Overlooking Nature Quotes

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?

The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Selfishness is one of the principal fruits of the corruption of human nature; and it is obvious that selfishness disposes us to over-rate our good qualities, and to overlook or extenuate our defects.

It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.

A man may meet a woman and be shocked by her ugliness. Soon, if she is natural and unaffected, her expression makes him overlook the faults of her features. He begins to find her charming, it enters his head that she might be loved, and a week later he is living in hope. The following week he has been snubbed into despair, and the week afterwards he has gone mad. (Chapter 17)

She certainly did not hate him. No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him, that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some time ceased to be repugnant to her feelings; and it was now heightened into somewhat of a friendlier nature, by the testimony so highly in his favour, and bringing forward his disposition in so amiable a light, which yesterday had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude.--Gratitude not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude--for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and as such its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not exactly be defined.

Forgive and forget is the divine ideal. Grappling with the hurt while biting your tongue and struggling to refuse justifiable vengeance―that's closer to human reality.

When you know you’re worth loving, you can be a little imperfect. Hell, look at me—a lot imperfect. It makes all the difference in the world when you believe someone loves you enough that they don’t overlook the spot and the messed up hair. They just add it to the things about you that make them love you all the more.

Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.

He was a man, an attractive man if one overlooked the obnoxiousness. But women had to overlook men’s personality flaws, else nobody would ever wed and/or reproduce and the human race would come to an end. Naturally

Her bedroom window overlooked the garden, and now and then, usually when she was "having a bad spell," Mr. Helm had seen her stand long hours gazing into the garden, as though what she saw bewitched her. ("When I was a girl," she had once told a friend, "I was terribly sure trees and flowers were the same as birds or people. That they thought things, and talked among themselves. And we could hear them if we really tried. It was just a matter of emptying your head of all other sounds. Being very quiet and listening very hard. Sometimes I still believe that. But one can never get quiet enough...")

Time is an observer, it reminds me of a microscope because it magnifies within time what we cannot see with the naked eye. Time is a natural connection – it reveals and helps us clarify what was overlooked and what we didn’t understand.

The time traveller proceeded, "any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thicknessa and Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimentions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.

Its natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily, most gracefully.

What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, wilfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage... The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a man if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity -- in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. "Yes, but it's advantage all the same," you will retort. But excuse me, I'll make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. In fact, it upsets everything... One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases… for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important -- that is, our personality, our individuality. Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason… It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy. But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy? I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! …And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it has not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don't know? You will scream at me (that is, if you condescend to do so) that no one is touching my free will, that all they are concerned with is that my will should of itself, of its own free will, coincide with my own normal interests, with the laws of nature and arithmetic. Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four? Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!

My belief is that happiness is necessarily transient. The natural state of a reflective man is one of depression. The world is a botch. Women can make men perfectly happy, but they seldom know how to do it. They make too much effort: they overlook the powerful effect of simple amiability. Women are also the cause of the worst kind of unhappiness.

Can an instantaneous cube exist?' 'Don't follow you,' said Filby. 'Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?' Filby became pensive. 'Clearly,' the Time Traveller proceeded, 'any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.

His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (non content all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone, and given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface is seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering limited beings- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering in its strict logic, across all divides.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a cast away do? Why he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child’s life.

This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble.... Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

[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!

Take dopamine. Elevated levels of dopamine in the brain produce extremely focussed attention,2 as well as unwavering motivation and goal-directed behaviors.3 These are central characteristics of romantic love. Lovers intensely focus on the beloved, often to the exclusion of all around them. Indeed, they concentrate so relentlessly on the positive qualities of the adored one that they easily overlook his or her negative traits;4 they even dote on specific events and objects shared with this sweetheart.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

If every form of nature looked the same we wouldn’t marvel in its beauty. If every mountain overlooked a parallel scene, if every flower bloomed in uninspired ways, the Earth would not steal us of our breath. Use this as a lesson. Your eyes, your hands, your marvelous smile – those are all your unique contribution to the matchless beauty of nature. You are a stunning rarity; you don’t need to be fixed.

A poor man is not disposed to quick and high resentment when he is among the rich: he is apt to yield to others, for he knows others are above him: he is not stiff and self-willed; he is patient with hard fare; he expects no other than to be despised, and takes it patiently; he does not take it heinously that he overlooked and but little regarded; he is prepared to be in a lowly place; he readily honours his superiors; he takes reproofs quietly; he readily honours others as above him; he easily yields to be taught, and does not claim much to his understanding and judgment; he is not over nice or humoursome, and has his spirit subdued to hard things; he is not assuming, nor apt to take much upon him, but it is natural for him to be subject to others. Thus it is with the humble Christian.

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature

We are all plagued by failures - by missed subtleties, overlooked knowledge, and outright errors. For the most part, we have imagined that little can be done beyond working harder and harder to catch the problems clean up after them. We are not in the habit of thinking the way the army pilots did as they looked upon their shiny new Model 299 bomber — a machine so complex no one was sure human beings could try it.

It was a cold still afternoon with a hard steely sky overhead, when he slipped out of the warm parlour into the open air. The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought that he had never seen so far and intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, til they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering-even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away; and with great cheerfulness of spirit he pushed on towards the Wild Wood, which lay before him low and threatening, like a black reef in some still southern sea.

Now, suppose we consider our trades and businesses. Is it not natural if we conclude a profitable transaction to consider it not good luck but a just reward for our efforts? I am inclined to think we may be overlooking the gifts of the goddess. Perhaps she really does assist us when we do not appreciate her generosity.

