Herbert Read Quotes

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.

I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction? -The Stolen Journals

To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism.

One doesn't need telepathy to read your intentions.

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection. (Letter to A. R. Wallace July 1866)

[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. ... On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic... upon the strata of the Earth!

Magic is not, and never has been a substitute for science, but is rather a constructive activity with a specific social function, and one that is still operative. [...] The aim of magical objects and magical rites is to arouse emotion in the group and to make such aroused emotions effective agents.

Al popularizarse la cultura, al ser "mediada" a las masas, queda necesariamente diluida, castrada, deformada.

The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.

A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write." There's no difference on paper between the two.

Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

Thoughts are such fleet magic things. Betsy's thoughts swept a wide arc while Uncle Keith read her poem aloud. She thought of Julia learning to sing with Mrs. Poppy. She thought of Tib learning to dance. She thought of herself and Tacy and Tib going into their 'teens. She even thought of Tom and Herbert and of how, by and by, they would be carrying her books and Tacy's and Tib's up the hill from high school.

Mr. Herbert Read, by the way, has made a rather unfortunate critical condemnation of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars as being an account of a campaign where men did not heroically suffer the machine-made boredom and agony of the Western trenches, and which therefore can hardly be taken seriously. This reads like a glorification of the more horrible sort of war at the expense of the less horrible, which cannot be what Mr. Read (an anti-militarist, and for good reason) intends. If he wishes to point out that all war is evil in itself, whatever its glamour, he should not complicate his argument by a false comparison of heroisms.

Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society.

But, as Sir Herbert Read remarks in his Concise History of Modern Art, metaphysical anxiety is no longer only Germanic and northern; it now characterizes the whole of the modern world. Read quotes Klee, who wrote in his Diary at the beginning of 1915: “The more horrifying this world becomes (as it is in these days) the more art becomes abstract; while a world at peace produces realistic art.” To Franz Marc, abstraction offered a refuge from the evil and ugliness in this world. “Very early in life I felt that man was ugly. The animals seemed to be more lovely and pure, yet even among them I discovered so much that was revolting and hideous that my painting became more and more schematic and abstract.

What we need, we are told every day, is more and better leadership. But what this demand involves is a closer and closer approximation to fascism. The fascists alone have evolved an efficient form of leadership: efficient leadership is fascism.

Believing then … that human life is actually worth living, one can combat one’s natural pessimism by stoicism and the refusal of illusion, while embellishing the scene with any one of the following. There are the beauties of science and the extraordinary marvels of nature. There is the consolation and irony of philosophy. There are the infinite splendors of literature and poetry, not excluding the liturgical and devotional aspects of these, such as those found in John Donne or George Herbert. There is the grand resource of art and music and architecture, again not excluding those elements that aspire to the sublime. In all of these pursuits, any one of them enough to absorb a lifetime, there may be found a sense of awe and magnificence that does not depend at all on any invocation of the supernatural. Indeed, nobody armed by art and culture and literature and philosophy is likely to be anything but bored and sickened by ghost stories, UFO tales, spiritualist experiences, or babblings from the beyond.

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.

Do you know about the horrors during the Time of Titans? Or the Hrethgir Rebellions?” “I’ve read my father’s memoirs in great detail—” “I don’t mean Agamemnon’s propaganda. Have you learned the real history?

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass, he walked through the woods one winter crunching through the shinycrusted snow stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was and found the grass green and weeds sprouting and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb, He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural Selection that wasn't what they taught in church, so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg, found a seedball in a potato plant sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin’s Natural Selection on Spencer and Huxley with the Burbank potato. Young man go west; Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa full of his dream of green grass in winter ever- blooming flowers ever- bearing berries; Luther Burbank could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus— winters were bleak in that bleak brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts— out to sunny Santa Rosa; and he was a sunny old man where roses bloomed all year everblooming everbearing hybrids. America was hybrid America could cash in on Natural Selection. He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural Selection and the influence of the mighty dead and a good firm shipper’s fruit suitable for canning. He was one of the grand old men until the churches and the congregations got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin. Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil, selected improved hybrids for America those sunny years in Santa Rosa. But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time; he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection and they stung him and he died puzzled. They buried him under a cedartree. His favorite photograph was of a little tot standing beside a bed of hybrid everblooming double Shasta daisies with never a thought of evil And Mount Shasta in the background, used to be a volcano but they don’t have volcanos any more.

