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.