The recipe for becoming a good novelist, for example is easy to give but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says 'I do not have enough talent'. One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes each day until one has learned how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate, keeping one's eyes and ears open for the effect produced on those present, one should travel like a landscape painter or costume designer; one should excerpt for oneself out of the individual sciences everything that will produce an artistic effect when it is well described, one should, finally, reflect on the motives of human actions, disdain no signpost to instruction about them and be a collector of these things by day and night. One should continue in this many-sided exercise some ten years: what is then created in the work­shop, however, will be fit to go out into the world. - What, however, do most people do? They begin, not with the parts, but with the whole. Per­haps they chance to strike a right note, excite attention and from then on strike worse and worse notes, for good, natural reasons.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific. By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

... ongoing care for the soul rather than seek for a cure appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. I sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature. It is a beast this thing that stirs in the core of our being, but it is also the star of our innermost nature. We have to care for this suffering with extreme reverence so that in our fear and anger at the beast, we do not overlook the star.

Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton’s most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe’s great color work, like Newton’s, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein’s last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery.

What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn’t be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?

This distorted lens may lead someone studying human sexuality to ask: “Where are you on a spectrum from straight to gay?” This question would miss a pattern we found in our data suggesting that people's arousal systems are not bundled by the gender of whatever it is that turns them on: 4.5% of men find the naked male form aversive but penises arousing, while 6.7% of women find the female form arousing, but vaginas aversive. Using simplified community identifications like the gay-straight spectrum to investigate how and why arousal patterns develop is akin to studying historic human migration patterns by distributing a research survey asking respondents to report their position on a spectrum from “white” to “person of color.” Yes, “person of color,” like the concept of “gay,” is a useful moniker to understand the life experiences of a person, but a person’s place on a “white” to “person of color” spectrum tells us little about their ethnicity, just as a person’s place on a scale of gay to straight tells us little about their underlying arousal patterns. The old way of looking at arousal limits our ability to describe sexuality to a grey scale. We miss that there is no such thing as attraction to just “females,” but rather a vast array of arousal systems that react to stimuli our society typically associates with “females” including things like vaginas, breasts, the female form, a gait associated with a wider hip bone, soft skin, a higher tone of voice, the gender identity of female, a person dressed in “female” clothing, and female gender roles. Arousal from any one of these things correlates with the others, but this correlation is lighter than a gay-straight spectrum would imply. Our data shows it is the norm for a person to derive arousal from only a few of these stimuli sets and not others. Given this reality, human sexuality is not well captured by a single sexual spectrum. Moreover, contextualizing sexuality as a contrast between these communities and a societal “default” can obscure otherwise-glaring data points. Because we contrast “default” female sexuality against “other” groups, such as the gay community and the BDSM community, it is natural to assume that a “typical” woman is most likely to be very turned on by the sight of male genitalia or the naked male form and that she will be generally disinterested in dominance displays (because being gay and/or into BDSM would be considered atypical, a typical woman must be defined as the opposite of these “other,” atypical groups). Our data shows this is simply not the case. The average female is more likely to be very turned on by seeing a person act dominant in a sexual context than she is to be aroused by either male genitalia or the naked male form. The average woman is not defined by male-focused sexual attraction, but rather dominance-focused sexual attraction. This is one of those things that would have been blindingly obvious to anyone who ran a simple survey of arousal pathways in the general American population, but has been overlooked because society has come to define “default” sexuality not by what actually turns people on, but rather in contrast to that which groups historically thought of as “other.

In this moment, however you are searching, stop. Whether you are searching for peace and happiness in a relationship, in a better job, or even in world peace, just for one moment stop absolutely. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits, but if you are engaging in them to get peace or to get happiness, you are overlooking the ground of peace that is already here. Once you discover this ground of peace, then whatever pursuits you engage in will be informed by your discovery. Then you will naturally bring what you have discovered to the world, to politics, to all your relationships. This discovery has infinite, complex ramifications, but the essence of it is very simple. If you will stop all activity, just for one instant, even for one-tenth of a second, and simply be utterly still, you will recognize the inherent spaciousness of your being that is already happy and at peace with itself. Because of our conditioning, we normally dismiss this ground of peace with an immediate, “Yes, but what about my life? I have responsibilities. I need to keep busy. The absolute doesn’t relate to my world, my existence.” These conditioned thoughts just reinforce further conditioning. But if you will take a moment to recognize the peace that is already alive within you, you then actually have the choice to trust it in all your endeavors, in all your relationships, in every circumstance of your life. It doesn’t mean that your life will be swept clean of conflicts, challenges, pain, or suffering. It means that you will have recognized a sanctuary where the truth of yourself is present, where the truth of God is present, regardless of the physical, mental, or emotional circumstances of your life.

Religion and science, for example, are often thought to be opponents, but as I have shown, the insights of ancient religions and of modern science are both needed to reach a full understanding of human nature and the conditions of human satisfaction. The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists. Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference.

We're shameless in overlooking our own faults, but graceless in letting go another's.

It’s natural to overlook and even sacrifice the things that belong to us most easily, most gracefully. So here’s me asking you to please not make that mistake.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices (pursuing a creative career instead of making money; breastfeeding over formula; not having children in an overpopulated world) as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish and wrong. So it's easy to overlook that it all arises out of insecurity.

It occurred to him that he didn’t care much for these hedge animals. It had always seemed slightly perverted to him to clip and torture a plain old hedge into something that it wasn’t. Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong. It was grotesque.

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

It’s almost impossible not to fall in love with Robert even when he’s acting like the devil incarnate, never mind when he’s being all tender and affectionate. A lesson for life: Beauty often causes people to overlook deeper flaws.

Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because the one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting in an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual fruits but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. - But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

EAMES: Word is, you're not welcome in these parts. COBB: Yeah? EAMES: There's a price on your head from Cobol Engineering. Pretty big one, actually. COBB: You wouldn't sell me out. Eames looks at Cobb, offended. EAMES: 'Course I would. COBB: (smiles) Not when you hear what I'm selling. A ramshackle balcony overlooking a busy street. Eames pours. COBB: Inception. Eames' glass stops halfway to his mouth. COBB: Don't bother telling me it's impossible. EAMES: It's perfectly possible. Just bloody difficult. COBB: That's what I keep saying to Arthur. EAMES: Arthur? You're still working with that stick-in-the-mud? COBB: He's a good point man. EAMES: The best. But he has no imagination. If you're going to perform inception, you need imagination. COBB: You've done it before? EAMES: Yes and no. We tried it. Got the idea in place, but it didn't take. COBB: You didn't plant it deep enough? EAMES: It's not just about depth. You need the simplest version of the idea-the one that will grow naturally in the subject's mind. Subtle art.

It’s a funny thing about a good porch overlooking the ocean. It was great in hot weather when you needed shade. It was good when it rained to be close to nature but stay dry and safe. It was soothing in the dark, or it could be a place to whisper secrets late at night. So

Stannard believes that by the end of the 16th century, the Spanish had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Even if one were to discount the millions of deaths resulting from diseases, this would still make the Spanish conquest of the New World the greatest act of genocide in recorded history. These types of numbers, which are subject to considerable academic debate, are often overlooked during Columbus Day parades and related festivities.

The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human nature. They filled with glory their respective stations, either in active or contemplative life; their excellent understandings were improved by study; philosophy had purified their minds from the prejudices of the popular superstition; and their days were spent in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue. Yet all these sages (it is no less an object of surprise than of concern) overlooked or rejected the perfection of the Christian system. Their language or their silence equally discover their contempt for the growing sect which in their time had diffused itself over the Roman empire. Those among them who condescend to mention the Christians consider them only as obstinate and perverse enthusiasts, who exacted an implicit submission to their mysterious doctrines, without being able to produce a single argument that could engage the attention of men of sense and learning.

The food chain is an aspect of nature. Survival of the fittest is also a natural law. Yet it is easy to take these facts and assume that they apply to every social function and all other aspects of life. Social demands for disrespect are numerous: "buy a bigger car", "have sex with more women", "show no respect for other people", "drive like a complete jerk", etc., etc. Unfortunately, this is overlooked by quite a lot of those who've witnessed and been awestruck by real power. The demands of the noble are: "respect yourself", "be what you are", "don't conform

As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection.

If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight. You might miss the water.

this consciousness I’m describing is gendered (and I think it is), it is clearly feminine. The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness. So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful—perhaps the most powerful—side of God.

Simply being in the presence of natural landscapes tends to reduce stress and promote relaxation. Such experiences lower mental fatigue and boost mental clarity while enhancing both work performance and healing. One early study found that surgery patients recovered faster and required less pain medication if their hospital room had a window overlooking a natural setting. Another found similar effects in a prison population: prisoners with windows facing out toward rolling farmland and trees had 24 percent fewer sick call visits than their counterparts with views of an empty interior courtyard.

Nature has the upper hand. For the individual, his is known as death. The Faustian dream of progress without limits in a material world magically responsive to our touch overlooks "the priority of external nature". Today, this is known not as the Faustian dream but the American one. It is a vision which secretly detests the material because it blocks our path to the infinite. This is why the material world has either to be vanquished by force or dissolved into culture. Postmodernism and the pioneer spirit are sides of the same coin. Neither can accept that it is our limits that make us what we are, quite as much as that perpetual transgression of them we know as human history.

Thus the electromagnetic information entering our eyes at each image point is infinite-dimensional twice over, because for each spectral color there are two possible polarizations, each of which can occur with an independent strength. Human vision overlooks that doubling because human eyes cannot distinguish between different polarizations of light.

The small mound I have mentioned a while ago was once occupied by the Phenician city of Laish. A party of filibusters from Zorah and Eschol captured the place, and lived there in a free and easy way, worshiping gods of their own manufacture and stealing idols from their neighbors whenever they wore their own out. Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to fascinate his people and keep them from making dangerous trips to Jerusalem to worship, which might result in a return to their rightful allegiance. With all respect for those ancient Israelites, I can not overlook the fact that they were not always virtuous enough to withstand the seductions of a golden calf. Human nature has not changed much since then.

Eli did not manage his household according to God’s rules for family government. He followed his own judgment. The fond father overlooked the faults and sins of his sons in their childhood, flattering himself that after a time they would outgrow their evil tendencies. Many are now making a similar mistake. They think they know a better way of training their children than that which God has given in his word. They foster wrong tendencies in them, urging as an excuse, “They are too young to be punished. Wait till they become older, and can be reasoned with.” Thus wrong habits are left to strengthen until they become [579] second nature. The children grow up without restraint, with traits of character that are a lifelong curse to them and are liable to be reproduced in others.

For some natures learn with greater difficulty and after greater delay than others, that the real importances of our existence are the nothingnesses of every-day life, the nothingnesses which the philosopher in his study, reasoning about and analyzing human character, is apt to overlook; but which, nevertheless, make him and everyone else more of a human reality and less of an abstraction.

In Darwin's work, time moves at two speeds: there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve; and then there is the gnat's-breath, hummingbird-heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us...The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin's implicit subject. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other - a prelude or a porlogue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn't. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows. The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly - not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either.