Now I am here; what thou wilt do with me None of my books will show: I read and sigh and wish I were a tree, For sure, then I should grow To fruit or shade: At least some bird would trust Her household to me, and I should be just.

Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Wells, along with Hugo Gernsback and Jules Verne, is sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". Source: Wikipedia

I am reading a terrible sententious book called The Wedding of Herbert Mimnaugh. Firstly, what sort of a name is Herbert and why would a parent with any trace of natural affection wish to afflict their child with such a name? Herbert's parents do not feature prominently in the book when this choice alone makes it obvious that they are the most interesting people in it.

when Herbert Hoover was elected U.S. president in 1928, Henry Stimson—Hoover’s new secretary of state—was shocked to learn that Yardley’s bureau was penetrating the private diplomatic missives of other countries. Stimson in 1929 shuttered the operation, cutting off State Department funding and primly explaining that gentlemen do not read one another’s mail—something European gentlemen did all the time, of course, and had been doing for hundreds of years.

The true artist is indifferent to the materials and conditions imposed upon him. He accepts any conditions, so long as they can be used to express his will-to-form. Then in the wider mutations of history his efforts are magnified or diminished, taken up or dismissed, by forces which he cannot predict, and which have very little to do with the values of which he is the exponent. It is his faith that those values are nevertheless the eternal attributes of humanity.

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him. For Fat, finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers. Who deals God? Fat knew that the churches couldn’t help, although he did consult with one of David’s priests. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Kevin suggested dope. Being involved with literature, I recommended he read the English seventeenth century minor metaphysical poets such as Vaughan and Herbert: “He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where, He sayes it is so far That he hath quite forgot how to go there.” Which

When I first started dual enrollment at Lake City Community College you could print in the library for free. I printed whole books. Like James Legge's 1891 "Tao Te Ching" translation. He was to parentheses what Emily Dickinson was to the Em Dash. "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (at­tain­ment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a dis­ease." I'd sit around listening to records as their dot matrix printer whirred. Slowly printing a book from the 6th century BCE. They had those hard blue plastic headphones. Your ears would ache. But Rimsky-Korsakov was pretty metal. Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response" had me picking "ZOOM" as my meditation mantra. Reading Vonnegut with his nonlinear narrative. Books will often have Acknowledgments. A page or two. Things that helped you. What matters. Everything I write is an Acknowledgment. What matters. And I've printed whole books.

If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal personalities as having a better perception of reality—what Herbert Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not egocentred and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared to the present

He had always liked to read, and had piles of literature in his attic room which was good, because it was cheap. Very few people know that cheap literature is very likely to be good, because it is old and unprotected by copyright.

