β
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteinβs brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History)
β
We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)
β
We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)
β
Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea,
And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be;
It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-by!
For the seas call and the stars call, and oh, the call of the sky!
I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are,
But man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide a star;
And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard,
For the river calls and the road calls, and oh, the call of a bird!
Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day
The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away;
And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why,
You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and the sky!
β
β
Gerald Gould
β
The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
Sometimes God calms the storm, but sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms His child.
β
β
Leslie Gould (The Amish Nanny (The Women of Lancaster County, #2))
β
The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a βhigher answerββ but none exists
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universesβone indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Fox: It's lonely at the top.
Gould: But it ain't crowded.
β
β
David Mamet (Speed-the-Plow)
β
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
Be beautiful if you can, wise if you want to, but be respected - that is essential.
β
β
Anna Gould
β
The human mind delights in finding patternβso much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)
β
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and seeatshops
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
What's your name?"
"Emma Gould," she said. "What's yours?"
"Wanted."
"By all the girls or just the law?
β
β
Dennis Lehane (Live by Night (Coughlin, #2))
β
So there you have it: two things & I can't bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinaryβhow am I to resolve them?
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
The best promises forever seem to be made by amnesiacs.
β
β
Chris Gould
β
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea. And the East and West the wander-thirst that will not let me be.
β
β
Gerald Gould
β
Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History)
β
I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteinβs brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,β reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould.
β
β
Jessica Bruder (Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century)
β
Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Great,' I said. 'Visit exotic Australia. Get bitten by an exotic snake. Die exotically.
β
β
Steven Gould (Jumpers (Jumper #1-2.5))
β
I always assumed everybody shared my love for overcast skies. It came as a shock to find out that some people prefer sunshine.
β
β
Glenn Gould (Glenn Gould Variations - By Himself and His Friends)
β
In the afternoon, over gold screens,
I will brush the blue dust of my dreams.
β
β
John Gould Fletcher (Irradiations Sand and Spray)
β
No,' said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; 'I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.'
'Well,' said Michael quietly, 'will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?
β
β
G.K. Chesterton (Manalive (Hilarious Stories))
β
Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need x number of hours alone. Now, what that x represents I don't really know, whether it be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it's a substantial ratio.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life
β
β
Lynette Gould (Heart of Darkness: How I Triumphed Over a Childhood of Abuse)
β
Happiness can be a cruel thing in the face of someone else's grief.
β
β
Sasha Gould (Cross My Heart (Cross My Heart, #1))
β
Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History)
β
In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliationsβthat we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny β and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History)
β
...Under the veil of Mythology lies a solid Reality.
β
β
Sabine Baring-Gould (The Book of Werewolves)
β
If we use the past only to creature heroes for present purposes, we will never understand the richness of human thought or the plurality of ways of knowing.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History)
β
I don't approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.
β
β
Glenn Gould
β
We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free
inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between
Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,
concerning βpunctuated evolutionβ and the unfilled gaps in post-
Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall
resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)
β
To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.
β
β
Deborah B. Gould (Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS)
β
The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
If you want to keep growing, you have to challenge everything. Even your own thinking and beliefs.
β
β
Bill Gould
β
There is an abandonment, an escape, that physical labor bestows.
β
β
Steven Gould (Jumper (Jumper, #1))
β
I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.
β
β
Joan Gould
β
At last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail.
No more moon in the water.
β
β
John Gould (Kilter: 55 Fictions)
β
Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History)
β
I would not choose to live in any age but my own; advances in medicine alone, and the consequent survival of children with access to these benefits, should preclude any temptation to trade for the past. But we cannot understand history if we saddle the past with pejorative categories based on our bad habits for dividing continua into compartments of increasing worth towards the present. These errors apply to the vast paleontological history of life, as much as to the temporally trivial chronicle of human beings. I cringe every time I read that this failed business, or that defeated team, has become a dinosaur is succumbing to progress. Dinosaur should be a term of praise, not opprobrium. Dinosaurs reigned for more than 100 million years and died through no fault of their own; Homo sapiens is nowhere near a million years old, and has limited prospects, entirely self-imposed, for extended geological longevity.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Maybe we have lost the ability, that sixth sense that allows us to see miracles and have visions and understand that we are something other, larger than what we have been told. Maybe evolution has been going on in reverse longer than I suspect, and we are already sad, dumb fish.
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish)
β
The innocent supposition, entertained by most people, that even if they are not brilliant, they are not dumb, is correct only in a very relative sense.
β
β
James Gould Cozzens (The Just And The Unjust)
β
Enjoy today because it won't come back.