Wallingford vaulted up from his chair. “You’ve come here so that I can mollify you and share in your belittling of Anais? Well, you’ve knocked on the wrong bloody door, Raeburn, because I will not join you in disparaging Anais. I will not! Not when I know what sort of woman she is—she is better than either of us deserves. Damn you, I know what she means to you. I know how you’ve suffered. You want her and you’re going to let a mistake ruin what you told me only months ago you would die for. Ask yourself if it is worth it. Is your pride worth all the pain you will make your heart suffer through? Christ,” Wallingford growled, “if I had a woman who was willing to overlook everything I’d done in my life, every wrong deed I had done to her or others, I would be choking back my pride so damn fast I wouldn’t even taste it.” Lindsay glared at Wallingford, galled by the fact his friend— the one person on earth he believed would understand his feelings—kept chastising him for his anger, which, he believed, was natural and just. “If I had someone like Anais in my life,” Wallingford continued, blithely ignoring Lindsay’s glares, “I would ride back to Bewdley with my tail between my legs and I would do whatever I had to do in order to get her back.” “You’re a goddamned liar! You’ve never been anything but a selfish prick!” Lindsay thundered. “What woman would you deign to lower yourself in front of? What woman could you imagine doing anything more to than fucking?” Wallingford’s right eye twitched and Lindsay wondered if his friend would plant his large fist into his face. He was mad enough for it, Lindsay realized, but so, too, was he. He was mad, angry—all but consumed with rage, but the bluster went out of him when Wallingford spoke. “I’ve never bothered to get to know the women I’ve been with. Perhaps if I had, I would have found one I could have loved—one I could have allowed myself to be open with. But out of the scores of women I’ve pleasured, I’ve only ever been the notorious, unfeeling and callous libertine—that is my shame.Your shame is finding that woman who would love you no matter what and letting her slip through your fingers because she is not the woman your mind made her out to be. You have found something most men only dream of. Things that I have dreamed of and coveted for myself. The angel is dead. It is time to embrace the sinner, for if you do not, I shall expect to see you in hell with me. And let me inform you, it’s a burning, lonely place that once it has its hold on you, will never let you go. Think twice before you allow pride to rule your heart.” “What do you know about love and souls?” Lindsay growled as he stalked to the study door. “I know that a soul is something I don’t have, and love,” Wallingford said softly before he downed the contents of his brandy, “love is like ghosts, something that everyone talks of but few have seen. You are one of the few who have seen it and sometimes I hate you for it. If I were you, I’d think twice about throwing something like that away, but of course, I’m a selfish prick and do as I damn well please.” “You do indeed.” Wallingford’s only response was to raise his crystal glass in a mock salute.“To hell,” he muttered,“make certain you bring your pride. It is the only thing that makes the monotony bearable.

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident- but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitue the future political constituency, and their attention or vote- whicich is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experiance than rational deciscion making- is not guaranteed.

Two blind men waited at the end of an era, contemplating beauty. They sat atop the world’s highest cliff, overlooking the land and seeing nothing.’ ‘Huh?’ She looked to him. ‘“Can beauty be taken from a man?” the first asked the second. ‘“It was taken from me,” the second replied. “For I cannot remember it.” This man was blinded in a childhood accident. “I pray to the God Beyond each night to restore my sight, so that I may find beauty again.” ‘“Is beauty something one must see, then?” the first asked. ‘“Of course. That is its nature. How can you appreciate a work of art without seeing it?” ‘“I can hear a work of music,” the first said. ‘“Very well, you can hear some kinds of beauty – but you cannot know full beauty without sight. You can know only a small portion of beauty.” ‘“A sculpture,” the first said. “Can I not feel its curves and slopes, the touch of the chisel that transformed common rock into uncommon wonder?” ‘“I suppose,” said the second, “that you can know the beauty of a sculpture.” ‘“And what of the beauty of food? Is it not a work of art when a chef crafts a masterpiece to delight the tastes?” ‘“I suppose,” said the second, “that you can know the beauty of a chef’s art.” ‘“And what of the beauty of a woman,” the first said. “Can I not know her beauty in the softness of her caress, the kindness of her voice, the keenness of her mind as she reads philosophy to me? Can I not know this beauty? Can I not know most kinds of beauty, even without my eyes?” ‘“Very well,” said the second. “But what if your ears were removed, your hearing taken away? Your tongue taken out, your mouth forced shut, your sense of smell destroyed? What if your skin were burned so that you could no longer feel? What if all that remained to you was pain? You could not know beauty then. It can be taken from a man.

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

In estimating what amount of power would be requisite to secure the objects of government, we must take into the reckoning, what would be necessary to defend the community against external, as well as internal dangers. Government must be able to repel assaults from abroad, as well as to repress violence and disorders within. It must not be overlooked, that the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. The limited reason and faculties of man, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse, with various other causes, have, by their operation, formed a great many separate communities, acting independently of each other. Between these there is the same tendency to conflict—and from the same constitution of our nature—as between men individually; and even stronger—because the sympathetic or social feelings are not so strong between different communities, as between individuals of the same community.

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest. At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public’s side—that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies. Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that the state enjoys a monopoly on coercive force. For example, Edward Snowden was reported to have said that tech companies do not “put warheads on foreheads.” This view downplays the fact that powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and that they enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations. The movement to abolish privacy is twin-horned. Privacy advocates who focus exclusively on one of those horns will find themselves gored on the other.

Since the Goddess has not been an integral part of Western life for the past two thousand years, we as her children are rather maladjusted. The Goddess, or Divine mother, would lead us in the way of natural law, wisdom and unconditional love; however, we don't pay enough attention to this aspect of God. That may be because of old beliefs that the Goddess is pagan and heathen. This is most unfortunate because we then overlook her beneficial, life-enhancing and regenerative powers and her offer of renewal.