AUTHOR’S NOTE The First Assassin is a work of fiction, and specifically a work of historical fiction—meaning that much of it is based on real people, places, and events. My goal never has been to tell a tale about what really happened but to tell what might have happened by blending known facts with my imagination. Characters such as Abraham Lincoln, Winfield Scott, and John Hay were, of course, actual people. When they speak on these pages, their words are occasionally drawn from things they are reported to have said. At other times, I literally put words in their mouths. Historical events and circumstances such as Lincoln’s inauguration, the fall of Fort Sumter, and the military crisis in Washington, D.C., provide both a factual backdrop and a narrative skeleton. Throughout, I have tried to maximize the authenticity and also to tell a good story. Thomas Mallon, an experienced historical novelist, has described writing about the past: “The attempt to reconstruct the surface texture of that world was a homely pleasure, like quilting, done with items close to hand.” For me, the items close to hand were books and articles. Naming all of my sources is impossible. I’ve drawn from a lifetime of reading about the Civil War, starting as a boy who gazed for hours at the battlefield pictures in The Golden Book of the Civil War, which is an adaptation for young readers of The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Yet several works stand out as especially important references. The first chapter owes much to an account that appeared in the New York Tribune on February 26, 1861 (and is cited in A House Dividing, by William E. Baringer). It is also informed by Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, 1861, edited by Norma B. Cuthbert. For details about Washington in 1861: Reveille in Washington, by Margaret Leech; The Civil War Day by Day, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long; Freedom Rising, by Ernest B. Ferguson; The Regiment That Saved the Capitol, by William J. Roehrenbeck; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell, by Thomas P. Lowry; and “Washington City,” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1861. For information about certain characters: With Malice Toward None, by Stephen B. Oates; Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald; Abe Lincoln Laughing, edited by P. M. Zall; Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries of John Hay, edited by Tyler Dennett; Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III: 1861–1865, by C. Percy Powell; Agent of Destiny, by John S. D. Eisenhower; Rebel Rose, by Isabel Ross; Wild Rose, by Ann Blackman; and several magazine articles by Charles Pomeroy Stone. For life in the South: Roll, Jordan, Roll, by Eugene D. Genovese; Runaway Slaves, by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; Bound for Canaan, by Fergus M. Bordewich; Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself; The Fire-Eaters, by Eric H. Walther; and The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, by Robert E. May. For background on Mazorca: Argentine Dictator, by John Lynch. This is the second edition of The First Assassin. Except for a few minor edits, it is no different from the first edition.

Dan Rostenkowski, the Democratic chairman of Ways and Means, for help. Over lunch in December 1988, “Rosty” agreed to “avoid embarrassing the new President on taxes for one year—but for only one year,” Dick Darman recalled. “Given the no-new-taxes pledge,” Darman noted, “even a one-year reprieve seemed better than none.” Bush took it, happily. Darman was reading Time’s coverage of the bipartisan announcement of a 1989 budget that avoided the hard choices until 1990. The headline, Darman knew, said it all: “Wait Till Next Year.

If what you learn about quantum physics here excites you as much as it does me, you should explore quantum physics in greater depth by reading some of the authors I follow with devotion. For starters, I highly recommend: Brian Greene (The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, New York: Vintage, 2011), Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design, New York: Bantam, 2012), Amit Goswami (The Self Aware Universe, New York: Tarcher, 1995), Nick Herbert (Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, New York: Anchor, 1987), John Gribbin (In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, New York: Bantam Books, 1984), Richard Feynman (Six Easy Pieces, New York: Basic Books, 1998), and Michio Kaku (Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel, New York: Anchor, 2009). This

nothing is sacred in and of itself...Ideas, texts, even people can be made sacred... the act of making sacred is in truth an event in history. It is the product of the many and complex pressures of the time in which the act occurs. And events in history must always be subject to questioning, deconstruction, even to declaration of their obsolescence

equally eagerly from the nineteenth-century polymath Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker – who, after reading Darwin, coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’. Hitler revered Atatürk (literally, ‘the father of the Turks’) as his guru; Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism, or ‘Americanism’; American New Dealers later adapted Mussolini’s ‘corporatism’.

Drug knowledge originated mostly with males because they tend to be more venturesome-an outgrowth of male aggression. You've read your Orange Catholic Bible, thus you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here's an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve.

He offered to parade for me a series of examples—famous military figures who were frozen in adolescence. I declined the offer. I have read my history with care and have recognized this characteristic for myself.” Moneo turned and looked directly into Idaho’s eyes.

Since we are suboids, we have no participation in profits from Ixian technology. We have simple lives and few ambitions—but we do have our religion. We read the Orange Catholic Bible and know in our hearts what is right.” The suboid speaker raised a massive, knuckled fist. “And we know that many of the things we’ve been building here on Ix are not right!

