"Beautiful—but not desirable; ugly—but not repulsive; false—but not rejected"

--- The perception of things in Buddhist wisdom, supposedly according R H Blyth, quoted by Ken Jones in "Buddhism and Social Action: An Exploration" (no reference given)

In context:

In this Wisdom, in the words of R.H. Blyth, things are beautiful — but not desirable; ugly — but not repulsive; false — but not rejected. What is inevitable, like death, is accepted without rage; what may not be, like war, is the subject of action skillful and the more effective because, again, it is not powered and blinded by rage and hate. We may recognize an oppressor and resolutely act to remove the oppression, but we do not hate him. Absence of hatred, disgust, intolerance or righteous indignation within us is itself a part of our growth towards enlightenment (bodhi).

 In an interesting example of the question of the suitability of righteous indignation, the New York Times reported the following in "Promoting Peace, Nobel Laureates Square Off, Politely" just yesterday:

On a stage during the opening session of the Newark Peace Education Summit, the Dalai Lama and Jody Williams, a world-famous anti-land-mine activist, disagreed — sometimes obliquely, always politely — about the importance of inner tranquillity, the role of anger and the moral character of the United States.

...

In the main panel on Friday morning, the Dalai Lama, wearing a deep red robe that hung to his ankles, and others said that people must attain inner peace in order to learn, and promote peace in the world. “Too much emotion, attachment, anger or fear, that kind of mental state, you can’t investigate objectively,” he said.

That did not sit well with Ms. Williams, an American, who is, as the Dalai Lama put it, “quite blunt.”

“I thought it was strange to be asked to be on this panel on inner peace, because I don’t have much,” she said. “It’s anger at injustice which fires many of us.” 

Update 13 July, 2011: I found the original Blyth quote on p. 278 of "Zen in English Literature & Oriental Classics" (The Hokuseido Press, 1942), following just after a retelling the story of the monk carrying the young woman over the ford:

Things are beautiful but not desirable ; ugly but not repulsive ; false, but not rejected ; dirty, but ourselves no cleaner.

[punctuation as in the original]

"Coal plants kill, but they only kill a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians"

--- Bill Gates on coal vs. nuclear power, speaking at WIRED's Disruptive by Design Business Conference, 3 May 2011, quoted in "Bill Gates: Don't dismiss nuclear energy" by JP Mangalindan, Fortune May 3, 2011
In context:

Gates suggested there's much more potential for nuclear energy, despite the recent disaster with Japan's Fukushima reactor. As he sees it, nuclear has a "factor million" of energy creation compared with coal. And as he quipped, "coal plants kill, but they only kill a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians."

"Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where or who we are."

--- Pema Chodron, quoted on her Facebook page in the note Start Where You Are, April 21, 2011. It's probably an excerpt from one of her books.

The full Facebook item (quotes theirs):

"In Tibetan there is an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means 'totally, completely,' and the rest of it means 'exhausted.' It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where or who we are."

"Humility, trust, and desire—making faith. For ages humanity has built this experience, but stupid people like me must discover it all again, must touch it for themselves."

--- Anna Kamienska (1920–1986), Polish poet, journal entry from the selection "Industrious Amazement: A Notebook" translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh, in Poetry magazine, March 2011, vol. CLCVIII, no. 6, p. 514

The whole entry:

From the whole liturgy my favorite words are those of the centurion, repeated before communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” They have the power of poetry. Humility, trust, and desire—making faith. For ages humanity has built this experience, but stupid people like me must discover it all again, must touch it for themselves.

Kamienska stumbled into her faith. Here's another entry from the same collection:

I wasn’t looking for God at all.

I sought my Dead One.

I’ll never cease repeating this, amazed.

The "Dead One" is her husband Jan, who figures constantly in the notebook. For example:

And then a dream took pity on me again. I got up before dawn. When I went back to bed it was dark. I sensed he was beside me, he’d crossed the room. He lay down next to me. We talked entwined. “What’s it like there?” “There’s God and there are birds,” he said. Maybe he meant to say “angels”? God and birds. He left, went through the wall and jumped into a passing truck. He opened his mouth as if he were shouting something.

"Play teaches us skills. Stories teach us what to do with them."

--- Harry Dewulf, in a letter to New Scientist (subscription required), 23 March 2011

Dewulf responds to an article about the "gamification" of everyday life, arguing

The best computer games exploit two basic desires. The first is to learn: a well-designed learning curve provides satisfaction from the achievement of mastery of the game. The greater the complexity, the greater the satisfaction.