The three thousand miles in distance he put between himself and Emma tonight is nothing compared with the enormous chasm separating them when they sit next to each other in calculus. Emma's ability to overlook his existence is a gift-but not one that Poseidon handed down. Rachel insists this gift is uniquely a female trait, regardless of the species. Since their breakup, Emma seems to be the only female utilizing this particular gift. Even Rayna could learn a few lessons from Emma in the art of torturing a smitten male. Smitten? More like fanatical. He shakes his head in disgust. Why couldn't I just sift when I turned of age? Why couldn't I find a suitable mild-tempered female to mate with? Live a peaceful life, produce offspring, grow old, and watch my own fingerlings have fingerlings someday? He searches through his mind for someone he might have missed in the past. For a face he overlooked before but could now look forward to every day. For a docile female who would be honored to mate with a Triton prince-instead of a temperamental siren who mocks his title at every opportunity. He scours his memory for a sweet-natured Syrena who would take care of him, who would do whatever he asked, who would never argue with him. Not some human-raised snippet who stomps her foot when she doesn't get her way, listens to him only when it suits some secret purpose she has, or shoves a handful of chocolate mints down his throat if he lets his guard down. Not some white-haired angelfish whose eyes melt him into a puddle, whose blush is more beautiful than sunrise, and whose lips send heat ripping through him like a mine explosion. He sighs as Emma's face eclipses hundreds of mate-worthy Syrena. That's just one more quality I'll have to add to the list: someone who won't mind being second best. His just locks as he catches a glimpse of his shadow beneath him, cast by slithers of sterling moonlight. Since it's close to three a.m. here, he's comfortable walking around without the inconvenience of clothes, but sitting on the rocky shore in the raw is less than appealing. And it doesn't matter which Jersey shore he sits on, he can't escape the moon that connects them both-and reminds him of Emma's hair. Hovering in the shallows, he stares up at it in resentment, knowing the moon reminds him of something else he can' escape-his conscience. If only he could shirk his responsibilities, his loyalty to his family, his loyalty to his people. If only he could change everything about himself, he could steal Emma away and never look back-that is, if she'll ever talk to him again.

The gray witch follows the beat of her own drum; she’s fiercely independent, the true essence of the wild-woman, untamable, awe-inspiring, and an awesome sight to behold. The gray witch is not a creature to be toyed with. But there’s also another side to this witch, one that’s often overlooked in the great debate of black and white – the gray witch is kind, loyal, loving, and gentle. She is blessed with a connection to nature and the Old Ways that comes from a much deeper place than the modern witchcraft of today. This is the Gray Witch.

Hume had shown that we naively read causality into this world and think that we grasp necessary succession in intuition. The same is true of everything that makes the body of the everyday surrounding world into an identical thing with identical properties, relations, etc. (and Hume had in fact worked this out in detail in the Treatise, which was unknown to Kant). Data and complexes of data come and go, but the thing, presumed to be simply experienced sensibly, is not something sensible which persists through this alteration. The sensationalist thus declares it to be a fiction. He is substituting, we shall say, mere sense-data for perception, which after all places things (everyday things) before our eyes. In other words, he overlooks the fact that mere sensibility, related to mere data of sense, cannot account for objects of experience. Thus he overlooks the fact that these objects of experience point to a hidden mental accomplishment and to the problem of what kind of an accomplishment this can be. From the very start, after all, it must be a kind which enables the objects of pre-scientific experience, through logic, mathematics, mathematical natural science, to be knowable with objective validity, i.e., with a necessity which can be accepted by and is binding for everyone.

If there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure that the ability to avoid it was within you. If it doesn’t harm your character, how can it harm your life? Nature would not have overlooked such dangers through failing to recognize them, or because it saw them but was powerless to prevent or correct them. Nor would it ever, through inability or incompetence, make such a mistake as to let good and bad things happen indiscriminately to good and bad alike. But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.

...Identity arises spontaneously out of our bodies and minds, and spontaneously evolves in name, meaning, structure, and appearance. All of these spontaneously arising things are not fixed and isolated... If I am subsumed by blackness, speaking and acting out from some idea of it, I am apt to overlook the completely mysterious unfolding of this dark flowering body... When I see my embodiment as nothing more than nature, nothing more than a flower, nothing to be annihilated, the experience of my life as interrelated allows tenderness to well up, despite the impositions of hatred, whether from without or within. Others may be unable to see me or those that look like me as flowers, but this does not make it any less so.

When it comes to people we admire, it is in our nature to be selective with information, to load with personal associations, to elevate and make heroic. That is especially true after their deaths, especially if those deaths have been in any way untimely and/or shocking. It is hard to hold onto the real people, the true story. When we think of the Clash, we tend to forget or overlook the embarrassing moments, the mistakes, the musical filler, the petty squabbles, the squalid escapades, the unfulfilled promises. Instead, we take only selected highlights from the archive-the best songs, the most flatteringly-posed photographs, the most passionate live footage, the most stirring video clips, the sexiest slogans, the snappiest soundbites, the warmest personal memories-and from them we construct a near-perfect rock 'n' roll band, a Hollywood version of the real thing. The Clash have provided us with not just a soundtrack, but also a stock of images from which to create a movie we can run in our own heads. The exact content of the movie might differ from person to person and country to country, but certain key elements will remain much the same; and it is those elements that will make up the Essential Clash of folk memory. This book might have set out to take the movie apart scene by scene to analyse how it was put together; but this book also believes the movie is a masterpiece, and has no intention of spoiling the ending. It's time to freeze the frame. At the very moment they step out of history and into legend: the Last Gang In Town.