...we should continue to ask, How might we attend to words as closely as they deserve? What if lectio began with reading aloud, with feeling the words on your tongue and teeth and practicing the sounds and noticing where they occur in your mouth and throat? When reading Scripture, we are feeding on the Word. Peterson insists that in addition to learning Scripture, we should digest the words within us: “Not merely Read your Bible but Eat this book.” Jesus Christ is called the Word, and we are to dine on his body—not only in the sacrament of Communion but also in our devotional reading. Recall George Herbert’s poem “Love III,” in which Love says to his guest, “You must sit down…and taste my meat.” To read literature well, we should articulate the choice words aloud, delighting in the sounds of sentences and the ways the beautiful diction tastes. (p. 107)

Narcissus Garden was an environmental piece consisting of fifteen hundred plastic mirror balls covering a section of green lawn. The chairman himself had helped me install the reflective spheres, so it was hardly a ‘guerrilla’ operation. I stood among the mirror balls in a formal gold kimono with silver obi and handed out copies of the statement Sir Herbert Read had provided for my exhibition two years earlier. As a comment on commercialism in the art world, I was selling the mirror balls for 1,200 lira (about $2) each, an audience-participation performance that shocked the authorities. They made me stop, telling me it was inappropriate to sell my artworks as if they were ‘hot dogs or ice cream cones’. But the installation remained.

The single most important piece of advice I ever got was to concentrate on story. What is "story? "It's the quality that keeps the reader following the narrative. A good story makes interesting things happen to a character...And it keeps them happening, so that the character progresses and grows in stature. A writer's job is to do whatever is necessary to make the reader want to read the next line. That's what you're supposed to be thinking about when you write a story...don't waste your energy on anything else.

[CR] I was reading another of your books in your library last night—Herbert Morrison’s autobiography. He’s got one paragraph on you. It’s the nastiest piece of business, calling you a TV personality. He doesn’t know if you have any influence on anyone and he refers to your election defeat in Plymouth. He loads it on. Do you remember that? [MF] Ernest Bevin is supposed to have said of Morrison when someone else said, “He’s his own worst enemy,” “not while I’m alive.” Michael had no other comment on Morrison. He rarely spent time on those he disliked.

The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency.

You cannot impose a culture from the top--it must come from under. It grows out of the soil, out of the people, out of their daily life and work. It is a spontaneous expression of their joy of life, of their joy in work, and if this does not exist, the culture will not exist. Joy is a spiritual quality, an impalpable quality: that too cannot be forced. It must be an inevitable state of mind, born of the elementary processes of life, a by-product of natural human growth.

A similar method was used by the late Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Herbert Simon. He won the Nobel Prize in economics, was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and is widely regarded as among the most imaginative and productive behavioral scientists of all time. Simon didn’t read newspapers or watch television to get news. He said that when something important happened, people always told him, so it was a waste of time. Simon even made this point in a speech he gave to the National Association of Newspaper Editors, who were not amused. “I’ve saved an enormous amount of time since 1934, when I cast my first vote,” Simon told them, and he went on to say, it had left him more time to focus on his research.

Herbert Read thought we would need a mystical theory to connect beauty and function. Well, it took one hundred years, but today we have that theory, one based in biology, neuroscience, and psychology, not mysticism.

Take a Trip to Bali through Food! Enter Bali through the food, spices and cooking culture of the island. An array of favorite dishes drinks, and desserts for those whose passion is food. Interesting and enjoyable reading and cooking!” Margery Hamai. Bodhi Tree Dharma Center. Honolulu, Hawaii “I am very happy that the book is ready to enjoy. We are very proud that some Puri Lumbung cuisine (authentic recipe) is in your book. I hope this can enrich the knowledge and creation of people in the cooking world.” Yudhi Ishwari, Puri Lumbung Cottages, Munduk, northern Bali. April 2014 “Great travel journalism! Not only a thorough book about a fascinating cuisine, but good travel journalism as well. A delightful journey for the senses.” By Mutual Publishing, LLC (Consignment) on April 30, 2014 “We are proud and happy that one of our graduates is the author of an interesting book enjoyed by many readers.” Kachuen Gee, Head Librarian, Leonard Lief Library, Herbert Lehman College, Bronx, New York. May 2014

