—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Showing posts with label So true!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label So true!. Show all posts
"Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World. Columbus died having seen very little of it and in fact not knowing what he had discovered. The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!"
When Consumer Reports rates and compares cars, it measures them on the basis of categories such as performance, safety, reliability and value. It tries to measure "outputs"—in short, what the car does. U.S. News mostly looks at "inputs" (money spent, class size, test scores of students, degrees held by faculty), rather than assessing what the college or university actually accomplishes for students over the lives of their enrolment. If Consumer Reports functioned like U.S. News, it would rank cars on the amount of steel and plastic used in their construction, the opinions of competing car dealers, the driving skills of customers, the percentage of managers and sales people with MBAs and the sticker price on the vehicle (the higher, the better).
All administrators agree that "exit" data are much better than "entry" data. But schools have this information! The magazine would use it if it could. Why can't they get it? The schools in the study will often not let the information become public. Why? They say that such student information cannot be made public because it's confidential.
Balderdash! If the students were told the information was going to be made public, they wouldn't bat an eye. In fact, they would want the information made public. They could have used it themselves when they were planning to go to college. Clearly, the elite schools don't release this information because it would have a profound effect on the top twenty schools rankings. The better the students, the harsher the comments. I've taught the same course to random undergraduates and to honor students. The honor students invariably complain more. They have higher standards not only for themselves but for me.
—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld
"Can you give us some idea of what all that means, Mr. Popper?"
"It doesn't mean much of anything in a surface reading like that."
"That's what I would have said too. So much sawdust. I'm surprised to hear you admit it."
"I acknowledge it freely enough. A lot of that is just filler material in the oracular mode to put P.S. off the scent."
"P.S.?"
"Perfect Strangers. Those who are not Gnomons. Others, outsiders. P.S. or A.M. Perfect Strangers or the Ape Men."
"But to what purpose? Apes we may be, but why throw dust in our eyes? Can you explain?"
"Sure can. I thought it would be obvious. We do it to protect our secret knowledge. We don't know whose hands those books might fall into, Senator, and so we are obliged to put a lot of matter in there to weary and disgust the reader. The casual reader is put off at once. A page or two of that and the ordinary man is a limp rag. Even great scholars, men who are trained and well paid to read dull books, are soon beaten down by it."
—Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
I have often noticed in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off. I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths that he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. The man will never understand that he wearies me to death unless I tell him so, and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
The condition of a fish's life, its environment, is water; take a fish out of water, and it dies. The condition of a tree's life, its health and its environment, is the soil: uproot a tree, and you kill it. It is no act of liberation to take a fish out of water, or a tree out of the ground. Similarly, the condition of a man's life, the ground of man's moral, spiritual, and physical health, is the law of God. To take men and societies out of the world of God's law is to sentence them to a decline, fall, and death. Instead of liberation, it is execution. Man's liberty is under God's law, and God's law is the life-giving air of man and society, the basic condition of their existence.
—R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty
I love artists and creative people. They make me crazy, but they're rarely boring. When they do get boring, it's because they are working on something they are so passionate about that they become obsessive. An artist caught up in an idea is like an eighteen-wheeler stuck in the sand, just grinding its wheels over and over. It can go on for months! But even when they are boring this way, it is fascinating because being passionate and obsessive is still an intense way of being alive and present to the beauty and complexity of life. When you're around artists, you are around people who are definitely living life to the fullest. Even their despair is gritty and real and fully committed, and I always feel like I'm living that line from the transfiguration scene in the Gospel: "How good it is for us to be here!"
—Barbara Nicolosi, "The Artist", in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church
The faith in one's natural goodness is a constant encouragement to evade moral responsibility. To accept responsibility is to follow the line of maximum effort, whereas man's secret desire is to follow, if not the line of least, at all events the line of lesser resistance. The endless twisting and dodging and proneness to look for scapegoats that results is surely the least reputable aspect of human nature. Rousseau writes to Madame de Francueil (20 April, 1751) that it was her class, the class of the rich, that was responsible for has having had to abandon his children. With responsibility shifted from one's self to the rich, the next step is inevitable, namely to start a crusade against the members of a class which, without any warrant from "Nature," oppresses its brothers, the members of other classes, and forces them into transgression. A man may thus dodge his duties as a father, and at the same time pose as a paladin of humanity. Rousseau is very close here to our most recent agitators. If a working girl falls from chastity, for example, do not blame her, blame her employer. She would have remained a model of purity if he had only added a dollar or two a week to her wage. With the progress of the new morality every one has become familiar with the type of the perfect idealist who is ready to pass laws for the regulation of everybody and everything except himself, and who knows how to envelop in a mist of radiant words schemes the true driving power of which is the desire to confiscate property.
—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism
"But is it not the deepest Law of nature that she remain constant?" cries an illuminated class: "Is not the machine of the universe fixed to move by unalterable rules?" Probable enough, good friends; nay, I too must believe that the God, whom ancient, inspired men assert to be "without variableness or shadow of turning," does indeed never change; that Nature, that the Universe, which no one whom it so pleases can be prevented from calling a Machine, does move by the most unalterable rules. And now of you too I make the old inquiry: What those same unalterable rules, forming the complete Status-Book of Nature, may possibly be?
They stand written in our Works of Science, say you; in the accumulated records of man's Experience?—Was man with his Experience present at the Creation, then, to see how it all went on? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived down to the foundation of the Universe, and gauged every thing there? Did the Maker take them into his counsel; that they read His ground-plan of the incomprehensible All; and can say, This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise! These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are; have seen some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is infinite, without bottom as without shore.
—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Out of the turmoil incidental to the Great Revival came a number of schisms among the evangelical denominations active in the West. Doctrinally conservative, the Presbyterians were quick to scent heresy and to throw out the unorthodox. As a result, they soon began to divide by fission. New Lights, Cumberland Presbyterians, Seceders, Old School and New School Presbyterians, and many other names for dissident groups indicate the division within the ranks. The Baptists and Methodists were also riven by controversy. But these sectarian divisions owe less to the frontier than they do to the beliefs implicit in Protestantism. They merely illustrate a tendency which had been in operation since the Reformation. When the Reformers conceded that men could read and interpret the Scriptures according to the dictates of their consciences and could dispense with a priest as intercessor with God, they opened a Pandora's box which they could never close thereafter.
—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier
In order to discover the rules of association that are most suitable to nations, a superior intelligence would be necessary who could see all the passions of men without experiencing any one of them; who would have no affinity with our nature and yet know it thoroughly; whose happiness would not depend on us, and who would nevertheless be quite willing to interest himself in ours; and, lastly, one who, storing up for himself with the progress of time a far-off glory in the future, could labor in one age and enjoy in another. Gods would be necessary to give laws to men.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
The mind of this supreme judge of the world is not so independent as to be impervious to whatever din may be going on near by. It does not take a cannon's roar to arrest his thoughts; the noise of a weathercock or a pulley will do. Do not be surprised if his reasoning is not too sound at the moment, there is a fly buzzing round his ears; that is enough to render him incapable of giving good advice. If you want him to be able to find the truth, drive away the creature that is paralyzing his reason and disturbing the mighty intelligence that rules over cities and kingdoms. What an absurd god he is! Most ridiculous hero!
—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts
What sort of freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God.
—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts
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