Mark well what I say. Do not overlook this, though all the rest be forgotten. I do not say that the statesman must throw up his office, and the rich man forsake his property. Let no one fancy that I mean this. But I say, if a man would be saved, whatever be his rank in life, he must be prepared for tribulation. He must make up his mind to choose much which seems evil, and to give up and refuse much which seems good. I dare say this sounds strange language to some who read these pages. I know well you may have a certain form of religion, and find no trouble in your way. There is a common, worldly kind of Christianity in this day, which many have, and think they have enough--a cheap Christianity which offends nobody, and is worth nothing. I am not speaking of religion of this kind.

It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling in favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an argument overlooks the fact that 'emancipation,' the 'woman question,' 'women's rights movements,' are no new things in history, but have always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. It also largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the mental development of women, especially at the present time. Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present time it is not the true woman who clamours for emancipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who misconstrues her own character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman. As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it has been with the contemporary woman's movement. Its originators were convinced that it was being put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had never been thought of before. They maintained that women had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in darkness by man, and that it was high time for her to assert herself and claim her natural rights. But the prototype of this movement, as of other movements, occurred in the earliest times. Ancient history and medieval times alike give us instances of women who, in social relations and intellectual matters, fought for such emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the female sex. It is totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have had no opportunity for the undisturbed development of their mental powers.

It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature; especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind. I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with the men on night patrol, a mediaeval anchorite would have probably regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy. There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood, but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a moment with a candle flame.

Accordingly, we imagine ourselves to be innocuous, reasonable, and humane. We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious. One can regard one’s stomach or heart as unimportant and worthy of contempt, but that does not prevent overeating or overexertion from having consequences that affect the whole man. Yet we think that psychic mistakes and their consequences can be got rid of with mere words, for ‘psychic’ means less than air to most people. All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of world-wide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity. The technical means necessary for this are present on both sides. And certain conscious deliberations, uncontrolled by any inner opponent, can be put into effect all too easily, as we have seen already from the example of one 'Leader.’ The consciousness of modern man still clings so much to external objects that he makes them exclusively responsible, as if it were on them that the decision depended

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. ‘It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism.24 Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience. Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors. Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.

The Toyota Production System unlocked employees’ capacity to suggest innovations by giving them more control. The Disney system does something different. It forces people to use their own emotions to write dialogue for cartoon characters, to infuse real feelings into situations that, by definition, are unreal and fantastical. This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

As a criticism of philosophies and general conclusions based on physics, one could point to the exclusivity accorded to mathematical logic as if this were the only form of logic. What is mathematically satisfactory is considered to be true even if it violates the principles of intelligence and the logic connected with the imaginative faculty. But there is no reason whatsoever to limit all the intellectual faculties to mathematical logic and overlook the demands of the rest. So much of modern philosophy that relies on physics, and so many generalizations within physics itself, are based on this unconscious mathematicism which Cartesian philosophy bestowed upon mathematical physics, and which has become accentuated in contemporary science. In the domains of both micro- and astrophysics direct contact with objective reality has been removed, leaving only an abstract mathematical model as the means of analysing the structure of matter.

warm little pond” where Darwin supposed life began to the bubbling sea vents that are now the most popular candidates for life’s beginnings—but all this overlooks the fact that to turn monomers into polymers (which is to say, to begin to create proteins) involves what is known to biology as “dehydration linkages.” As one leading biology text puts it, with perhaps just a tiny hint of discomfort, “Researchers agree that such reactions would not have been energetically favorable in the primitive sea, or indeed in any aqueous medium, because of the mass action law.” It is a little like putting sugar in a glass of water and having it become a cube. It shouldn’t happen, but somehow in nature it does. The actual chemistry of all this is a little arcane for our purposes here, but it is enough to know that if you make monomers wet they don’t turn into polymers—except when creating life on Earth. How and why it happens then and not otherwise is one of biology’s great unanswered questions.

According to those who write on this virtue, the meek live in a noble quietude of mind, and are not easily perturbed. They are sober and temperate, control their anger, are not impetuous but very placid; they are gentle and never speak bitterly; courteous and not rough-mannered. They are good-hearted, not malicious, suspect no harm, always return good for evil, are healthy and un-corrupted, for those who are by nature meek are naturally healthy, not only, in soul but even in body. They are neither provoked nor do they provoke others to evil; they do not hinder people nor are they hindered: they bear no grudges and are generally self-possessed: are not readily annoyed and usually give place to evil. They overlook many offences; are easily corrected; do not resist though they are struck and wounded; are neither cruel nor melancholy but always cheerful;[175] they are extremely docile and sincere, simple and thoroughly straightforward: their face is open and they are full of kindness and patience.

First, it must be admitted that certain forms of behaviour may be described as more ‘natural’ than other forms; for instance, going naked or eating only raw food; and some people think that this in itself justifies the choice of these forms. But in this sense it certainly is not natural to interest oneself in art, or science, or even in arguments in favour of naturalism. The choice of conformity with ‘nature’ as a supreme standard leads ultimately to consequences which few will be prepared to face; it does not lead to a more natural form of civilization, but to beastliness14. The second criticism is more important. The biological naturalist assumes that he can derive his norms from the natural laws which determine the conditions of health, etc., if he does not naïvely believe that we need adopt no norms whatever but simply live according to the ‘laws of nature’. He overlooks the fact that he makes a choice, a decision; that it is possible that some other people cherish certain things more than their health (for instance, the many who have consciously risked their lives for medical research). And he is therefore mistaken if he believes that he has not made a decision, or that he has derived his norms from biological laws.