The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It

All of this told of harm done, of a drug that made a child depressed, lonely, and filled with a sense of inadequacy, and when researchers looked at whether Ritalin at least helped hyperactive children fare well academically, to get good grades and thus succeed as students, they found that it wasn’t so. Being able to focus intently on a math test, it turned out, didn’t translate into long-term academic achievement. This drug, Sroufe explained in 1973, enhances performance on “repetitive, routinized tasks that require sustained attention,” but “reasoning, problem solving and learning do not seem to be [positively] affected.”26 Five years later, Herbert Rie was much more negative. He reported that Ritalin did not produce any benefit on the students’ “vocabulary, reading, spelling, or math,” and hindered their ability to solve problems. “The reactions of the children strongly suggest a reduction in commitment of the sort that would seem critical for learning.”27 That same year, Russell Barkley at the Medical College of Wisconsin reviewed the relevant scientific literature and concluded “the major effect of stimulants appears to be an improvement in classroom manageability rather than academic performance.”28 Next it was James Swanson’s turn to weigh in. The fact that the drugs often left children “isolated, withdrawn and overfocused” could “impair rather than improve learning,” he said.29 Carol Whalen, a psychologist from the University of California at Irvine, noted in 1997 that “especially worrisome has been the suggestion that the unsalutary effects [of Ritalin] occur in the realm of complex, high-order cognitive functions such as flexible problem-solving or divergent thinking.”30 Finally, in 2002, Canadian investigators conducted a meta-analysis of the literature, reviewing fourteen studies involving 1,379 youths that had lasted at least three months, and they determined that there was “little evidence for improved academic performance.”31

Drug knowledge originated mostly with males because they tend to be more venturesome—an outgrowth of male aggression. You’ve read your Orange Catholic Bible, thus you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here’s an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve. My story tells you something about how our societies find a structural necessity for sub-groups.

I know the evil of my ancestors because I am those people. The balance is delicate in the extreme. I know that few of you who read my words have ever thought about your ancestors this way. It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

pristine copy of The Rats by James Herbert. Louise smiled to herself, remembering reading the book as a teenager and being equally repelled and enthralled by the story of a plague of rats taking over London.

Herbert’s And now in age I bud again After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain and relish versing.

Now Leto understood why the Old Duke had insisted that his son learn to read his subjects and know the mood of the populace. “At the heart of it all, lad, we rule at their sufferance,” Paulus had told him, “though thankfully most of the population doesn’t realize it. If you’re a good enough ruler, none of your people will think to question it.

Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel’s layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. A neat trick, and he pulled it off perfectly.

The makings of a trial lawyer are a collection of many things: watching, doing, reading about doing, reading about great masters of advocacy, and then redoing and re-reading. It is a never-ending study.

She read a good deal of that kind of literature which may be defined as specialism popularised; writing which addresses itself to educated, but not strictly studious, persons, and which forms the reservoir of conversation for society above the sphere of turf and west-endism. Thus, for instance, though she could not undertake the volumes of Herbert Spencer, she was intelligently acquainted with the tenor of their contents; and though she had never opened one of Darwin’s books, her knowledge of his main theories and illustrations was respectable. She was becoming a typical woman of the new time, the woman who has developed concurrently with journalistic enterprise.

I know I’m right,” Roosevelt said. “Read Herbert L. Stoddard’s book. It’s called The Bobwhite Quail, and it’s bigger than the Bible, but every word in it’s important.

necessity of character as the chief factor in any man's success—a teaching in which I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others. All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard. But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a collective responsibility. Books such as Herbert Croly's "Promise of American Life" and Walter E. Weyl's "New Democracy" would generally at that time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy. The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way. It was not so democratic in another. I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages.

Anyone who has done a bit of family history research which has taken them into the censuses of the 19th and 20th Centuries will be aware of just how many German citizens there were in Britain in those years. So we must assume that Katrin Fitzherbert's experiences and feelings must have been mirrored many times over in the 20th C. Other readable examples which spring to mind are Robert Graves ("Good-Bye to all that") who had a German mother, which caused him several difficulties, and Christabel Bielenberg ("The Past is Myself") a British woman who married a German lawyer in 1934 and spent WW2 in Germany. I find that reading the experiences of people resident in Germany during WW2 shows how similar peoples' lives were on both sides of the front. War diaries of life in Britain show the frustrations of ordinary folk with their own Government, but we never quite (so far as I remember) go to the point of having political officers keeping and eye on us and our remarks.