The second desire is for a story. First-person "shooter" games involving one participant have the player follow a predetermined story path, deriving satisfaction from discovering the twists and turns.

He then offers the quote above. He concludes

Much of the gaming described in your article is light on play and storytelling, and heavy on "cumulomania" - the mindless racking-up of points, powers and achievements. Even the games strongest in learning and storytelling, like the Civilization series, eventually deteriorate into steady statistical accumulation.

Apps which rely on our attachment to endless accumulation of tokens and whose value is derived from potentially divisive social competition will have to be continually refreshed or replaced with new content - with diminishing returns as all the niches for apps that teach something useful are occupied.

If I am wrong about the games bubble, then the world will become increasingly divided between dopamine freaks endlessly indulging their cumulomania and those who prefer to use their time accumulating real value.

“The catch with ardent followers is that they’ll go ardently follow something else after a short while.”

--- Walter Podrazik, co-author of the book Watching TV, on the precipitous decline of Glenn Beck's ratings, quoted in Why is Glenn Beck leaving his Fox News show?, Linda Feldmann for the Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2011

"It's 1946 in cyber[warfare]"

--- James Mulvenon, a founding member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, a Washington DC nonprofit, quoted on page 2 of Mark Clayton's feature for the Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 2011, The new cyber arms race. See below for another great quote, by Mike McConnell, director of US national intelligence 2007-2009.

From the article:

"Here's the problem – it's 1946 in cyber," says James Mulvenon, a founding member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, a nonprofit group in Washington. "So we have these potent new weapons, but we don't have all the conceptual and doctrinal thinking that supports those weapons or any kind of deterrence. Worse, it's not just the US and Soviets that have the weapons – it's millions and millions of people around the world that have these weapons."

In the new cyber world order, the conventional big powers won't be the only ones carrying the cannons. Virtually any nation – or terrorist group or activist organization – with enough money and technical know-how will be able to develop or purchase software programs that could disrupt distant computer networks.

And the US, because it's so wired, is more vulnerable than most big powers to this new form of warfare. It's the price the country may one day pay for being an advanced and open society.

"If the nation went to war today, in a cyberwar, we would lose," Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009, told a US Senate committee a year ago. "We're the most vulnerable. We're the most connected. We have the most to lose."

"The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence"

--- Avi Steinberg, p. 214 in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (2010)

Excerpt, from a meditation about a ruined prison:

But ambiguity is born of long life. Archaeologists are occasionally unsure whether an unidentified solidly built ancient structure is a prison or whether it is a treasury building. The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence. Both are of supreme concern and utmost value. Ultimately they are indistinguishable.

This is particularly salient in the United States since, as Steinberg notes on p. 394, "America has 5 percent of the world'ds population, 25 percent of the world's prison population. A population the size of an American city left without the vote."

For more on prisons in America, see these two July 2010 Economist articles:

• Rough justice (leader)
• Too many laws, too many prisoners (reporting)

 In the second story, The Economist writes: "The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them."

"Our experiences, then, are not just our sensations"

--- James Hall, Prof. of Philiosophy Emeritus, University of Richmond, in "Postmodern and New-Age Problems," lecture 23 in the Teaching Company course Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason, published as an excerpt in a Teaching Company catalog, March 2011

In context:

Let's look at this [question of observation] at a down-home level. I would insist that you cannot observe edible things on banana trees unless you had some experience that would lead you to construe what you see as safe and nourishing. This is why a city slicker who is lost in the forest can starve to death because he does not observe what is out there as food. He does not thave the requisite experience and background to categorize things in useful ways and to see that he is surrounded by edible, useful material.

Our experiences, then, are not just our sensations. Our experiences, our observations, are the way that we construe our sensations, and the way that we construe them is a product of all our experiences, and of a great many other things as well. So one could claim, then -- and many people have claimed -- that our observations are relative to the conceptual apparatus, and the prior experience, and all of the other things that come into play, that enable us to construe our sensations the way we do and arrive at the observations that we arrive at.

"Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not"

--- Carolyn Forché, lines from her elegy "Travel Papers", published in Poetry magazine, February 2011.

