Claptrap Quotes

Instead of playing leapfrog with trivial claptrap or slamming doors with our “always right” egos, let us learn to nurture the seeds of acceptance and step back from our pinned-down prejudices. ("On a doggy day")

The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to down in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia — what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!" -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine

I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father's death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious "claptrap." My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33

...Even to me, a sufferer, 'depression' seems like a fetid load of weaselly claptrap, a cheap and easy excuse for not participating in life.

He turned to her. “Didn’t you see the lightning strike the steeple?” She recovered with a sip of tea, then smiled sweetly. “I was listening too devotedly to the sermon.” “Claptrap last week,” Lady D announced. “I think the priest is getting old.” Gareth opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, his grandmother’s cane swung around in a remarkably steady horizontal arc. “Don’t,” she warned, “make a comment beginning with the words, ‘Coming from you…’” “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he demurred. “Of course you would,” she stated. “You wouldn’t be my grandson if you wouldn’t.” She turned to Hyacinth. “Don’t you agree?” To her credit, Hyacinth folded her hands in her lap and said, “Surely there is no right answer to that question.” “Smart girl,” Lady D said approvingly. “I learn from the master.” Lady Danbury beamed.

May I leave you with some genuine wisdom, in place of all the humdrum claptrap? Do well. Act with honour and dignity. Not because there is some promised reward, but because it is the only way to live.

Stupid, stupid, stupid: I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that, as if on a magic charm.

I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious “claptrap.” My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33. Stonehill

Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out.

There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.

Unfortunately we have to remember we’re scientists, not writers of popular semifictional archaeological claptrap.

the hired scribes of the capitalist Press wrote columns of fulsome admiration of the miserable claptrap, and the working men who had elected this man went into raptures

This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality--the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward--this even an outsider can't judge. The sight of a coffin can effect a great change of heart--all at once you find you are not so disappointed in the person who is dead--but what the sight of a coffin does for a mind in its search for the truth, this I don't profess to know.

In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral forced without any claptrap in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward—even an outsider can’t judge.

Yes, a policeman! Nothing else will do. Doesn’t matter whether he wears a number or a red cap. A policeman should be posted alongside every person in the country with the job of moderating the vocal outbursts of our honest citizenry. You talk about ruin. I tell you, doctor, that nothing will change for the better in this house, or in any other house for that matter, until you can make these people stop talking claptrap! As soon as they put an end to this mad chorus the situation will automatically change for the better.

Thus possibly our rape and subsequent hanging represent the overthrow of a matrilineal moon-cult by an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father-god-worshipping barbarians. The chief of them, notably Odysseus, would then claim kingship by marrying the High Priestess of our cult, namely Penelope. No, Sir, we deny that this theory is merely unfounded feminist claptrap. We can understand your reluctance to have such things brought out into the open “ rapes and murders are not pleasant subjects “ but such overthrows most certainly took place all around the Mediterranean Sea, as excavations at prehistoric sites have demonstrated over and over.

so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking.

If you're anything like me, you don't make up your mind about important issues by doing original research, pounding over primary sources and coming to your own conclusions; you listen to people who claim to know what they're talking about - "experts" - and try to determine which of them is more credible. You do your best to gauge who's authentically well-informed and unbiased, who has an agenda and what it is - who's a corporate flack, a partisan hack, or a wacko. I believe that global warming is real and anthropogenic not because I've personally studied Antarctic ice core samples or run my own computer climate models, but because all the people who support the theory are climatologists with no evident investment in the issue, and all the people who dismiss it as alarmist claptrap are shills of the petro-chemical industry or just seem to like debunking things, from the Holocaust to the moon landing. We put our trust - our votes, our money, sometimes our lives - in someone else's authority. In other words, most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason.

The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth I had fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to drown in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.