The BFMSS [British False Memory Syndrome Society] The founder of the 'false memory' movement in Britain is an accused father. Two of his adult daughters say that Roger Scotford sexually abused them in childhood. He denied this and responded by launching a spectacular counter-attack, which enjoyed apparently unlimited and uncritical air time in the mass media and provoke Establishment institutions that had made no public utterance about abuse to pronounce on the accused adults' repudiation of it. p171-172 The 'British False Memory Syndrome Society' lent a scientific aura to the allegations - the alchemy of 'falsehood' and 'memory' stirred with disease and science. The new name pathologised the accusers and drew attention away from the accused. But the so-called syndrome attacked not only the source of the stories but also the alliances between the survivors' movement and practitioners in the health, welfare, and the criminal justice system. The allies were represented no longer as credulous dupes but as malevolent agents who imported a miasma of the 'false memories' into the imaginations of distressed victims. Roger Scotford was a former naval officer turned successful property developer living in a Georgian house overlooking an uninterrupted valley in luscious middle England. He was a rich man and was able to give up everything to devote himself to the crusade. He says his family life was normal and that he had been a 'Dr Spock father'. But his first wife disagrees and his second wife, although believing him innocent, describes his children's childhood as very difficult. His daughters say they had a significantly unhappy childhood. In the autumn of 1991, his middle daughter invited him to her home to confront him with the story of her childhood. She was supported by a friend and he was invited to listen and then leave. She told him that he had abused her throughout her youth. Scotford, however, said that the daughter went to a homeopath for treatment for thrush/candida and then blamed the condition on him. He also said his daughter, who was in her twenties, had been upset during a recent trip to France to buy a property. He said he booked them into a hotel where they would share a room. This was not odd, he insisted, 'to me it was quite natural'. He told journalists and scholars the same story, in the same way, reciting the details of her allegations, drawing attention to her body and the details of what she said he had done to her. Some seemed to find the detail persuasive. Several found it spooky. p172-173

It has been said, in a tone of reproach, that Machiavelli makes no attempt *to persuade'. Certainly he was no prophet. For he was concerned first of all with truth, not with persuasion, which is one reason why his prose is great prose, not only of Italian but a model of style for any language. He is a partial Aristotle of politics. But he is partial not because his vision is distorted or his judgment biased, or because of any lack of moral interest, but because of his sole passion for the unity, peace, and prosperity of his country. What makes him a great writer, and for ever a solitary figure, is the purity and single-mindedness of his passion. No one was ever less Machiavellian' than Machiavelli. Only the pure in heart can blow the gaff on human nature as Machiavelli has done. The cynic can never do it; for the cynic is always impure and sentimental. But it is easy to understand why Machiavelli was not himself a successful politician. For one thing, he had no capacity for self-deception or self-dramatization. The recipe dors ton sommeil de brute is applied in many forms, of which Calvin and Rousseau give two variations; but the utility of Machiavelli is his perpetual summons to examination of the weakness and impurity of the soul. We are not likely to forget his political lessons, but his examination of conscience may be too easily overlooked.

Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and “uneconomic.” From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential difference between nonrenewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does… As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.

It is one of the great beauties of our system, that a working-man may raise himself into the power and position of a master by his own exertions and behaviour; that, in fact, every one who rules himself to decency and sobriety of conduct, and attention to his duties, comes over to our ranks; it may not be always as a master, but as an over-looker, a cashier, a book-keeper, a clerk, one on the side of authority and order.' 'You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world, from whatever cause, as your enemies, then, if I under-stand you rightly,' said Margaret' in a clear, cold voice. 'As their own enemies, certainly,' said he, quickly, not a little piqued by the haughty disapproval her form of expression and tone of speaking implied. But, in a moment, his straightforward honesty made him feel that his words were but a poor and quibbling answer to what she had said; and, be she as scornful as she liked, it was a duty he owed to himself to explain, as truly as he could, what he did mean. Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning. He could best have illustrated what he wanted to say by telling them something of his own life; but was it not too personal a subject to speak about to strangers? Still, it was the simple straightforward way of explaining his meaning; so, putting aside the touch of shyness that brought a momentary flush of colour into his dark cheek, he said: 'I am not speaking without book. Sixteen years ago, my father died under very miserable circumstances. I was taken from school, and had to become a man (as well as I could) in a few days. I had such a mother as few are blest with; a woman of strong power, and firm resolve. We went into a small country town, where living was cheaper than in Milton, and where I got employment in a draper's shop (a capital place, by the way, for obtaining a knowledge of goods). Week by week our income came to fifteen shillings, out of which three people had to be kept. My mother managed so that I put by three out of these fifteen shillings regularly. This made the beginning; this taught me self-denial. Now that I am able to afford my mother such comforts as her age, rather than her own wish, requires, I thank her silently on each occasion for the early training she gave me. Now when I feel that in my own case it is no good luck, nor merit, nor talent,—but simply the habits of life which taught me to despise indulgences not thoroughly earned,—indeed, never to think twice about them,—I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenances of the people of Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.

Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors. Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.

Also bearing witness to the unbearable nature of the vulnerability experienced by peer-oriented kids is the preponderance of vulnerability-quelling drugs. Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle. Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers. And, in another way, they help young people escape from the benumbed state imposed by their defensive emotional detachment. With the shutdown of emotions come boredom and alienation. Drugs provide an artificial stimulation to the emotionally jaded. They heighten sensation and provide a false sense of engagement without incurring the risks of genuine openness. In fact, the same drug can play seemingly opposite functions in an individual. Alcohol and marijuana, for example, can numb or, on the other hand, free the brain and mind from social inhibitions. Other drugs are stimulants — cocaine, amphetamines, and ecstasy; the very name of the latter speaks volumes about exactly what is missing in the psychic life of our emotionally incapacitated young people. The psychological function served by these drugs is often overlooked by well-meaning adults who perceive the problem to be coming from outside the individual, through peer pressure and youth culture mores. It is not just a matter of getting our children to say no. The problem lies much deeper. As long as we do not confront and reverse peer orientation among our children, we are creating an insatiable appetite for these drugs. The affinity for vulnerability-reducing drugs originates from deep within the defended soul. Our children's emotional safety can come only from us: then they will not be driven to escape their feelings and to rely on the anesthetic effects of drugs. Their need to feel alive and excited can and should arise from within themselves, from their own innately limitless capacity to be engaged with the universe. This brings us back to the essential hierarchical nature of attachment. The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her. Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don't need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don't need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably. But why should we want our children to remain open to their own vulnerability? What is amiss when detachment freezes the emotions in order to protect the child?