Excerpt:

Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight.
Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not—

do not, upon waking, gaze out a window
if you wish to remember your dream

"in the most secret heart of every intellectual ... lies hidden ... the hope of power"

--- Lionel Trilling's character Gifford Maxim, from the 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey via Michael Knox Berry's opinion piece "When compassion turns to coercion", Christian Science Monitor March 14, 2011


Quote in context:

For a moment Maxim did not answer. Then, “Is it not strange,” he said, “do you not find it strange that as we become more sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, we become more and more cruel? The more we think of the human body and the human mind as being able to suffer, and the sorrier we feel for that, and the more we plan to prevent suffering, the more we are drawn to inflict suffering. The more tortures we think up, the more people we believe deserve to be tortured. The more we think that people can be ruled by fear of suffering. We have become our brother’s keeper—and we will keep him in fear, we will keep him in concentration camps, we will keep him in straitjackets, we will keep him in the grave.”


...

“And never has there been so much talk of liberty while the chains are being forged. Democracy and freedom. And in the most secret heart of every intellectual, where he scarcely knows of it himself, there lies hidden the real hope that these words hide. It is the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. We are all of us, all of us, the little children of the Grand Inquisitor. The more we talk of welfare, the crueler we become. How can we possibly be guilty when we have in mind the welfare of others, and of so many others?”

 

"Giving up is half the battle"

--- Reputed to have been said by a meditation teacher. Via John Givot, while chatting at the conclusion of a 10-day sit on 12 March 2011 about the importance of admitting one's weakness to oneself. A web search on 14 March 2011 didn't yield any attribution; in fact, many of the results for the string "giving up is half the battle" were people saying "not giving up is half the battle" :-)

"such a pleasure to read that it must have been hell to write"

--- The Economist, in its review of Alex Ross's Listen To This (2010)

From the opening paragraph of the review:

“Writing about music isn’t especially difficult,” avers Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic, at the start of his new collection of essays. That sounds too modest. Mr Ross’s history of music in the 20th century, “The Rest is Noise”, published in 2007, is such a pleasure to read that it must have been hell to write. The same goes for these pieces, which are mostly reworked articles from his day job, ranging from Björk to Brahms, and Radiohead to Verdi.

"The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought"

--- Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca, in a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende”, quoted in "What is the hardest word to translate from Spanish?" dictionary.com's the hot word column, February 22, 2011

In context:

In the dictionary, the word is listed as “elf” or “magic.” However, in actual practice, when the word shows up in text, it is rarely in the context of a woodland spirit, although that is where the word’s etymology begins. . . .

In 1933 Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende” in which he addressed the fiery spirit behind what makes great performance stir the emotions:

“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ”The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation … everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.”

"... the world is alive and in dread; it is, as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales claimed, 'full of gods.'"

--- Painter Madeleine Avirov, in the opening sentence of an essay about her experience of poetry, in the January 2011 issue of Poetry.

In context:

When I wake in the night in fear I regain the knowledge that no child lacks: the world is alive and in dread; it is, as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales claimed, “full of gods.” The time is invariably between three and four in the morning.

This belief is attributed to Thales, according to Wikipedia, in Aristotle, De Anima, 411a7, and for other ancient sources see the discussion in Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, 93-7. A Crandall University philosophy department web page portrays it thus: "Thales' view seems to be as follows. As most Greeks, he holds that soul is the cause of all motion, even of inanimate objects. Thus, since there is motion, there must be a soul causing each instance of motion. . . . He then takes a further step and concludes that soul, or the cause of motion, is a god." Not quite as poetic as Avirov's gloss...

"Babies are like the [R&D] division of the human species and we're production and marketing"

--- Philosopher and psychologist Alison Gopnik, in conversation with Alan Saunders on ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone, 29 Jan 2011

In context:

Alan Saunders: So babies and kids brains are clearly different to adult brains, which is what makes us think of them as something 'different'.


Alison Gopnik: One of the things I say is that babies are like the research and development division of the human species and we're production and marketing. They're the ones who are just exploring in a blue-sky way figuring out the way the world works, and we're the ones who actually take all those things that we learned as babies and put them to use as adults.

"Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself"

---James Richardson, number 8 in his poem, "Vectors 2.3: Fifty Aphorism and Ten-Second Essays", originally published in America Poetry Review, collected in The Best American Poetry 2010, p. 124

A few others on the list that jumped out at me:

4. Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals.

10. No one's so entertaining as the one who thinks you are

13. Office supplies stores are the Cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Maybe when you get home it will already be finished.

