Uninformed Quotes

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything.

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.

You made me feel less alone; you made me feel not quite so deformed, uninformed and hunchbacked.

I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

New Rule: Stop asking Miss USA contestants if they believe in evolution. It’s not their field. It’s like asking Stephen Hawking if he believes in hair scrunchies. Here’s what they know about: spray tans, fake boobs and baton twirling. Here’s what they don’t know about: everything else. If I cared about the uninformed opinions of some ditsy beauty queen, I’d join the Tea Party.

The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.

When we know what we are trying to achieve, we are less likely to be swayed by uninformed opinions and more inclined to make principled and ethical decisions.

Name me no names for my disease, With uninforming breath; I tell you I am none of these, But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known, For brooks that I had crossed, ...Before I met this flesh and bone And followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last, Yet name no name of ills. Say only, "Here is where he passed, Seeking again those hills.

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

Only the insane equate pain with success." "The uninformed must improve their deficit, or die." _Cheshire Cat

I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

The idea of celibate vampires is ridiculous. To me, vampires are sex. I don't get a vampire story about abstinence. I don't care about high school students. I find them irritating and uninformed.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

…her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

The bigger the lie, apparently, the more likely the uninformed were to accept it, simply because they couldn't believe any government would tell such an absurd story unless it were true.

The advertising industry's prime task is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices, thus undermining market theories that are based on just the opposite.

Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.

When the uninformed argue with the misinformed, there is no need to choose a side.

Throw in “never read books” and you have the dictionary definition of a liberal. Being completely uninformed is precisely how most liberals stay liberal.

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.

There is a difference between criticizing people and criticizing a people's uninformed ideals. That is, unless one defines himself or others by their ideals, then he is offended, and usually offended secretly. Because oddly enough, this person is the same person quickest to resort to dismissive name-calling, such as 'bigot' or 'zealot'. And oddly enough, he is always the one, the 'open-minded' one, who adamantly protests for, not only himself, but others not to listen to any type of scholarly theological truth inherently for the sake of his own personal, moral beliefs.

Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??

Once you realize that the vast majority of people see and know very little, you will rarely be affected when someone speaks ill or well of you.

Many researchers have argued that the use of toxic positivity in healthcare is unethical and even dangerous. It leads to unfounded assertions of confidence, implies a lack of empathy for the patient, and can cause people to make uninformed decisions about their health.

Madame will forgive me for not perceiving her busyness. It is a sign of the highest breeding to be able to be busy whilst appearing idle to the uninformed observer.

The only difference between being uninformed and misinformed is that one is your choice and the other is theirs.

Why would I care about the tittle-tattle of the uninformed? Ignorant gossip.

It's the Yelp effect. Every halfwit who eats food suddenly thinks he's a food critic. And don't get me started on people “reviewing” books they didn't even read. Who needs information, when you can have an uninformed opinion?

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

The primary, the most urgent requirement is the promotion of education. It is inconceivable that any nation should achieve prosperity and success unless this paramount, this fundamental concern is carried forward. The principal reason for the decline and fall of peoples is ignorance. Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!

they will learn how much better it is, when one is uninformed, to put questions than to make assertions;

On the subject of Carrie White, we're all relatively uninformed.

Why would I care about the tittle-tattle of the uninformed?

If you try to make something just to fit your uninformed view of some hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and powerful and honest and true, you will succeed.

A simple creature unlettyrde. Julian of Norwich called herself. The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Echoed Jane Austen—four hundred years afterward.

Everything just feels so empty without her. She was more a parent to me than my birth parents were. She took me in, fed, dressed me, but most importantly, she treated me with respect. She taught me that my abilities were nothing to be ashamed of, nothing I should try so hard to deny. She convinced me that what I had was a gift-not a curse- and that I shouldn't let other people's narrow minds and fears determine how I love, what I do, or how I perceive myself in the world. She actually made me believe that in no way, shape, or form did their uninformed opinions make me a freak.