β
β
Leslie Gould (The Amish Nanny (The Women of Lancaster County, #2))
β
We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin)
β
My potential salvation...must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha" -- while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)
β
No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas)
β
Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.
β
β
William A. Dembski (Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design)
β
The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor β not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies βout thereβ in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History)
β
Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History)
β
As I went through the city by day
I saw shadows in sunlight;
But in the night I saw everywhere
Stars within the darkness.
β
β
John Gould Fletcher (Irradiations Sand and Spray)
β
Alter any event, ever so slightly and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into radically different channel.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History)
β
I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
β
β
Jay Gould
β
Now I'm dreaming, will I ever find you now?
I walk in circles but I'll never figure out
What I mean to you, do I belong
I try to fight this but I know I'm not that strong
And I feel so helpless here
Watch my eyes are filled with fear
Tell me do you feel the same
Hold me in your arms again
I need your love
I need your time
When everything's wrong
You make it right
I feel so high
I come alive
I need to be free with you tonight
I need your love
β
β
Ellie Goulding
β
Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.
β
β
Lynette Gould (Heart of Darkness: How I Triumphed Over a Childhood of Abuse)
β
His [(Rumpelstiltskin)] feeling that his name, which is his identity, must be kept secret, or else he'll be revealed to the world as the hunchbacked, shriveled, ridiculous creature he knows himself to be. And if that happens, he'll disappear.
β
β
Joan Gould (Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life)
β
I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.
But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I donβt know what I donβt know. There are universes of things out there β ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions β that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I donβt know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.
Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I canβt help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.
[β¦]
I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise. I believe this empathy improves our ability to see the unseen and better know the unknown.
Lives are shaped by chance encounters and by discovering things that we donβt know that we donβt know. The arc of a life is a circuitous one. β¦ In the grand scheme of things, everything we do is an experiment, the outcome of which is unknown.
You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you wonβt know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete.
This, just this, I am comfortable not knowing.
β
β
Debbie Millman (Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design)
β
And when I had finished painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go round as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
Here upon earth there is life, and then death,
Dawn, and later nightfall,
Fire, and the quenching of embers:
But why should I not remember that my night is dawn in another part of the world,
If the idea fits my fancy?
β
β
John Gould Fletcher (Irradiations Sand and Spray)
β
When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body.
Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through the darkness of depression. Snow White both works and sleeps before she is ready to open her eyes and find a Prince leaning over her.
β
β
Joan Gould (Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life)
β
Anywhere, anytime.
β
β
Steven Gould (Jumper (Jumper, #1))
β
There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms -- if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us -- the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould
β
Like any great and good country, Japan has a culture of gathering- weddings, holidays, seasonal celebrations- with food at the core. In the fall, harvest celebrations mark the changing of the guard with roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and skewers of grilled gingko nuts. As the cherry blossoms bloom, festive picnics called hanami usher in the spring with elaborate spreads of miso salmon, mountain vegetables, colorful bento, and fresh mochi turned pink with sakura petals.
β
β
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
β
I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano.
β
β
Stephen Jay Gould (The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History)
β
Even if the intelligent design of some structure has been established, it still is a separate question whether a wise, powerful, and beneficent God ought to have designed a complex, information-rich structure one way or another. For the sake of argument, let's grant that certain designed structures are not simply, as Gould put it, "odd" or "funny," but even cruel. What of it? Philosophical theology has abundant resources for dealing with the problem of evil, maintaining a God who is both omnipotent and benevolent in the face of evil.
β
β
William A. Dembski (Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design)
β
definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was
β
β
Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
β
Drawing a good figure doesnβt make you a good artist. I can name you ten men, right off the bat, who draw better than I do. But I donβt think their work gets as much response as mine. I canβt think of a better man to draw Dick Tracy than Chester Gould, who certainly is no match for Leonardo Da Vinci. But Chester Gould told the story of Dick Tracy. He told the story of Dick Tracy the way it should have been told. No other guy could have done it. Itβs not in the draftsmanship, itβs in the man.
Like I say, a tool is dead. A brush is a dead object. Itβs in the man.
If you want to do, you do it. If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal βem. Take those hands.
The only thing I can say is: Caniff was my teacher, Alex Raymond was my teacher, even the guy who drew Toonerville Trolley was my teacher. Whatever he had stimulated me in some way. And I think thatβs all you need. You need that stimulation. Stimulation to make you an individual. And the draftsmanship, hang it. If you can decently: learn to control what you can, learn to control what you have, learn to refine what you have. Damn perfection. You donβt have to be perfect. You are never going to do a Sistine Chapel, unless someone ties you to a ceiling. Damn perfection.