I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The

As I tried to doze, the incident on the piazzetta, lost somewhere amid the Piave war memorial and our ride up the hill with fear and shame and who knows what else pressing on me, seemed to come back to me from summers and ages ago, as though I'd biked up to the piazzetta as a little boy before World War I and had returned a crippled ninety-year-old soldier confined to this bedroom that was not even my own, because mine had been given over to a young man who was the light of my eyes. The light of my eyes, I said, light of my eyes, light of the world, that's what you are, light of my life. I didn't know what light of my eyes meant, and part of me wondered where on earth had I fished out such claptrap, but it was nonsense like this that brought tears now, tears I wished to drown in his pillow, soak in his bathing suit, tears I wanted him to touch with the tip of his tongue and make sorrow go away.

That can happen when people die—the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration. In which estimate lies the greater reality—the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral forced without any claptrap in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward—even an outsider can’t judge.

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.

His mouth, his tongue, his voice box, seem to be working separately at first. His Adam's apple shivers, the skulls vibrate, his voice quakes. What's going on? It is as if a different Romeo is speaking, an interior Romeo. This unknown alternate Romeo has staged a coup. This Romeo Two has infiltrated his communication infrastructure. Are the drugs betraying him? What did he take again? What shape of pill? Romeo thinks it was a big white oval but there also were some smaller yellow articles. Perhaps crisscrossing side affects. Romeo is startled to silence even as Romeo Two becomes voluble, moved to unload certain acts undertaken for certain reasons. Romeo Two's mouth claptraps, his voice shifts gear, high and higher, until Romeo One understands in despair that Romeo Two has frog-leaped all the way to that holy step somewhere beyond three, maybe four, five, where you tell God and another human the exact nature of your wrongs. Talk about combined side effects. Where among the vertigo, gastric pain, incontinence, shortness of breath, and possible kidney failure was telling the truth?

By Jove, what claptrap! Love can turn to contempt in the blink of an eye. When it sours, believe me, only bitterness and misery remain. Such disappointment spoils all other affection. Whereas mature, reasonable expectations cannot be disappointed, my lady, because they can be fulfilled.” “I will not marry without love, my lord.” “Nor will I pretend to love in order to marry,” he growled in reply. “I won’t spout drivel to stoke your overheated fantasies. If we can rub along, that is enough for me. In return, I will honor you, provide for you and protect you.”   “My father loved my mother deeply, devotedly. He loves her to this day. That is perfect, enduring love.”   “I cannot promise you perfection.”   “It’s not impossible to love with devotion. Swans mate for life, why can’t I?” “Perhaps because you are not an aggressive water fowl with a brain the size of an acorn. You have the option to act as a rational creature and accept that there is no such thing as perfect love in reality.”   “ I will not settle for less.” “By all means, don’t settle, Lady Elizabeth,” Clun said and rudely stood up to leave. “Don’t settle for me. Hold out for a poet. Or more appealing waterfowl for all I care. In the meantime, do not presume to lecture me about the proper basis of marriage, as if you knew better than I.

We approached the long, heavily guarded causeway. There were soldiers at the entrance. Our names were taken, and our permissions scrutinized, and then a bell rang and a military escort went with us through the gate. We didn’t go to the side where the government offices are. We walked inside the huge place, past the old cathedrals which have been there for so long, and we went through the museums in the giant palace which was used by so many czars, from Ivan the Terrible on. We went into the tiny bedroom that Ivan used, and into the little withdrawing rooms, and the private chapels. And they are very beautiful, and strange, and ancient, and they are kept just as they were. And we saw the museum where the armor, the plate, the weapons, the china services, the costumes, and the royal gifts for five hundred years are stored. There were huge crowns covered with diamonds and emeralds, there was the big sledge of Catherine the Great. We saw the fur garments and the fantastic armor of the old boyars. There were the gifts sent by other royal houses to the czars—a great silver dog sent by Queen Elizabeth, presents of German silver and china from Frederick the Great to Catherine, the swords of honor, the incredible claptrap of monarchy. It became apparent, after looking at a royal museum, that bad taste, far from being undesirable in royalty, is an absolute necessity.