In addition to what has been already said of Catherine Morland's personal and mental endowments, when about to be launched into all the difficulties and dangers of a six weeks' residence in Bath, it may be stated, for the reader's more certain information, lest the following pages should otherwise fail of giving any idea of what her character is meant to be; that her heart was affectionate, her disposition cheerful and open, without conceit or affectation of any kind - her manners just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and, when in good looks, pretty - and her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is.

But no matter how closely I observed her, she seemed to be quite distant from me. Suddenly I realized that I was totally uninformed about the secrets of her heart, and that no relationship existed between the two of us. I wanted to say something, but I was afraid that her ears, accustomed to distant, soft and heavenly music might become hateful of my voice.

The enemy, however, is not the historically imagined enemy of brown or black youth, more often depicted as America's problem than as its promise. The enemy is not the nameless, faceless, yet ethnically imagined terrorist that we have been encouraged to fear in the post-9/11 environment. Rather, the greater enemy to American democracy is more likely to be an uninformed and uncritical American public that can be manipulated by soothing political slogans, feelgood photo ops, and an endless round of holiday sales.

Some Greek idiot believed the ring finger on the left hand had an artery that led straight to the heart. And they bought it. How such an intelligent species could be so uninformed about their own physiology for so much of their existence was beyond me. Humans scoffed at the idea of gods and turned their backs on us, leaving us all to die. Yet some ridiculous notion that wearing a chunk of metal on a certain finger bound two souls until death stuck. Figures.

If you have an opinion, and that opinion is weak, do not consider it wisdom. - Tiresias to Pentheus

Choosing beauty and love does not mean being uninformed or weak; it means you clearly see the ugliness, but choose love anyway.

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly uninformed why he ought to assume the expression.

[...] “It’s better to be uninformed than misinformed. I even doubt some of the pictures I see in the papers.

Soldiers handling reactor graphite by hand shows how uninformed people were in the early days of the clean-up operation.

To be great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling others; but to stand above the partialities and futilities of uninformed desire, and to rule one’s self.

Unfortunately, an uninformed public tends to confuse scholarship with magicianry, and love life seems to be that factor which requires the largest quantity of magical tinkering.

Misinformation is the side effect of being uninformed.

Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude.

Young love was often unrealistic. It was definitely uninformed.

The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.

The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion. Veteran reporter John Lawton, 68, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995

Political scientists followed up on Todorov’s initial research by identifying a category of voters for whom the automatic preferences of System 1 are particularly likely to play a large role. They found what they were looking for among politically uninformed voters who watch a great deal of television. As expected, the effect of facial competence on voting is about three times larger for information-poor and TV-prone voters than for others who are better informed and watch less television. Evidently,

Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts: 1)Artificial censorship 2)Limitations of social contact 3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs. 4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages 5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world 6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives

Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.

If you’ve ever taken an economics course you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. I don’t have to tell you, that’s not what’s done. If advertisers lived by market principles then some enterprise, say, General Motors, would put on a brief announcement of their products and their properties, along with comments by Consumer Reports magazine so you could make a judgment about it. That’s not what an ad for a car is—an ad for a car is a football hero, an actress, the car doing some crazy thing like going up a mountain or something. If you’ve ever turned on your television set, you know that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to try to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices—that’s what advertising is.

Along with the concept of American Dream runs the notion that every man and woman is entitled to an opinion and to one vote, no matter how ridiculous that opinion might be or how uninformed the vote. It could be that the Borderer Presbyterian tradition of "stand up and say your rightful piece" contributed to the American notion that our gut-level but uninformed opinions are some sort of unvarnished foundational political truths. I have been told that this is because we redneck working-class Scots Irish suffer from what psychiatrists call "no insight".Consequently, we will never agree with anyone outside our zone of ignorance because our belligerent Borderer pride insists on the right to be dangerously wrong about everything while telling those who are more educated to "bite my ass!

Knowledge is strength. Ignorance is the kiss of death.

We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed,” passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.

Empathy in BDSM presents a wonderful paradox: as tops in role, we are often called upon to present ourselves as cold, cruel and unfeeling, when in fact we are getting our rocks off on an empathy so profound that it can approach the telepathic. So we believe that, contrary to the opinions of the uninformed, consensual sadism, dominance and topping are primarily empathic activities.