14. When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks.

15. I'd listen to my conscience if I could be sure it was really mine.

17. The lesser of two evils is the one with the less evil friends.

26. What keeps us deceived is the hope that we aren't.

34. Do unto others and an eye for an eye have the same payment plan.

38. The great man's not sure he wants you to criticize even his great rival, let there be no such thing as greatness.

40. My best critic is me, too late.

"Only the present has a true shape in our mind, it’s the only image of truth, and all truth is ugly"

--- Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), poet and writer, from his daybooks “Zibaldone di pensieri”, August 18, 1821, transl. W. S. di Piero, published in Poetry magazine, November 2010, p.134

Full quote from Poetry:

The past in memory, like the future in our imagination, is more beautiful than the present. Why? Because only the present has a true shape in our mind, it’s the only image of truth, and all truth is ugly.

This reminds me of the Buddhist teaching to realize the dissatisfaction of existence by being constantly aware of the present moment.

"No law can impede violation or disobedience of the law"

--- Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), poet and writer, from his daybooks “Zibaldone di pensieri”, August 31, 1820, transl. W. S. di Piero, published in Poetry magazine, November 2010, p.132

"To say that one practices zazen in order to become an enlightened person is like saying one practices medicine to become a doctor"

--- Thomas P. Kasulis, in Zen Action, Zen Person (1989), summarizing Dōgen:

In short, Dōgen rejects the view that zazen is a technique by which one comes to realization. Zazen is not the cause of satori; even at that first moment when the student begins to sit in meditation, zazen is already realization. Thus, in referring to enlightenment, Dōgen usually prefers to use the character shō (“authentication”) rather than satori (“realization”) or kaku (“awakening”). For Dōgen, proper sitting authenticates the enlightenment already there. Conversely, the student never reaches the point at which zazen is superseded. To say that one practices zazen in order to become an enlightened person is like saying one practices medicine to become a doctor. To practice medicine is to be a doctor. To practice zazen is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is not a static state of achievement; it is the active undertaking of the way exemplified in zazen.

"a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning"

--- Augustine of Hippo, Epistolae 145, 4; quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000) p. 375

Context in Brown: "It is Pelagius, not Augustine, who harps on the terrors of the Last Judgment: to which Augustine simply remarked that ‘a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning.’"

Who better knows clay, the geologist or the potter?

--- Thomas Kasulis, proposing an analogy for the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy, quoted in his interview on the Philosopher's Zone

From the transcript:

Alan Saunders: When you wrote to us here at The Philosopher's Zone about your forthcoming book, Engaging Japanese Philosophy you use a nice analogy that I'd like to repeat here: 'The easiest way to think of the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy is to ask who better knows clay, the geologist or the potter?' Now for the most part, modern Western philosophy sides with the geologist. While for the most part Japanese philosophers have studied with the Potter. Both traditions recognise both kinds of knowing, but there is a marked difference in emphasis as to which is the more profound.

Thomas Kasulis: That's right, and that's why I call the book Engaging Japanese Philosophy because I think that in modern Western -- mediaeval Western is kind of interestingly different in some ways, and some ways also the ancient traditions, or some of them -- but in the modern West, what we might consider from 1600 on and certainly since the enlightenment, from 1800 on, that Western model has been one of objectivity, detachment, observation, and logical reflection. Whereas in many cases Japan's model has been one of engagement.

Both traditions agree that both are kinds of knowing, I think. I don't think there's any problem there. But the issue is which is the really important kind of knowing?

"public goods: things ... that everyone wants and nobody is prepared to pay for"

--- Nice definition of public goods from James Astill in The Economist's special report on forests, 25 Sep 2010; this quote from the article "Money can grow on trees"

Quote in context:

Yet in the national accounts the clearance is recorded as progress. About a quarter of Indonesian output comes from forestry, agriculture and mining, all of which, in a country more than half-covered in trees, involve felling. But this is bad accounting. It captures very few of the multiple costs exacted by the clearance, which fall not so much on loggers and planters but on poor locals, all Indonesians and the world at large.

The Indonesian exchequer, for one, is missing out. Illegal logging is estimated to cost it $2 billion a year in lost revenues. But that can be fixed by policing. A bigger problem is that most of the goods and services the country’s forests provide are invisible to the bean-counters. Many of them are public goods: things like clean air and reliable rains that everyone wants and nobody is prepared to pay for. And where they are traded, they are often undervalued because their worth or scarcity is not fully appreciated.