It is truly wonderful," he said, "how easily Society can console itself for the worst of its shortcomings with a little bit of clap-trap. The machinery it has set up for the detection of crime is miserably ineffective—and yet only invent a moral epigram, saying that it works well, and you blind everybody to its blunders from that moment. Crimes cause their own detection, do they? And murder will out (another moral epigram), will it? Ask Coroners who sit at inquests in large towns if that is true, Lady Glyde. Ask secretaries of life-assurance companies if that is true, Miss Halcombe. Read your own public journals. In the few cases that get into the newspapers, are there not instances of slain bodies found, and no murderers ever discovered? Multiply the cases that are reported by the cases that are not reported, and the bodies that are found by the bodies that are not found, and what conclusion do you come to? This. That there are foolish criminals who are discovered, and wise criminals who escape. The hiding of a crime, or the detection of a crime, what is it? A trial of skill between the police on one side, and the individual on the other. When the criminal is a brutal, ignorant fool, the police in nine cases out of ten win. When the criminal is a resolute, educated, highly-intelligent man, the police in nine cases out of ten lose. If the police win, you generally hear all about it. If the police lose, you generally hear nothing. And on this tottering foundation you build up your comfortable moral maxim that Crime causes its own detection! Yes—all the crime you know of. And what of the rest?

Dear Carl: Here, on this paper, there are only you and me, and the things that each of us tries so hard to understand, clambering up through long, long researches into the past, and thinking ponderously and seeking, and finding that for which we looked a glorified question mark. It would be desirable to be flung, unfettered by consciousness, into the void, to sail unhindered through eternity. Please do not think that I am riding along on baseless words, covering threadbare thoughts with garrulous tapestries. I am not. It is the words which are inadequate. You know so much and I can tell you nothing, and I don't think I can even make you feel anything you have not felt more poignantly than I, who am a mummer in a brocaded boudoir. I wrote about miners' faces around a fire. Their bodies did not show in the light, so their yellow faces seemed like dangling masks against the night. And I wrote about little voices in the glens which were the spirits of passions and desires and dreams of dead men's minds. And Mrs. Russell said they were not real, that such things could not be, and she was not going to stand me bullying her into such claptrap nonsense. Those were not her words, it was was her meaning, and then she smiled out of the corner of her mouth as nurses do when an idiot child makes blunders. And I could not stand that, so I swore at her because I had been out all night to make my pictures. And now she is very cold, and she means to flunk me in the course, thinking that she can hurt me thus. I wish that she could know that I do not in the least care. I wish you were back, because you could understand the things I try to say, and help me say them better, and I know you would, because you did once.

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of Friends there is a sectional ‘public opinion’ which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance. Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or ‘get at’; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda about ‘Togetherness’ or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure impossible, ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude.

From race to the environment, from religion to sex, from the War on Terror to the Arab-Israeli conflict, universities push a never-ending line of liberal claptrap. The higher education system indoctrinates America’s youth.

Good luck trying to really understand the words of a book full of contradictions and nutty claptrap about things like shellfish and slavery and homosexuality. Concepts quite removed from the simple unconditional love of God.

Women have a special relationship with chocolate mostly because our culture tells them to. It goes back to the old claptrap about sweet treats being for ‘ladies’, while savoury tastes for men.

And this whole thing’s completely absurd, I know. Self-indulgent claptrap, that’s what it is, so I suppose it must be Art, mustn’t it, James!

I felt I was slumming, in my own life. My task was to ward off the drivel (I felt I was drowning in drivel)—the jovial claptrap of classmates and teachers, the maddening bromide I heard at home. And the weekly comedy shows festooned with canned laughter, the treacly Hit Parade, the hysterical narratings of baseball games and prize fights—radio, whose racket filled the living room on weekday evenings and much of Saturday and Sunday, was an endless torment.