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence. Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new - Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches will fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? Or will he be my representative, Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation - marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built This special shell? For, though I've no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.

Most girls take one look at you and swoon. You've never had to really work for someone's affection or put effort into maintaining it. In many ways, your natural gifts have done you a disservice-- they've stunted your sensitivity and charm! You've never had to develop insight into what will make a girl laugh and come to love you for reasons that aren't handsome or heroic. That's why smees are experts on the subtle arts of courtship and seduction; nothing comes easy to us, but we do understand and live by the Lover's Maxim." "And what on earth is the Lover's Maxim?" asked Maz, feeling very uninformed. The smee cleared his throat. "If you can't be handsome, be rich. If you can't be rich, be strong. If you cant be strong, be witty." "But what if you can't be witty?" Max wondered. "Learn the guitar.

If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally a grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam.

I had lost all faith when Nixon won the second time after so much was already known about what he had done to retain power. Now it's time for Trump's Accountability Sandwich. We don't know yet how many layers there will be, how much meat, how many fixings. It better be good. Not because I want him to suffer, but because we need him to, so he can't do it again, so he can't be re-elected. And, just as critically, we need others to see it and feel it, MAGA fanatics, reckless Republican politicos, misguided mis-informed/uninformed self-styled middle-of-the-roaders, so that there is less risk to the country, so that those who crave an autocratic state to impose their power and their values on us all know the cost.

With age, you acquire a certain humility, Alexander. The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn’t matter much if you look ridiculous,” his grandmother lectured.

There are many controversial issues in contemporary American politics where, in spite of my strong feelings, I have the ability to understand and respect the other side. But the notion that we could ever pretend women have real equality in this country when a man as uninformed about basic reproductive gynecology as Mr. Todd Akin could take away my right to decide whether I want to spend a minimum of eighteen years and an average of $235,000 raising a child—not to mention the significant cost to my own dreams and goals or the myriad ways my child might ultimately suffer for my having been denied the ability to make that choice, the ways so many children suffer every day at the hands of their frustrated, stultified mothers—is an absurdity.

To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That’s what the government is doing to the masses now.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are 'happy', O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of 'happy nuts', 'There's a tightening around the head that hurts, there's a terror of the mind that hurts even more, they're so unhappy and especially because they cant explain it to anybody or reach out and be helped through all the hysterical paranoia they are really suffering more than anyone in the world and I think in the universe in fact,' and Irwin knew this from observing his mother Naomi who finally had to have a lobotomy ― Which sets me thinking how nice to cut away therefore all that agony in my forehead and STOP IT! STOP THAT BABBLING! ― Because now the babbling's not only in the creek, as I say it's left the creek and come in my head, it would be alright for coherent babbling meaning something but it's all brilliantly enlightened babble that does more than mean something: it's telling me to die because everything is over ― Everything is swarming all over me.

Finches are seed eaters, but Dr. Daruwalla didn’t know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn’t know. This was the kind of Everyman he was—a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was.

It's this oppressive, aggressive and exclusice side to cool that makes me declare ardently, no I'm not cool. I rebel against the notion of a standard or style or attitude that oppresses those that don't fit in- that excludes and diminishes the vulnerable, the shy, the uninformed and the uncofident. I rebel, too, against the dominance of a set of values which seems so geared towards the superficial and ephemeral. And I rebel against the idea of being cool if it means being detatched, distant, univolved, dismissive, unresponsive, lacking in emotional honesty- in fact, lacking in all the things that make the world a happier, more sympathetic place.

A similar attitude causes some people to spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, 'I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself.' That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors?

