on the ground in appreciation. 

 

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines

 --- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four: Maxims and Intentions, transl. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics (Rev Ed) 2003

p. 99, paragraph 130 (complete)

What a person is begins to betray itself when his talent declines – when he ceases to show what he can do. Talent is also finery; finery is also a hiding place.

Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite

 --- Matt Taibbi, "Our Endless Dinner With Robin DiAngelo," Jun 30, 2021

In context:

. . . You wonder: Am I high? Didn’t I just read that? And didn’t I read that in the last book also? 

You did, because the rule, “If you wrote it, don’t write it again,” has an exception: “Unless it makes money, in which case write it as many times as the market will bear.” Telling affluent white progressives they’re racists and explaining they can buy absolution for $24.95 is fishing for cash with dynamite. DiAngelo is monetizing white guilt on a grand scale, and there’s an extraordinary irony in the fact that she’s got a home-field advantage in this game over someone like, say, Ibram Kendi, because she’s more accessible to people like herself, the same phenomenon she decries. Normally I’d salute the capitalist ingenuity. Unfortunately, like Donald Trump, DiAngelo is both too dim-witted and too terrific an entrepreneur to stop herself from upselling a truly psychotic movement into existence. 

It's a high-octane rant; much more like this in the piece.

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced

 --- Attrib. to James Baldwin

capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety

 --- Celso Vieira,  in "The capricious gods counterattack: on what the empirical method and the rational gods model miss" Academia Letters, 2021

From the Conclusion

According to the big gods hypothesis, moralizing deities who punish ethical transgressions play a key role in reinforcing human cooperation. Hence, a religion with a big god is instrumental in the development of complex societies. This hypothesis has been questioned recently. . . . Factors such as wars and accessibility of resources seem to bear a closer connection with rising and falling complex societies. Wars and drastic resource depletion follow heavy-tailed distributions, that is, a body of events in which rare outliers are big enough to distort the mean of the whole. . . .

Regularity-centred models will not work to make predictions or estimates. The advised way to deal with a potential catastrophic event is a zero-risk attitude. However, it is not easy to advocate for it. Heavy events are rare, so people are expected to adopt self-constraining behaviour based on unavailable observed evidence. To make the perils more vivid, older generations who experienced heavy events might want to find a way to convey this information for the generations to come. Storytelling might work. Again, because of the rarity, no foreseeable gratification for the self-constraining behaviour is available. If so, piety, that is, prudence plus a humbling recognition of uncertainty might reinforce the right attitude. According to the previous discussion, capricious gods – and not a big or moralizing one – are better for motivating piety. Thus, capriciousness might be a side of religiosity playing a non-negligible role in the avoidance of catastrophes by long-lasting societies.

There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.

 --- Alec Ryrie, closing of his Gresham College lecture "Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich," March 2017.

Closing comments, starting at timecode 51:49:

We might imagine or hope that had we been there, we would've done something or taken some stand, and we are fooling ourselves. We would've understood what was happening around us, in the same way that they did. We would've shared their hopes, their experiences, their resentments, their assumptions, and their prejudices. Like them, we would've lowered our heads and muddled through increasingly terrible times as best we could. There is only one reason that we do not share in that guilt, and it's that we were not there.

When the ducks quack, feed ‘em

 --- Wall Street proverb, via Jason Zweig, "Should You Be Buying What Robinhood Is Selling?," Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2021

Excerpt

One of Wall Street’s oldest and frankest sayings is “When the ducks quack, feed ‘em”—meaning that whenever investors are eager to buy something, brokers will sell it like mad.

The intelligence can only be led by desire. . . . The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy.

 --- Simone Weil, quoted by Toril Moi in "I came with a sword," an LRB review of The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, by Robert Zaretsky

From Moi's piece: 

Zaretsky rightly devotes a chapter to Weil’s ideas on attention. For her, attention is not focused, tense concentration. It has nothing to do with willpower. Attention is attente – a waiting, a letting go, an unselfish opening. To struggle with a problem in geometry is valuable whether or not we manage to solve it, because it teaches us to be open to God and therefore to others. The ‘love of God’, she writes

    has attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour ... is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.