"we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion"

--- David Eagleman, opinion column Beyond God and atheism: Why I am a 'possibilian', New Scientist, 27 September 2010

Excerpts, quote quote highlighted below:

Given these considerations, I do not call myself an atheist. I don't feel that I have enough data to firmly rule out other interesting possibilities. On the other hand, I do not subscribe to any religion. Traditional religious stories can be beautiful and often crystallise hard-won wisdom - but it is hardly a challenge to poke holes in them. Religious structures are built by humans and brim with all manner of strange human claims - they often reflect cults of personality, xenophobia or mental illness. The holy books of these religions were written millennia ago by people who never had the opportunity to know about DNA, other galaxies, information theory, electricity, the big bang, the big crunch, or even other cultures, literatures or landscapes.

So it seems we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion. Given this, I am often surprised by the number of people who seem to possess total certainty about their position.

...

I don't think the important goal should be to fight for a particular story in the absence of strong evidence; it should be to explore and celebrate the vast possibilities.

...

This is why I call myself a "possibilian". Possibilianism emphasises the active exploration of new, unconsidered notions. A possibilian is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind and is not driven by the idea of fighting for a single, particular story. The key emphasis of possibilianism is to shine a flashlight around the possibility space. It is a plea not simply for open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas.

...

In every generation, people are seduced by the idea that they possess all the tools they need to explain the universe. They have always been wrong. From consciousness to dark energy, we know that we are missing an unknowable number of pieces of the puzzle. This is why in the debates between the strict atheists and the fundamentally religious, I choose a third side. A little less pretence of certainty and a little more exploration of the possibility space.

As Voltaire put it, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

"Hurt people hurt people"

---David Hooker, a black community-builder, recounting an incident in an Oxford, Miss. bar; from a CS Monitor story Beyond racism: lessons from the South on racial discrimination and prejudice, Sep 18, 2010. (This article is part of the cover-story package for the Sept. 20, 2010 issue of The Christian Science Monitor weekly magazine. The weekly is well worth having - subscribe!)

Excerpt

Mr. Hooker, who lives in Atlanta and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., stepped into the Ajax bar to order some food. A white Mississippian sitting at the bar said to no one in particular, but within Hooker's earshot, "I remember when they didn't let niggers in here."

Recounting the episode, Hooker says he replied, "That was crazy, wasn't it? I remember that, too."

Hooker adds: "He kind of looked at me, like, 'What do you mean? You're not going to be offended?' "

The two ended up having a 45-minute chat that spanned the election of Obama, the Ole Miss football team, and hopes for their kids. "He was asking to have a conversation about race – he just didn't quite know how," says Hooker. "The reason I could hear that as an invitation is because I constantly remind myself that hurt people hurt people – they're exposing you to a place of their own pain."

Times are changing, it seems, though not in the way Northerners might imagine. Willie Griffin, an entrepreneur who moved back South is quoted as saying, "If there's prejudice today, it's more of a class thing than a racial thing."

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

--- Francis Bacon, in the essay "On Studies", found via a lecture by Brooks Landon on "The Rhythm of Threes" in his Teaching Company course Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.

This short essay is packed with wonderful quotes; it short, and bears reading in full.  Here are a few that jumped out at me:

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

"Innovation is unnatural"

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in  review (Aug 30, 2010) of “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble ("G&T")

From the piece:

G&T say that you need to start by recognising that innovation is unnatural. Established businesses are built for efficiency, which depends on predictability and repeatability—on breaking tasks down into their component parts and holding employees accountable for hitting their targets. But innovation is by definition unpredictable and uncertain. Bosses may sing a pretty song about innovation being the future. But in practice the heads of operational units will favour the known over the unknown.

...

G&T argue that companies need to build dedicated innovation machines. These machines need to be free to recruit people from outside (since big companies tend to attract company men rather than rule-breakers). They also need to be free from some of the measures that prevail in the rest of the company. But they must avoid becoming skunk works. They need to be integrated with the rest of the company—they must share some staff, for example, and they must tap into the wider company’s resources as they turn ideas into products. And they must be tightly managed according to customised rather than generic rules. For example, they should be held accountable for their ability to learn from mistakes rather than for their ability to hit their budgets.

Sounds good, but it's easy to give recipes. Still, it's a good quote

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality"

--- attributed passim to Irving Kristol, cited to Two Cheers for Capitalism (1979) at conservativeforum.org's page on Kristol.

I heard Peter Berkowitz mention it in a Philosopher's Zone program about Leo Strauss and the state of American conservatism.

I wouldn't say I've been mugged by reality yet, but I definitely feel like I'm walking in a rough neighborhood...