What showed this man's way with such clarity was his heart. His enlightenment came from the light the heart sheds. No theories, just lots of good works. Abstruse speculations are dizzying, and nothing indicates that he polluted his mind mystical claptrap. An apostle may be reckless, but a Bishop has to tread carefully. He probably made a point of not going too far in certain issues and conundrums, preserved to a certain extent, for towering and terrifying minds. There is holy horror at the gates to enigma.

What showed this man's way with such clarity was his heart. His enlightenment came from the light the heart sheds. No theories, just lots of good works. Abstruse speculations are dizzying, and nothing indicates that he polluted his mind with mystical claptrap. An apostle may be reckless, but a Bishop has to tread carefully. He probably made a point of not going too far in certain issues and conundrums, preserved to a certain extent, for towering and terrifying minds. There is holy horror at the gates to enigma.

If I had had a daughter, I always knew what I would tell her. First of all, I would try to counter all outdated stereotypical claptrap that girls are commonly told about their sex--that women are valued far more for their sexual characteristics than their character and brains--and encourage her to be a truly independent person. Only knowing who she is herself will she be able to find find her own life's work and make good decisions in choosing a partner and having children.

It seemed as though he had a fundamental belief that the merit of his argument depended on the strength of his feelings about the matter, and since he always felt uncontrollably passionate about everything, then clearly he was always right. This irrational claptrap, coming as it did from a swarthy, excitable, plump Celtic demi-dwarf, struck me not just as thoroughly impertinent but also as a noisy and ignorant attempt to undermine the most basic principles of the Enlightenment.

Trump survived all of this, seized the Republican nomination, and won, because in the end, he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.

It is difficult to talk to people about freedom. Most of them have not considered it. They have not thought beyond what public education has taught them, so they regurgitate the same claptrap they have been spoon-fed their whole lives. Thus, it takes a lot of patience to explain and express the precepts of liberty and to respectfully challenge dangerous and distorted worldviews.

Divisionism and dollarism are the curse of society, yet society worships them as the greatest boon. Peace and peoplism are cussed as commie claptrap, while populism continues to give power to goons.

Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book that came from. Unfortunately he himself never forgot any citation that suited his mania, and his work as a totality is hopelessly vitiated by the half-witted diligence of the trainspotter. An edifying comparison can be made with Yeats, whose allegiance to the spiritualist claptrap of the theory of the Mystic Rose was at least as batty as Pound’s to the pseudo-economic quackery of the theory of Social Credit: but Yeats could develop beyond his early lyrics because art, for him, was a system of solid knowledge by far transcending his own fads.

I knew I could count on President Wilson to refrain from pious claptrap. “Human beings,” he said, millet crunching in his beak, “seem powerfully invested in the notion that suffering improves or ennobles the sufferer. This is, of course, childish nonsense.

You don't have to live long to discern that religion is a claptrap. My five years old grandchild knows it already.

By far, the oldest of the claptrap philosophies of mankind is astrology.

Your ability to walk short distances will be handsome jacks dawnfal

Sociological claptrap also rears its ugly head. When one reads that (for example) ‘Dark Age leaders sought re-validation through the extensive reuse of Iron-Age hill forts’, or similar, one has to question what the writer was smoking.

DOLINSKY’S IMPERATIVE: “Individuals must take it upon themselves to form and grow bubbles of civility within and external to their organizations. Doing so creates new and deeper relationships across stakeholders. It prevents bureaucratic claptrap and friction from descending like a toxic cloud of dissatisfaction. Friction is reduced, and the spread of the workplace zombie virus is slowed.

DOLINSKY’S IMPERATIVE: Individuals must take it upon themselves to form and grow bubbles of civility within and external to their organizations. Doing so creates new and deeper relationships across stakeholders. It prevents bureaucratic claptrap and friction from descending like a toxic cloud of dissatisfaction. Friction is reduced, and the spread of the workplace zombie virus is slowed.