The point of studying is not to learn this or that, but to acquire this discipline of the soul. Weil argues that we can train our attention by doing geometry, Greek and Latin translation and by writing, if we are willing to wait for the right word to come. ‘The intelligence,’ Weil writes in a passage I particularly love, ‘can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.’ Weil’s method is hardly a way to get straight As, for if there is no joy, there should be no work. As always, she practised what she preached. She failed the entrance exams to the École Normale the first time she tried, because she disliked her history teacher and so never turned up for his classes.

I believe the quote is from "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God." Here is a reprint (pdf); see there for source and translator.

All tragedies are finish'd by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage

 --- Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the Third (h/t Diane Sieber)

Excerpt

All tragedies are finish'd by a death,

  All comedies are ended by a marriage;

The future states of both are left to faith,

   For authors fear description might disparage

The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,

   And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;

So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,

   They say no more of Death or of the Lady.

Celebrity is cyclical and responds to what the overarching culture wants at any given time

 --- Jorie Lagerwey, quoted in "Famous for good reason? Britain elevates do-gooders to celebrities," Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2021

In context

The rise of Dr. Bodalia and Dr. Okorocha, who have a combined following of more than 85,000 on Instagram alone, reveals a shift in who, and what, constitutes celebrity in the eyes of Britons during the pandemic. At a time when the U.K. records one of the world’s highest death tolls per capita from COVID-19, the country has been granting iconic status to those who serve communities, do public good, and raise awareness for social causes.

“Celebrity is cyclical and responds to what the overarching culture wants at any given time,” says Jorie Lagerway [sic], associate professor in television studies at the University of Dublin. “The reason we have celebrities is to tell us what’s important in our culture at that particular moment in history.”

Anyone claiming to know the future is just trying to own it

 --- Margaret Heffernan, perhaps in The Myth of Inevitability, BBC audio, Oct 2019, via LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience

 --- David E Nye, quoted by LM Sacasas in Resistance Is Futile: The Myth of Tech Inevitability, The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 7

Context via Sacasas

Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities . . . Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

 --- Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, according to goodreads

gossip, cherry-picked facts and baseless speculation—America’s second, third and fourth favorite past times [sic]

 --- Jason Gay, in "Why the NFL Draft Is Unstoppable, Even Now," WSJ, April 27, 2021

In context:

Get it right, get it wrong, the draft is a huge deal, really an optimal event for these times, a windy feast of gossip, cherry-picked facts and baseless speculation—America’s second, third and fourth favorite past times, after screaming at each other on social media about pandemic face masks. In the information-is-everywhere era, the draft has turned marvelously democratic: You don’t need to be decked in Brioni on TV to have a sizzling, or even smarter, take on BYU quarterback Zach Wilson, Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields, or the current, allegedly-surging quarterback darling, Trey Lance of North Dakota State. You don’t have to be able to finish a 40-yard dash to have profound wisdom on the proper 40-yard dash time for an NFL player. All you need is access to a computer. And a mouth.

he lives well who lives unseen

 --- Descartes, according to Michael Allen Gillespie in The Theological Origins of Modernity (2008, 183)

Gillespie excerpt:

Why did Descartes leave Paris and hide himself away from the public eye? He himself gives us a preliminary answer to this question with his famous assertion that “he lives well who lives unseen.” This humanist claim, however, does not capture the truth of the matter, for Descartes did not really retreat from society. In fact, he moved around a great deal, spending considerable time in Amsterdam, which he called his “urban solitude,” and in a number of smaller towns. It was not therefore a bucolic, Petrarchian solitude that Descartes was seeking. It is more likely that he wanted to find a place he could work and publish more freely and without fear of retaliation. On May 5, 1632, he wrote a paean on Holland to his friend, the poet Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac: “What other land [is there] where one can enjoy a liberty so entire, where one can sleep with less inquietude, where there are always armies afoot expressly to guard you, where poisonings, treason, calumnies are less known, and where the innocence of former times remains?” It is important to remember that he had already been accused of Rosicrucianism. His fears on this score were not misplaced, as the actions taken against a number of the libertines indicate. Already in the Little Notebook, he had recognized the need to conceal his true features and during his years in Holland he went to great lengths to develop and perfect this mask. In fact, Descartes assiduously cultivated the appearance of orthodoxy, although it is clear that at least theologically he had adopted heterodox positions from very early on.

Future events such as these will affect you in the future

 --- Criswell, in Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed D Wood Jr.

Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7apnH01sf0I&ab_channel=JWood

Not my circus, not my monkeys

 --- Polish proverb "Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy," according to the Polish and Proud blog, April 2019

From the blog:

In short, it could be translated as having the same meaning of "I mind my own business" or "it’s none of my business", but in a broader sense, it’s usually used to enhance the fact that you are not the one to judge someone else’s actions, even when you don’t necessarily agree with them. As if the mess someone else has found himself in, is not your mess to worry about, and the people taking part in that mess are not the ones you can control. 

The research shows that this proverb is not actually an old one. This is interesting because most used usually have a long history and a meaning behind them. It is noted by Henryk Markiewicz and Andrzej Romanowski in Skrzydlate słowa: wielki słownik cytatów polskich i obcych from 2005, that the proverb has been first used in 1993, when Ireneusz Sekula commented the governing of Hanna Suchocka.

They could fight, or they could gamble

 --- Canadian Museum of History archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki, about game pieces found at a Native American archaeological site, in "Walking Into New Worlds," Archaeology, Sep/Oct 2020

In context:

In addition to the moccasins, the team unearthed more bison bones, hide scrapers, sewing awls, small beads, and fragments of woven mats and baskets. Perhaps the most significant group of artifacts they excavated is a large collection of gaming pieces. This evidence of gambling is particularly telling, says Canadian Museum of History archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki. “These games weren’t just recreational pastimes,” he says. They were a proxy for communication, indicating that contact between groups was taking place. Native elders have explained that when two groups speaking different languages and from different cultures encountered each other, they had a choice: “They could fight,” Yanicki says, “or they could gamble.”

Magic without magic

 --- John Wheeler, via a Nautilus animation of comments by Robbert Dijkgraaf

From an obituary, "Magic without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)" by @curiouswavefn

Only Wheeler could have introduced paradoxical and yet meaningful phrases like "mass without mass". In celebration of his sixtieth birthday, physicists produced a volume dedicated to him with a title that appropriately captured the essence of his thinking- "magic without magic". 

The 1972 festschrift: Magic without magic: John Archibald Wheeler;: A collection of essays in honor of his sixtieth birthday (amazon).

although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things

 --- Miri Rubin, on the BBC In Our Time episode Medieval Pilgrimage, at timecode 11:00

In context - responding to a question from Melvyn Bragg about the role of relics, and the power associated with them

From very early on, the very idea of a sacrament means that deep in Christianity is the belief that although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things.

the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized

 --- Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007), p. 126

In context: 

With the Cold War no longer available, it was necessary to reframe pretexts not only for intervention but also for militarized state capitalism at home. The Pentagon budget presented to Congress a few months after the fall Of the Berlin Wall remained largely unchanged, but was packaged in a new rhetorical framework, presented in the National Security Strategy of March 1990. One priority was to sup- port advanced industry in traditional ways, in sharp violation of the free market doctrines proclaimed and imposed on others. The National Security Strategy called for strengthening "the defense industrial base" (essentially, high-tech industry) with incentives "to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development." As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized, a form of state socialism for the rich on which much of the advanced US economy relies, particularly since World War Il, but with precedents in the advanced economies back to the early days of the industrial revolution." In the past several decades, Pentagon funding for research and development has declined, while support through the National Institutes of Health and other "health-related" components of the state sector has increased, as the cutting edge of the economy of the future shifts from electronics- to biology-based industry. The longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and other ideologues may hail the wonders of "entrepreneurial initiative," "consumer choice," and "free trade," but those who channel public funds to development of the economy and those who profit from these decisions know better.

Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature

 --- Kermit Pattison, in Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind Hardcover (2020, p. 360), via Stephanie Hanes's review in the CS Monitor, December 2020.

In context

The Royal Society conference began to expose the battle lines around the oldest family skeleton. Those guided by genetics and primatology used living apes to make logical inferences about our common ancestors. ("I have no more direct access to the last common ancestor than anyone else in this room," McGrew explained to the audience. "So we have to model. We're forced to do so.") In contrast, those guided by fossils took a ground-up approach— bones revealed what really happened. Those two mind-sets placed faith in different lines of evidence, made different assumptions, and inevitably reached different conclusions. In the first approach, the relationships between humans and apes were irrefutable, but the form of their common ancestors remained conjectural. In the fossil-based method, bones provided rock-hard evidence of past forms, but their places in the family and relationships to humans could only be surmised. Both sides fought to make their work relevant to human origins—and Ardi [a 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton, short for Ardipithecus ramidus] became the flashpoint. 

In short, it was a classic clash of scientific worldviews. Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature. In his 1962 milestone The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of the scientific paradigm—the set of theories and methods that …

Another excerpt the Stephanie Hanes points to, on p. 399-400

One of Ardi 's main lessons is that the simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science. The most enduring work is that which describes things never seen before—human anatomy, fossils of extinct animals, ape behaviors, genetic code, ancient ecosystems, and more—without distorting that novelty to conform to the expectations of the era. But we humans hunger for more than just pure description—we search for meaning and emotionally satisfying endings, and that's when we run astray, because our reach for narrative often exceeds our grasp of facts. In the struggle to comprehend the unfamiliar, we invoke familiar analogies, but nature usually turns out to be more complex than what we imagine in our little brains. The only way to know for sure is to discover.

 

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no"

 --- Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, writing in 2009, referring to a much older concept; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Betteridge, from TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism, archived 

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

See the Wikipedia article for earlier mentions, including Hinchliffe's Rule.

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces

 --- ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (e.g. Goodreads); haven't tracked down the source

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought

 --- Samuel Palmer, British landscape painter, etcher, and printmaker, via the Ashmolean Museum Instagram feed, 27 Jan 2021

A self-portrait of Palmer in the Ashmolean
that was painted when he was nineteen

For more quotes by Palmer, see AZ Quotes

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler

 --- Tony Stark, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); the archetypal tech entrepreneur on his relationship to leadership (archetypally, the Ruler)

From https://www.quotes.net/mquote/974240 

Maria Hill:

All set up boss.

Tony Stark:

Actually he's the boss.

[points to Captain America]

Tony Stark:

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler.

Serial faileur

 --- Pierre de Vries, Blogger "About Me" statement until Jan 7, 2021

Full description

Serial faileur. Not good enough at particle physics; quit venture capital; dropped out of art school; left the software industry; got bored with technology policy. Currently thinking about high tech and myth.

potency as a source of meaning and [a] potential for zealotry are naturally correlated

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), p. 177

Quote in context: after citing critiques by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and David French in the National Review:

Yet social justice's most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated. Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.

Cui bono?

 --- attributed to Lucius Cassius by Cicero, according to Wikipedia:

L. Cassius ille, quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat, identidem in causis quaerere solebat, cui bono fuisset?

Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: "to whom might it be for a benefit?"

—Cicero: Pro Roscio Amerino, §§ 84, 86