"If the people are to be ruled they must first be scared"

--- A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (2008) p. 158, quoted by Walter Rodgers in his CSMonitor Commentary "Obama vs.his enemies", 21 February 2010

From Nuttall:

It is sometimes said that political leaders require a “demonised Other” to retain control of their citizens. If the people are to be ruled they must first be scared. This is very nearly the situation at the beginning of Henry V. The King desperately needs a war with France if he is to control such as Scroop and Grey.

"fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates"

--- David Bowman, in the essay "Scorched earth: Wildfires will change the way we live," New Scientist, 10 October 2009

In context:

A key to understanding those consequences [of global climate change] is the notion of the "fire regime", where different vegetation has characteristic fires in terms of recurrence, intensity, seasonality and biological effects. Indeed, fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates. In other words, Earth has a "pyrogeography".

"There are societies where, once the book is closed, the reader goes on believing; there are others where he does not."

--- Paul Veyne, tr. Paula Wissing, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (1983, 1988), p. 22, Ch. 2, "The Plurality and Analogy of True Worlds"

According a certain program of truth, that of deductive and quantified physics, Einstein is true in our eyes. But if we believe in the Iliad, it is no less true according to its own mythical program. The same can be said for Alice in Wonderland. For, even if we consider Alice and the plays of Racine as fiction, while we are reading them we believe; we weep at the theater. The world of Alice and its fairytale program is offered to us as a realm as plausible and true as our own—as real in relation to itself, so to speak. We have shifted the sphere of truth, but we are still within the true or its analogy. This is why realism in literature is at once a fake (it is not reality), a useless exertion (the fairy world would seem no less real), and the most extreme sophistication (to fabricate the real with our real: how baroque!). Far from being opposed to the truth, fiction is only its by-product. All we need to do is open the Iliad and we enter into the story, as they say, and
lose our bearings. The only subtlety is that later on we do not believe. There are societies where, once the book is closed, the reader goes on believing; there are others where he does not.

"Financial markets are a collection of arguments"

--- Michael Lewis, p. 79 of "The Big Short" (2010)

Extended quote:

[Deutsche Bank trader Greg] Lippman had at least one good reason for not putting up a huge fight [against the request from management to make a bet against the subprime bond market]: There was a fantastically profitable market waiting to be created. Financial markets are a collection of arguments. The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument. The constant argument over the value of the shares of some major publicly traded company has very little value, as both buyer and seller can see the fair price of the stock on the ticker, and the broker’s commission has been driven down by competition. The argument over the value of credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds – a complex security whose value was derived from that of another complex security – could be a gold mine.

"He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one"

--- Johann Hari, in his review of Richard Toye's "Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made"for the New York Times, August 12, 2010

Churchill was a brutal imperialist. From the review:

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” Later, he boasted of his experiences. “That was before war degenerated,” he said. “It was great fun galloping about.”

....

So how can the two Churchills be reconciled? Was his moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact that he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival? Toye quotes Richard B. Moore, an American civil rights leader, who said that it was “a most rare and fortunate coincidence” that at that moment “the vital interests of the British Empire” coincided “with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind.” But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

"Great thoughts / do not nourish / small thoughts / as parents do children"

--- poet Kay Ryan, in the poem Great Thoughts, from Say Uncle (2000) reprinted in the new collection The Best Of It (2010)
In context:

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

"c’est le métier qui rentre"

--- a French expression that might be translated as "the craft is entering". It has been paraphrased as "pain is the craft entering the apprentice." Larousse gives "it shows you're learning."

Here's some context from my friend Pierre-Yves Saintoyant:

We would say this, for instance, when cutting or burning your finger when trying to cook, doing some DIY, or hurting yourself in any way while trying a new craft; or suffering and complaining in learning a new process. For instance if you lose all your work because you did not do any backup, someone could tell you “c’est le métier qui rentre” ;-)  If you develop some pain (e.g. blisters) while doing some work, someone might tell you “c’est le métier qui rentre” to “comfort” you.

This expression is also used when beginners make mistakes to encourage them to continue (and hopefully improve);  someone could tell them “that’s not bad, c’est le métier qui rentre”.