There was a movement at one time, not so many years ago either, which was international in its scope, which had for its object the setting aside the first of May for a general, international holiday, looking ultimately to the inauguration of a short-hour workday, but this grand idea has been side-tracked in later years by a lot of political buncombe and claptrap, thus persuading the working classes into the notion that they can gain their freedom by electing a lot of fellows to office. (1906)

You are summoning Demons-" "No, I'm summoning angels." The same claptrap Justin had been spewing earlier. Where did they get their ideas? There was no such thing as angels.

politically correct claptrap for ‘extremely messed up’. Most of the children in Jessie’s class were the product of appalling neglect, both mental and physical, and abuse, also both mental and physical. They were the children of alcoholics and drug-addicted parents, of parents who spent half their lives in jail, the rest of the time trying to spend their welfare on booze, weed and crystal meth. That was if they even had parents to speak of. Many of Jessie’s pupils were being reared by their grandparents; sad, tired, ill-equipped people whose hearts were in the right place, even if they did not have the wherewithal to help their grandchildren in ways other than to feed and house them. Jessie lifted a pop-up picture book from under a desk and slotted it into what they romantically called ‘the library’, though it was little more than two shelves of tattered books bought and

Where is the counterpart to this closed system of will, goal and interpretation? Why is the counterpart lacking? . . . Where is the other ‘one goal’? . . . But I am told it is not lacking, not only has it fought a long, successful fight with that ideal, but it has already mastered that ideal in all essentials: all our modern science is witness to that, – modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, obvi- ously believes only in itself, obviously possesses the courage to be itself, the will to be itself, and has hitherto got by well enough without God, the beyond and the virtues of denial. However, I am not impressed by such noise and rabble-rousers’ claptrap: these people who trumpet reality are bad musicians, it is easy enough to hear that their voices do not come from the depths, the abyss of scientific conscience does not speak from them – for the scientific conscience today is an abyss –, the word ‘science’ is quite simply an obscenity in the traps of such trumpeters, an abuse, an indecency. 109 On the Genealogy of Morality Precisely the opposite of what they are declaring here is the truth: science today has absolutely no faith in itself, let alone in an ideal above it, – and where it is still passion, love, fire, suffering, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latter’s own most recent and noble manifestation. Does that sound strange to you? . . . There are enough worthy and modest workers even amongst the scholars of today, who like their little corner and therefore, because they like being there, are occasionally somewhat pre- sumptuous in making their demand heard that people today ought to be content in general, especially with science – there being so much useful work to be done. I do not deny it: I am the last to want to spoil the pleasure of these honest workers in their craft: for I delight in their work. But the fact that nowadays people are working hard in science, and that they are contented workmen, does not at all prove that today, science as a whole has a goal, a will, an ideal, a passion of great faith. The opposite, as I said, is the case: where it is not the most recent manifestation of the ascetic ideal – there are too few noble, exceptional cases for the general judgment to be deflected – then science today is a hiding place for all kinds of ill-humour, unbelief, gnawing worms, despectio sui,113 bad conscience – it is the disquiet of the lack of ideals itself, the suffering from a lack of great love, the dis- content over enforced contentedness. Oh, what does science not conceal today! how much it is supposed to conceal, at any rate! The industry of our best scholars, their unreflective diligence, heads smoking night and day, their very mastery of their craft – how often does all that mean trying to conceal something from themselves? Science as a means of self-anaesthetic: do you know that? . . . Everyone in contact with scholars has the experience that they are sometimes wounded to the marrow by a harmless word, we anger our scholarly friends at the very moment when we want to honour them, we make them lose their temper and control simply because we were too coarse to guess who we were actually dealing with, with sufferers who do not want to admit what they are to themselves, with people drugged and dazed who fear only one thing: coming to consciousness . . .

William Hood, a former CIA executive, who wrote: Like war, spying is a dirty business. Shed of its alleged glory, a soldier’s job is to kill. Peel away the claptrap of espionage and the spy’s job is to betray trust. The only justification a soldier or a spy can have is the moral worth of the cause. . . . When an ordinary man puts his life at stake for a political cause, and has an impact on history, the story is worth telling. . .

It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People.