All a man has in this field is pressure. And I think the pressure supplies a stimulation. You have your own stresses, that will supply your own stimulation. If you want to do it, youβll do it. And youβll do it anyway you can.
β
β
Jack Kirby
β
I'm sorry I was short with him--but I don't like a man to approach me telling me it for my sake.
"Maybe it was," said Wylie
"It's poor technique."
"I'd all for it," said Wylie. "I'm vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I'll ask for more. I like advice."
Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him--he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted. "You fall for some kinds of flattery," he said. "this 'little Napoleon stuff.'"
"It makes me sick," said Stahr, "but it's not as bad as some man trying to help you."
"If you don't like advice, why do you pay me?"
"That's a question of merchandise," said Stahr. "I'm a merchant. I want to buy what's in your mind."
"You're no merchant," said Wylie. "I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams."
"What did he say?"
"He knew them all--Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor--and he said there wasn't one he'd care to meet again in the hereafter. Well--they haven't improved since then, and that's why I say you're no merchant."
"Adams was probably a sourbelly," said Stahr. "He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn't have the judgement or else the character."
"He had brains," said Wylie rather tartly.
"It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out." He shrugged his shoulders. "You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important-especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.
β
β
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Last Tycoon)
β
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress tried to introduce an income tax of 2 percent on earnings of $4,000 in 1894, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. Income tax wouldn't become a regular part of American Life until 1914. People would never be this rich again.
Spending all this wealth became for many a more or less full-time occupation. A kind of desperate, vulgar edge became attached to almost everything they did. At one New York dinner party, guests found the table heaped with sand and at each place a little gold spade; upon a signal, they were invited to dig in and search for diamonds and other costly glitter buried within. At another party - possibly the most preposterous ever staged - several dozen horses with padded hooves were led into the ballroom of Sherry's, a vast and esteemed eating establishment, and tethered around the tables so that the guests, dressed as cowboys and cowgirls, could enjoy the novel and sublimely pointless pleasure of dining in a New York ballroom on horseback.
β
β
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
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Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.
I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away.
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Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai)
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For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a βmisfiring of something usefulβ, it is a kind if virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.
Dawkins is an extreme exponent of the scientific naturalism, originally formulated by dβHolbach, that has now become a major worldview among intellectuals. More moderate versions of this βscientismβ have been articulated by Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, and Daniel Dennett, who have all claimed that one has to choose between science and faith. For Dennett, theology has been rendered superfluous, because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious. But for Dawkins, like the other βnew atheistsβ β Sam Harris, the young American philosopher and student of neuroscience, and Christopher Hitchens, critic and journalist β religion is the cause of the problems of our world; it is the source of absolute evil and βpoisons everything.β They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.
But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) followed Monod in his discussion of the implications of evolution. Everything in the natural world could indeed be explained by natural selection, but Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could only work with natural explanations. Gould had no religious axe to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic, but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians - Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky - had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.
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Karen Armstrong
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The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of securityβnational, individual, spiritualβwasnβt a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody elseβs lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner.
But it wasnβt about price and heritage, it wasnβt about that at all.
The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.
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Richard Flanagan (Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish)
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But you don't come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime.
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Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
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Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as βIntelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental.β A 60 percent (or whatever) βheritabilityβ for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the βinteractionismβ we all accept does not permit such statements as βTrait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic.β When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that beingβs behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable.
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Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man)
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The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:
"The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory."
Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks.
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
[Evolutionβs Erratic Pace - "Natural History," May, 1977]
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Stephen Jay Gould
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About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf.
Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this
riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb.
Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incomparable head is one whole ruby. Husband of a thousand wives, he has begotten on them ten thousand children. Nothing is mean about him; his urine is white wine; his faeces are always soft gold. However, despite his splendor and his extraordinary attainments, he cannot successfully pronounce the words: electricity, Methodist Episcopal, organization, third cavalry brigade. Avoid them. Infuriated by your demonstration of any accomplishment not his, he may suddenly kill you.
Now choose for your friend a paranoiac, and beware of the wolf! His back is to the wall, his implacable enemies are crowding on him. He gets no rest. He finds no starting hole to hide him. Ten times oftener than the Apostle, he has been, through the violence of the unswerving malice which pursues him, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Now that, face to face with him, you simulate innocence and come within his reach, what pity can you expect? You showed him none; he will certainly not show you any.
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, 0 Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Mr. Lecky's maniacs lay in wait to slash a man's head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud. The beastly cunning of their approach, the fantastic capriciousness of their intention could not be very well met or provided for. In his makeshift fort everywhere encircled by darkness, Mr. Lecky did not care to meditate further on the subject.
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James Gould Cozzens (Castaway)