There are certain prejudices attached to the human mind which it requires all our wisdom to keep from interfering with our happiness; certain set notions, acquired in infancy, and cherished involuntarily by age, which grow up and assume a gloss so plausible, that few minds, in what is called a civilized country, can afterwards overcome them. Truth is often perverted by education. While the refined Europeans boast a standard of honour, and a sublimity of virtue, which often leads them from pleasure to misery, and from nature to error, the simple, uninformed American follows the impulse of his heart, and obeys the inspiration of wisdom. Nature, uncontaminated by false refinement, every where acts alike in the great occurrences of life. The Indian discovers his friend to be perfidious, and he kills him; the wild Asiatic does the same; the Turk, when ambition fires, or revenge provokes, gratifies his passion at the expence of life, and does not call it murder. Even the polished Italian, distracted by jealousy, or tempted by a strong circumstance of advantage, draws his stiletto, and accomplishes his purpose. It is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from the prejudices of country, or of education… Self-preservation is the great law of nature; when a reptile hurts us, or an animal of prey threatens us, we think no farther, but endeavour to annihilate it. When my life, or what may be essential to my life, requires the sacrifice of another, or even if some passion, wholly unconquerable, requires it, I should be a madman to hesitate.

For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.1 Despite the increase in the number of young people having sex in the 1950s and 1960s, access to birth control and sex education lagged far behind. Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain.

If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do. He was against nation building, but he believed there were few situations that he couldn’t personally make better. He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, either.

Her Mother and Father were especially blind to feelings. Her Father denied he even had feelings and her Mother assumed everyone shared hers. Heather didn’t know for years that her ability to see people’s feelings and even feel them sometimes was unusual and when she discovered that the cruelty and rudeness that adults and friends inflicted on each other was unintentional or at least uninformed, she decided to withdraw, overwhelmed by the pain of typical human behavior.

Yes, I said; and there is another thing which is likely, or rather a necessary inference from what has preceded, that neither the uneducated and uninformed of the truth, nor yet those who never make an end of their education, will be able ministers of State; not the former, because they have no single aim of duty which is the rule of all their actions, private as well as public; nor the latter, because they will not act at all except upon compulsion, fancying that they are already dwelling apart in the islands of the blest. Very true, he replied. Then,

The sixties began what many admirers of Eliot would consider a bleak period. The anxiety of influence of the profession at large seemed to inspire quick and increasingly uninformed dismissals of Eliot, and these repeated denigrations produced, predictably, a generation of students with vague and inaccurate impressions about his poetry and ideas. But there is a bright side to Eliot studies of the last quarter century. The general retreat from Eliot coincided with the beginning of basic and important work on his ideas, especially on his early philosophical writings.

Uninformed, America may succumb to bad ideas and leaders. In succumbing, we fail to fulfill our destiny. Well informed, America rises as far as the good ideas and leaders it proactively chooses. In so rising, we fulfill our destiny and offer to the world vacuum its last best hope. (Scott L. Vanatter)

Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend—either directly or indirectly—on the exploitation of the LDCs for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back. The loans of foreign aid ensure that today's children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back. The fact that our own companies already received most of this money to build the power plants, airports, and industrial parks does not factor into this formula. Does the excuse that most Americans are unaware of this constitute innocence? Uninformed and intentionally misinformed, yes—but innocent?

Concluding that democracy was indefensible—for reasons similar to those suggested by Brennan, Caplan, Friedman, and others—Shepard urged his fellow political scientists to disabuse themselves of their unjustified faith in the public: the electorate “must lose the halo which has surrounded it. . . . The dogma of universal suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant, the uninformed, and the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled elections.”7 Even John Dewey, who had once declared his own “democratic faith,” in a long debate with Walter Lippmann acknowledged that the public was unlikely to be able to rise to the level of civic knowledge and competence demanded in a period of ever more complexity, and suggested that Whitman-like poets would be needed to provide a suitable and accessible “presentation” of the complex political and scientific information needed by the citizenry of a complex modern society.8

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

Everyone thinks; it is our nature to do so. But much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated.

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person’s inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic. True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person’s physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm

The most frequent misconception about celebrities, is that they must be so fascinating. The opposite is often the case. Most of my famous clients with some important exceptions, have been uninteresting, some have been outright boring. We tend to confuse their public persona and surroundings which fascinate us with their private personalities which are banal, mundane and self-centered. Many of them have no ideas, no insights, and little to say about matters outside the narrow spheres of their professional lives. Yet we listen to their often uninformed opinions on important issues of the day affecting the world, just because they have a handsome face, strong muscles or other talents or attributes that are irrelevant to their presumed credibility on the matters about which they’re opining. Celebrities may seem fascinating from a distance, but the reality viewed up close, is often very different.