Ahh, but the dice cannot read their own spots.

Actually, a vast number of men, even when they are in the springtime of their lives, “kill” time by reading “shockers”, solving crossword puzzles, studying the worthless tips of racetrack touts, by loafing on the street corner or in pubs and by scores of other time-wasting devices. In most cases, time is all they have. It is their only capital. And their steady desire is to destroy it. Speaking of crossword puzzles, Mr. Esme Wingfield-Stratford truly says: “Energy must find an outlet somewhere, even in the most atrophied mind, and that it may drain itself easily and agreeably into vacancy, puzzles and competitions are devised, culminating in the invention of the crossword, perhaps the most scientific of all time-killing devices, with its capacity for holding the attention just sufficiently to keep the brain employed in the most useless of all possible activities for hours on end.

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by 'boring from within', rather by 'doing the job', learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one's own consciousness in working with others. The long march includes the concerted effort to build up counterinstitutions. They have long been an aim of the movement,but the lack of funds was greatly responsible for their weakness and their inferior quality. They must be made competitive. This is especially important for the development of radical, "free" media. The fact that the radical Left has no equal access to the great chains of information and indoctrination is largely responsible for its isolation.

The religious commentary statement in Dune is the one that we've discussed earlier, that messiahs should come with a label on the forehead that reads, 'Caution, may be dangerous to your health.

It won’t be long now.” Such an odd old holy man, young Scytale thought. Even compared to the smells of disinfectant, medicine, and sickness, he’d always had an odd smell about him. Sounding compassionate, Yueh said, “There isn’t much we can do.” Gasping for air, old Scytale croaked out, “A Tleilaxu Master should not be so weak and decrepit. It is . . . unseemly.” His youthful counterpart tried again to trigger the flow of memories, to squeeze them into his brain by sheer force of will, as he had attempted to do countless times before. The essential past must be in there somewhere, buried deep. But he felt no tickle of possibilities, no glimmer of success. What if they are not there at all? What if something had gone terribly wrong? His pulse pounded as the panic began to rise. Not much time. Never enough time. He tried to cut off the thought. The body provided a wealth of cellular material. They could create more Scytale gholas, try again and again if necessary. But if his own memories had failed to resurface, why should an identical ghola have any better luck without the guidance of the original? I am the only one who knew the Master so intimately. He wanted to shake Yueh, demand to know how he had managed to remember his past. Tears were in full flow now, falling onto the old man’s hand, but Scytale knew they were inadequate. His father’s chest spasmed in an almost imperceptible death rattle. The life-support equipment hummed with more intensity, and the instrument readings fluctuated. “He’s slipped into a coma,” Yueh reported. The Rabbi nodded. Like an executioner announcing his plans, he said, “Too weak. He’s going to die now.” Scytale’s heart sank. “He has given up on me.” His father would never know if he succeeded now; he would perish wondering and worrying. The last great calamity in a long line of disasters that had befallen the Tleilaxu race. He gripped the old man’s hand. So cold, too cold. He felt the life ebbing. I have failed! As if felled by a stunner, Scytale dropped to his knees at the bedside. In his crashing despair, he knew with absolute certainly that he could never resurrect the recalcitrant memories. Not alone. Lost! Forever lost! Everything that comprised the great Tleilaxu race. He could not bear the magnitude of this disaster. The reality of his defeat sliced like shattered glass into his heart. Abruptly, the Tleilaxu youth felt something changing inside, followed by an explosion between his temples. He cried out from the excruciating pain. At first he thought he was dying himself, but instead of being swallowed in blackness, he felt new thoughts burning like wildfire across his consciousness. Memories streamed past in a blur, but Scytale locked onto each one, absorbing it again and reprocessing it into the synapses of his brain. The precious memories returned to where they had always belonged. His father’s death had opened the barriers. At last Scytale retrieved what he was supposed to know, the critical data bank of a Tleilaxu Master, all the ancient secrets of his race. Instilled with pride and a new sense of dignity, he rose to his feet. Wiping away warm tears, he looked down at the discarded copy of himself on the bed. It was nothing more than a withered husk. He no longer needed that old man.