“Your destination is the present moment”

--- Yoga teacher Seong Yoon Lee, heard during class, 6/27/2010

"Once sent out, a word takes wing beyond recall"

--- Roman poet Horace, Horace 65-8 bc: Epistles, source Oxford Quotations database

From the translation on authorama.com

Moreover, that I may advise you (if in aught you stand in need of an adviser), take great circumspection what you say to any man, and to whom. Avoid an inquisitive impertinent, for such a one is also a tattler, nor do open ears faithfully retain what is intrusted to them; and a word, once sent abroad, flies irrevocably.

"The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it"

--- The Economist in a leader on the American newspaper business, June 12th 2010

Quote in context:

Thanks to family connections, Chandler ended up in control of the Los Angeles Times in 1960. The paper he inherited was parochial and conservative, reflecting the city it served. Chandler jettisoned the anti-union dogma and set about building a west-coast rival to the New York Times. His paper was heavy on foreign news and serious, objective reporting. The result was hugely impressive—but not, as it turned out, suited to the internet era. In the past few years the paper has suffered repeated staff cuts. In 2007 it was acquired by a property magnate and in 2008 filed for bankruptcy protection.

The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. The Los Angeles Times’s foreign reporting is extremely good. But it is hard to argue that it is better than the stuff supplied by the New York Times or foreign papers—sources to which the residents of Los Angeles now have unfettered, largely free access via their laptops and iPhones. Similarly, it has never been clear why each major newspaper needs its own car reviewer: a Corolla is a Corolla, whether it is driven in Albuquerque or Atlanta. And by extension, it is not clear why presidential candidates or sport teams require huge journalistic entourages. Papers should concentrate on what they do best, which means, in many cases, local news and sport. If the rest is bought in from wire services or national outfits, readers are unlikely to complain—as long as there is enough competition between those larger providers to keep up standards (and thanks to the internet there probably is now). Specialisation generally means higher quality.

"a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter"

--- The Economist's description of the Segway, in a profile of Dean Kamen, "Mr Segway's difficult path", Technology Quaterly, June 12th 2010.  Classic Economist.

In context:

The invention for which Mr Kamen is best known is the Segway Transporter, a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter that had the misfortune to emerge just after the dotcom crash in 2001, just as the disillusioned technology industry was looking for the next big thing. Before its unveiling, Mr Kamen’s mysterious new invention was the subject of feverish speculation. Steve Jobs of Apple said it was “as big a deal as the PC” and John Doerr, a venture capitalist, mused that it would be “bigger than the internet”. It was, in fact, a rather clever two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter, using technology similar to the iBot. But after all the hype it could not possibly live up to expectations.

"in a golden age everyone goes around complaining about how yellow everything is"

--- Randall Jarrell, quoted by Adam Kirsch in his exchange with Ilya Kaminsky on the occasion of the publication of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, ed. by Kaminsky and Susan Harris; in Various Tongues: An ExchangeIs true translation impossible?,  Poetry, March 2010, p. 467

Quote in context:

Randall Jarrell said that in a golden age everyone goes around complaining about how yellow everything is. I don’t want to make that old mistake, but I wonder if there are some costs to living in a time when books like The Ecco Anthology make so much foreign-language poetry so easily accessible. What strikes me about the many examples you cite, from Wyatt down to Akhmatova, is that they are all cases of poets immersing themselves in a foreign literature and using its resources to renovate their own.

"the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be"

--- Elizabeth Lund in "Poet Kay Ryan: A profile", Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 2004

Quote in context:

"I've tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy," she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be. Her poems function much the same way, with deep currents underlying a simple-looking surface, as in "Hope" from the collection "Elephant Rocks":

Hope
What's the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope -
The almost-twin
of making-do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn't in
the envelope
just before
it isn't:
the always tabled
righting of the present.

"I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more"

--- Jonas Salk, quoted passim. According to wikiquote, this was said on receiving the Congressional Medal for Distinguished Civilian Achievement on 23 April 1956. Other variations cited there:

• The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more
• I feel that the greatest reward for success is the opportunity to do more.

"What if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being?"

--- sociologist William Sims Bainbridge in an interview about his work on World of Warcraft, New Scientist, 27 March 2010

In context; interviewer's question followed by Bainbridge's answer:

You've done a lot of work with religion. What does religion in WoW tell us about the real-world phenomenon?

The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?

That, on a much smaller scale, is what is happening with the fictional religions in WoW. The overwhelming majority of the people that play WoW don't take its religions seriously.

The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it's possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people's hopes can be expressed in something that's acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.