In actuality, myths are neither fiction nor history. Nor are most myths—and this will surprise some people—an amalgamation of fiction and history. Rather, a myth is something that never happened but is always happening. Myths are the plots of the psyche. They are ongoing, symbolic dramatizations of the inner life of the species, external metaphors for internal events. As Campbell used to say, myths come from the same place dreams come from. But because they’re more coherent than dreams, more linear and refined, they are even more instructive. A myth is the song of the universe, a song that, if accurately perceived, explains the universe and our often confusing place in it. It is only when it is allowed to crystallize into “history” that a myth becomes useless—and possibly dangerous. For example, when the story of the resurrection of Jesus is read as a symbol for the spiritual rebirth of the individual, it remains alive and can continually resonate in a vital, inspirational way in the modern psyche. But when the resurrection is viewed as historical fact, an archival event that occurred once and only once, some two thousand years ago, then its resonance cannot help but flag. It may proffer some vague hope for our own immortality, but to our deepest consciousness it’s no longer transformative or even very accessible on an everyday basis. The self-renewing model has atrophied into second-hand memory and dogma, a dogma that the fearful, the uninformed, and the emotionally troubled feel a need to defend with violent action.

Could be off one of your own boats, Lavette," Whittier said. "The crab I mean." Whittier was hostile, contriving his hostility in witless remarks. Dan said nothing, only thinking that if this small, pompous, foolish man, so uninformed about the essence of his own business, was a measure of the hundred tycoons who ruled the hills of San Francisco, then his own way up would be none too difficult. It came down to money; if you had money, you functioned and you could do without guts or brains; and if you had money, you saw a girl like Jean Sheldon more than once, more than by accident.

you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.

For it was not only dislike of one’s fellow-citizens that was intensified into a strong sense of community; even mistrust of oneself and of one’s own destiny here assumed the character of profound self-certainty. In this country one acted—sometimes indeed to the extreme limits of passion and its consequences—differently from the way one thought, or one thought differently from the way one acted. Uninformed observers have mistaken this for charm, or even for a weakness in what they thought was the Austrian character. But that was wrong. It is always wrong to explain the phenomena of a country simply by the character of its inhabitants. For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional one, a national one, a civic one, a class one, a geographical one, a sex one, a conscious, an unconscious and perhaps even too a private one; he combines them all in himself, but they dissolve him, and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel. Hence every dweller on earth also has a tenth character, which is nothing more or less than the passive illusion of spaces unfilled; it permits a man everything, with one exception: he may not take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what happens to them, in other words, the very thing that ought to be the filling of him. This interior space—which is, it must be admitted, difficult to describe—is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet both here and there it is the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination. In so far as this can at all become apparent to every eye, it had done so in Kakania, and in this Kakania was, without the world’s knowing it, the most progressive State of all; it was the State that was by now only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence and lapped by the great fantasy of all that had not happened, or at least had not yet irrevocably happened, as by the foam of the oceans from which mankind arose. Es ist passiert, ‘it just sort of happened’, people said there when other people in other places thought heaven knows what had occurred. It was a peculiar phrase, not known in this sense to the Germans and with no equivalent in other languages, the very breath of it transforming facts and the bludgeonings of fate into something light as eiderdown, as thought itself. Yes, in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.