Great railway president Samuel Rea made a speech to his staff when he retired. In his closing words he said: “I advise you all to read good books. They are invaluable. Never forget that.

With the shower on full blast, I crank my Wet Tunes, the hope being that I can drown out one song in my head with another. Better yet, maybe they’ll play the same song, so I can hear the lyrics and figure out what it is. Somehow, I don’t imagine myself being that lucky. The shower does feel good, though, so I stay in there for a while. As the water cascades over my head, I begin to relax. I’ve got the radio tuned to WFUV, the college radio station out of Fordham, and they’re playing “Alison” by Elvis Costello, one of my favorites. Before I know it — and just as I hoped — it’s the only thing I hear between my ears. That is, until the song ends and some guy comes on reading the news. I whip back my head from the shower spray. I could swear he said something about a tragedy at the Fálcon Hotel. But that’s not what has me shaking like a leaf as I try to towel myself dry. The radio newsman didn’t say it happened yesterday. He said it happened this morning. Thirty minutes later, Michael hasn’t called, but I’m heading out the door of my place. I turn my key to double-lock it. And — “Ms. Burns? Ms. Burns?” Not again. It’s way too early to face the Wicked Witch on Nine. I turn — and it’s even worse than I thought. Mrs. Rosencrantz has brought a bald old man, who towers over her despite his being no more than five-foot-five, six tops. “You were screaming and screaming,” she practically screams in my face. “You woke up my Herbert. He heard it. Ask him, Ms. Burns.” I don’t ask Herbert.

Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs,” Leto said. Moneo held his breathing to a shallow minimum. The Lord can read thoughts! “Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.” Moneo felt beaten down by these words, terrified by unspoken things they might make him think. “That’s how events get lost in history,” Leto said.

How soon this child must assume his manhood, Halleck thought. How soon he must read that form within his mind, that contract of brutal caution, to enter the necessary fact on the necessary line: ‘Please list your next of kin.

And he recognized that there was a deep emotional difference between history as recorded on shigawire and read at leisure, a deep difference between that kind of history and the history which one lived. This new living history which he felt gathering around him possessed a sense of plunging into an irreversible future.

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep him. For Fat, finding God (if indeed he did find God) became, ultimately, a bummer, a constantly diminishing supply of joy, sinking lower and lower like the contents of a bag of uppers. Who deals God? Fat knew that the churches couldn’t help, although he did consult with one of David’s priests. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. Kevin suggested dope. Being involved with literature, I recommended he read the English seventeenth century minor metaphysical poets such as Vaughan and Herbert: He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where,   He sayes it is so far That he hath quite forgot how to go there.

There is a current misconception which sees in Jung an early disciple of Freud who subsequently deserted his master. Nothing could be more misleading. From the very beginning there were differences of procedure and of outlook that were bound to lead to divergent results. Freud's work is based on a scientific method restricted to the principle of causality: that is to say, it is assumed that everything that happens has an explanation in prior causes, and is merely the result of those causes. The world is a mechanism that can be taken to pieces and we can only understand how it works if we know how to dismantle and reassemble its constituent parts. Jung does not deny this causal principle, but he says it is inadequate to explain all the facts. In his view, we live and work, day by day, according to the principle of directed aim or purpose, as well as by the principle of causality. We are drawn onwards and our actions are significant for a future we cannot foresee, and will only be explicable when the final effect of the impulse becomes evident. In other words, life has a meaning as well as an explanation; a meaning, moreover, that we can never finally discover, for it is being extended all the time by the process of evolution.

Both sides can make very strong cases for their positions, but sadly both sides have become arrogant and much too certain of their positions. Probably most of you who read this chapter will look at the verses on the other side (of your position) and say, "I can answer those verses easily." No, you can't! You are imposing the grid of your system on those passages that challenge you so that you won't have to be challenged. Let me give an example.

Suggested Further Reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr Dune by Frank Herbert To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

But that would only shame him, frighten him to learn he's so easily read. I should place more trust in my friends.

How soon this child must assume his manhood... How soon must he read the form within his mind, that contract of brutal caution, to enter the necessary fact on the necessary line: 'Please enter your next of kin'.