"What interests me ... is how one is to live when one neither believes in God, nor totally in reason"

--- Albert Camus, quoted by Edward Hughes, Professor of French at Queen Mary University of London and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Albert Camus, in a Philosopher's Zone program on Albert Camus and The Absurd, 30 January 2010

Quote in context:

In 1945-46, Camus argued that, he says, 'I'm not a philosopher because I don't believe sufficiently in reason to sign up to a thought that would be seen as being philosophically systematic'. He says, 'What interests me is to know how one is to live, and this is more precisely how one is to live when one neither believes in God, nor totally in reason.'

 Looks like I really should go read The Myth of Sisyphus...

“Choose each word as a precision tool”

--- speech writer Ted Sorensen, quoted by Peter Grier in his Decoder column of March 29, 2010

In context:

Ask not whether Ted Sorensen wrote “Ask not what your country can do for you...,” the famous line from John Kennedy’s inaugural. He says today he doesn’t remember.

But whether he wrote that gem or not, Mr. Sorensen, who was one of JFK’s closest advisers, remains perhaps the greatest Washington speechwriter of modern times.

In his memoirs, he drops this bit of advice for aspiring political wordsmiths: “Choose each word as a precision tool.”

Remember that the next time you’re listening to some politician try to sell you something. Washington speeches often aren’t arguments so much as word-delivery machines. They’re sprinkled with bons mots that in themselves are intended to induce in you, the listener, a particular emotional response.

I loved that phrase, "Washington speeches often aren’t arguments so much as word-delivery machines"

“Good politics is repetition”

--- Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel, New York Times profile March 16, 2010, quoted by Peter Grier in his Decoder column of March 29, 2010

“No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers”

--- St Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Marc Ian Barasch in his "Searching for the Heart of Compassion", reprinted in The Best Buddhist Writing 2006, Melvin McLeod (Editor), p. 27

In the context of the Barasch essay:

Perhaps Thomas Aquinas was not so far off when he claimed, “No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers.” I take this less as a mandate for medieval masochism than an indecorous call to embrace our own authentic experience. If we’re not at home with the depth of our feelings, we’re likely to skirt the deep feelings of others.

There are links to on-line texts of Aquinas here, but the quote doesn't not resolve to one of these sources; the translation doesn't seem to be on-line.

"The anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy"

--- Jonah Lehrer, summing up his piece "Depression's Upside", New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2010

The story is built around the "analytic rumination hypothesis" for depression advanced by Andrew Thompson and Paul Andrews. Here's the quote in the context of the penultimate paragraph:

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

"Anatomy of focus" refers to the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a part of the brain that seems to be important for maintaining attention (among other things). Lehrer reports that "[s]everal studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients."

There are other good quotes near the end too. For example, after talking about the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders, Lehrer quotes neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

He also talks about "the virtue of self-loathing", one of the symptoms of depression, and quotes Roland Barthes: "A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem."

For a critique of Lehrer's piece, see Edward Champion's "Jonah Lehrer: A Malcolm Gladwell for the Mind", February 28, 2010.

“God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word

--- theologian Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I could not be a Christian (2009), p. 15

Quote in context:

Marcus Borg has written a widely helpful book about the need for Christians to retrieve the correct understanding of Jesus, which, he claims, would be a much more appealing picture of Jesus. He titled the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I think the same can be said about the need many Christians feel to retrieve their mystical traditions: they need to become mystics again for the first time. Karl Rahner, one of the most respected Catholic theologians of the past century (and my teacher!), recognized this in a statement that has been repeated broadly: “In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.”
...

   When Buddha refused to talk about God in order to make way for the experience of Enlightenment, he was making the same point, but even more forcefully, that Rahner was getting at in his insistence that Christians must be mystics: “God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own. . . .

   To put this more in our contemporary context, Buddha has reminded me and all of us Christians that any kind of religious life or church membership must be based on one’s own personal experience. It is not enough to say “amen” to a creed, or obey carefully a law, or attend regularly a liturgy. The required personal experience may be mediated through a community or church, but it has to be one’s own. Without such a personal, mystical happening, once cannot authentically and honestly call oneself religious.

"Microsoft is like a plumbing supply company that found itself running a chain of spas"

--- Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, ConnectedAction, personal communication 7 March 2010, reproduced here with permission.

Quote in context:

But is Microsoft an engine that has disconnected the innovation drive train from the axle? Yes, probably. But the first to market, innovator role is not really what Microsoft is. Microsoft is like a plumbing supply company that found itself running a chain of spas. It really likes pipes more than people, and has to do customer facing things more than it likes.