This was not the way Ian intended his wedding night should be, and as he removed his clothes by the light of the single candle burning across the room, he was determined that it would at least end as he intended. Elizabeth felt the bed sink beneath his weight and drew her whole body into the smallest possible space. He moved onto one side, leaning up on an elbow, and his hand touched her cheek. When he said nothing Elizabeth opened her eyes, staring straight ahead, and in her agitated state, lying naked next to a man who she knew was undoubtedly naked as well, she was amass of disjointed emotions: Wordsworth’s warnings tolled in one part of her mind while another part warned her that her own ignorance of the marital act didn’t relieve her of keeping their bargain; she felt tricked somehow, as well. Lying beside her, Ian put his hand on her arm, his thumb stroking soothingly across her arm, listening to her rapid breathing. She swallowed audibly and said, “I realize now what you expect from your part of the betrothal bargain and what rights I granted you this morning. You must think I am the most ignorant, uninformed female alive not to have known what-“ “Don’t do this, darling!” he said, and Elizabeth heard the urgency in his voice; she felt it as he bent his head and seized her lips in a hard, insistent kiss and did not stop until he drew a response from her. Only then did he speak again, and his voice was low and forceful. “This has nothing to do with rights-not the ones you granted me at our betrothal nor the ones this morning in church. Had we been wed in Scotland, we could have spoken the old vows. Do you know what words, what promises we would have spoken had we been there, not here, this morning?” His hand slid up to her cheek, cupping it as if to soften the effect of his tone, and as Elizabeth gazed at his hard, beloved face in the candlelight her shyness and fears slid away. “No,” she whispered. “I would have said to you,” he told her quietly and without shame, “’With my body, I thee worship.

How would I find someone,” Caleb said, edging the dead man’s legs parallel to one another with his toe, “who would be willing to kill a man?” “Now that, kid, is a man’s chore.” Ethan stretched his back until it cracked mightily. “You mean to kill the one who done that to you?” Ethan hoisted the corpse again and motioned with a nod for Caleb to follow suit. “I suppose I could do it. Depends on the job.” They shuffled across the gaming floor, Ethan kicking chairs and tables out of the way as they went. “Killing’s like anything else—there’s a right man for it.” Caleb couldn’t believe he hadn’t asked Ethan these questions sooner; everyone else took such great pains to protect him that he’d stopped asking lest he hear the same careful, uninformative answers. “What if I needed someone to go kill someone someplace else?” Ethan paused while he fiddled with the latch on the door, holding the man’s entire upper body with one large paw. “Ol’ Jackson Ramus, that’s who you’d call.” Jackson Ramus. The name didn’t seem real to Caleb. He checked it against his images of the men. “Of course Ramus died three, four years ago.” Ethan pitched the door open and the cold wind knocked Caleb backward. Ethan didn’t notice. “He was supposed to be tracking a woman whose husband said she’d been kidnapped. And he found her all right, found her in the lying-down game with another man.” Ethan didn’t slow moving across the icy landing to the railing. “Ramus was a smart man—maybe too smart, maybe not smart enough—and he figured if he came all the way back to ask the husband what to do, he was sure the husband would send him right back the way he came to kill this new man and the cheating wife.” Ethan stopped when they got to the edge of the deck. Caleb spun around, thinking they were going down the stairs when the legs were yanked out of his hands and the body flew through the air. Ethan slapped his palms together. “Of course, Ramus was also what you might call a lazy man. Lazy man with a gun is not the kind of man you want to find yourself next to.” The body landed facedown, the snow leaping into the air with a massive, rushing noise, and settling over the man’s clothes. “So he shot them, both of them. And came back home.” Caleb looked at the body splayed out in the snow, everything at unliving angles. He could barely listen to the words that followed. “But Ol’ Ramus got it wrong. When he came back, the husband was so upset, he shot Ramus between the eyes, stuffed his killing fee inside his mouth, and then shot himself right in his goddamned broken heart.