Yet a much more fundamentally political dimension of the socially constructed nature of capital - nothing less than the specification of a parallel universe with its own natural laws and rules for the physical existence and subsistence of financial capital and its interaction with the other factors of production - has also often been overlooked in contemporary academic literature. Under the current monetary arrangements financial capital is a peculiar creature indeed. Money can be created ex nihilo at the stroke of a pen - or a keyboard - by a specific type of legal person entrusted with the task, not other legal or natural person. With the socially constructed ability to attract compound interest in a world where physical assets rot and break, it does not share the same physical reality with the mere mortal factors of production: even in cases where productive investments which enable the payment of interest in real terms can be identified, the compounding of interest on financial capital is not temporally limited to the period that the relevant physical assets can continue to produce exponential returns in real terms. Rather than representing accumulated wealth that could be "saved" to finance investment, the bulk of money disappears as soon as other factors of production are not willing to pay a tribute to induce its continuing circulation in the form of interest payments. In addition to the inherently political nature of specifications of money have been detached from virtually any substantive connection to the rules or the realities experienced by other factors of production in the physical world that is nonetheless supposed to achieve economic efficiency and a host of other objectives through monetary calculation and monetarily mediated social relationships deserves particular scrutiny.

A very different threat to human progress is a political movement that seeks to undermine its Enlightenment foundations. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of a counter-Enlightenment movement called populism, more accurately, authoritarian populism. Populism calls for the direct sovereignty of a country’s “people” (usually an ethnic group, sometimes a class), embodied in a strong leader who directly channels their authentic virtue and experience. Authoritarian populism can be seen as a pushback of elements of human nature—tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, zero-sum thinking—against the Enlightenment institutions that were designed to circumvent them. By focusing on the tribe rather than the individual, it has no place for the protection of minority rights or the promotion of human welfare worldwide. By failing to acknowledge that hard-won knowledge is the key to societal improvement, it denigrates “elites” and “experts” and downplays the marketplace of ideas, including freedom of speech, diversity of opinion, and the fact-checking of self-serving claims. By valorizing a strong leader, populism overlooks the limitations in human nature, and disdains the rule-governed institutions and constitutional checks that constrain the power of flawed human actors. Populism comes in left-wing and right-wing varieties, which share a folk theory of economics as zero-sum competition: between economic classes in the case of the left, between nations or ethnic groups in the case of the right. Problems are seen not as challenges that are inevitable in an indifferent universe but as the malevolent designs of insidious elites, minorities, or foreigners. As for progress, forget about it: populism looks backward to an age in which the nation was ethnically homogeneous, orthodox cultural and religious values prevailed, and economies were powered by farming and manufacturing, which produced tangible goods for local consumption and for export.

Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.” A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing. “Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!” A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name. “Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide. “If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly. Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do? “But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.” Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

The German and Russian state apparatuses grew out of despotism. For this reason the subservient nature of the human character of masses of people in Germany and in Russia was exceptionally pronounced. Thus, in both cases, the revolution led to a new despotism with the certainty of irrational logic. In contrast to the German and Russia state apparatuses, the American state apparatus was formed by groups of people who had evaded European and Asian despotism by fleeing to a virgin territory free of immediate and effective traditions. Only in this way can it be understood that, until the time of this writing, a totalitarian state apparatus was not able to develop in America, whereas in Europe every overthrow of the government carried out under the slogan of freedom inevitably led to despotism. This holds true for Robespierre, as well as for Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. If we want to appraise the facts impartially, then we have to point out, whether we want to or not, and whether we like it or not, that Europe's dictators, who based their power on vast millions of people, always stemmed from the suppressed classes. I do not hesitate to assert that this fact, as tragic as it is, harbors more material for social research than the facts related to the despotism of a czar or of a Kaiser Wilhelm. By comparison, the latter facts are easily understood. The founders of the American Revolution had to build their democracy from scratch on foreign soil. The men who accomplished this task had all been rebels against English despotism. The Russian Revolutionaries, on the other had, were forced to take over an already existing and very rigid government apparatus. Whereas the Americans were able to start from scratch, the Russians, as much as they fought against it, had to drag along the old. This may also account for the fact that the Americans, the memory of their own flight from despotism still fresh in their minds, assumed an entirely different—more open and more accessible—attitude toward the new refugees of 1940, than Soviet Russia, which closed its doors to them. This may explain why the attempt to preserve the old democratic ideal and the effort to develop genuine self-administration was much more forceful in the United States than anywhere else. We do not overlook the many failures and retardations caused by tradition, but in any event a revival of genuine democratic efforts took place in America and not in Russia. It can only be hoped that American democracy will thoroughly realize, and this before it is too late, that fascism is not confined to any one nation or any one party; and it is to be hoped that it will succeed in overcoming the tendency toward dictatorial forms in the people themselves. Only time will tell whether the Americans will be able to resist the compulsion of irrationality or whether they will succumb to it.