Knowledgeable observers report that dating has nearly disappeared from college campuses and among young adults generally. It has been replaced by something called “hanging out.” You young people apparently know what this is, but I will describe it for the benefit of those of us who are middle-aged or older and otherwise uninformed. Hanging out consists of numbers of young men and young women joining together in some group activity. It is very different from dating. For the benefit of some of you who are not middle-aged or older, I also may need to describe what dating is. Unlike hanging out, dating is not a team sport. Dating is pairing off to experience the kind of one-on-one association and temporary commitment that can lead to marriage in some rare and treasured cases. . . . All of this made dating more difficult. And the more elaborate and expensive the date, the fewer the dates. As dates become fewer and more elaborate, this seems to create an expectation that a date implies seriousness or continuing commitment. That expectation discourages dating even more. . . . Simple and more frequent dates allow both men and women to “shop around” in a way that allows extensive evaluation of the prospects. The old-fashioned date was a wonderful way to get acquainted with a member of the opposite sex. It encouraged conversation. It allowed you to see how you treat others and how you are treated in a one-on-one situation. It gave opportunities to learn how to initiate and sustain a mature relationship. None of that happens in hanging out. My single brothers and sisters, follow the simple dating pattern and you don’t need to do your looking through Internet chat rooms or dating services—two alternatives that can be very dangerous or at least unnecessary or ineffective. . . . Men, if you have returned from your mission and you are still following the boy-girl patterns you were counseled to follow when you were 15, it is time for you to grow up. Gather your courage and look for someone to pair off with. Start with a variety of dates with a variety of young women, and when that phase yields a good prospect, proceed to courtship. It’s marriage time. That is what the Lord intends for His young adult sons and daughters. Men have the initiative, and you men should get on with it. If you don’t know what a date is, perhaps this definition will help. I heard it from my 18-year-old granddaughter. A “date” must pass the test of three p’s: (1) planned ahead, (2) paid for, and (3) paired off. Young women, resist too much hanging out, and encourage dates that are simple, inexpensive, and frequent. Don’t make it easy for young men to hang out in a setting where you women provide the food. Don’t subsidize freeloaders. An occasional group activity is OK, but when you see men who make hanging out their primary interaction with the opposite sex, I think you should lock the pantry and bolt the front door. If you do this, you should also hang up a sign, “Will open for individual dates,” or something like that. And, young women, please make it easier for these shy males to ask for a simple, inexpensive date. Part of making it easier is to avoid implying that a date is something very serious. If we are to persuade young men to ask for dates more frequently, we must establish a mutual expectation that to go on a date is not to imply a continuing commitment. Finally, young women, if you turn down a date, be kind. Otherwise you may crush a nervous and shy questioner and destroy him as a potential dater, and that could hurt some other sister. My single young friends, we counsel you to channel your associations with the opposite sex into dating patterns that have the potential to mature into marriage, not hanging-out patterns that only have the prospect to mature into team sports like touch football. Marriage is not a group activity—at least, not until the children come along in goodly numbers.

Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable

This is a good moment to remember one of Mansfield’s Manly Maxims: “Manly men tend their fields.” It means that we take care of the lives and property entrusted to us. It means that we take responsibility for everything in the “field assigned to us.” We cannot do this without knowledge. We cannot do it if we are ignorant of our times, blind to the trends shaping our lives, and oblivious to the basic knowledge that allows us to do what we are called to do as men. We must know enough about law, health, science, economics, politics, and technology to fulfill our roles. We should also know enough about our faith to stand our ground in a secular age, resist heresies, and teach our families. We also shouldn’t be without the benefits of literature and poetry, of good novels and stirring stories, all of which make us more relevant and more effective. We need all of this, and no one is going to force it upon us. Nor will we acquire what we need from a degree program or a study group alone, as valuable as these can be. The truth is that men who aspire to be genuine men and serve well have no choice: they must devote themselves to an aggressive program of self-education. They have to read books, stay current with websites and periodicals, consult experts, and put themselves in a position to know. It isn’t as hard as it sounds, particularly in our Internet age. Much of what a man needs to know can land in his iPad while he is sleeping, but he has to know enough to value this power in the first place. To ignore this duty can mean disaster. How many men have lost jobs because they did not see massive trends on the horizon? How many men have failed to stay intellectually sharp and so gave up ground in their professions to others with more active minds? How many have lost money through uninformed investments or have not taken opportunities in expanding fields or have missed promotions because they had not bothered to learn about new technologies or what changes social media, for example, would bring to their jobs? I do not want to be negative. Learning is a joy. Reading is one of the great pleasures of life. A man ought to invest in knowledge because it is part of living in this world fully engaged and glorifying God. Yet our times also make it essential. The amount of knowledge in the world is increasing. Technology is transforming our lives. New trends can rise like floodwaters and sweep devastation into our homes. Men committed to tending their fields learn, study, research, dig out facts, and test theories. They know how to safeguard their families. They serve well because they serve as informed men.