“Few among us are qualified to testify as to whether God is dead, or alive, or wandering somewhere in exile (the possibility I tend to favor).” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Month: September 2024
“We are lived by drives we cannot command.” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
“You never regret being kind. I really believe that. I have regretted being sarcastic. I have regretted losing my temper. But I’ve never regretted being kind.” – Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (interviewed by Nancy Kaffer, Detroit Free Press, July 7, 2024)
“We do not verify the hypotheses of science; instead, if we have any intellectual honour, we do our level best to disconfirm even our own theories. The process is Darwinian: the properly successful scientific theories are the ones that have survived, by a kind of logical natural selection.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“The universe is indefinitely recessive to the understanding. It will not provide the thing that philosophers cannot help pursuing: The Answer.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“No man is called happy till his death, and all the taxes at his wake and funeral paid.” – Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III, “Cadmus” (trans. Horace Gregory)
“The approach to nothingness is exciting, but nothingness itself is boring and featureless.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the hero or anti-hero, Raskolnikov, has been brooding on the more frightening implications of Utilitarian ethics. Russian Utilitarianism is a more violent affair than its English counterpart: if the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole criterion of ethical behaviour, the Ten Commandments no longer hold. It is right to kill if this killing is the only way to prevent two other people from being killed. Even, say, torturing a child to death could be right, if one knew that it was the only to prevent the torturing to death of two other children. Truly independent spirits can rise above biblical morality and, when necessary, spill blood.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“When the Christians were an underground sect, meeting in catacombs in Rome, they could afford to be absolutely merciful because the non-Christian Roman cops would deal with anything really nasty. Then the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and suddenly the cops were Christians.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“If one has a system of immense rewards in heaven for good behaviour in this world, then that good behaviour, once the agent has become aware of the reward, will cease to be innocently disinterested.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“We can never surrender to democracy’s enemies. We can never allow America to be defined by forces of division and hatred. We can never go backward in the progress we have made through the sacrifice and dedication of true patriots. We can never and will never relent in our pursuit of a more perfect union, with liberty and justice for all Americans.” – Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Chairman, Final Report, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
“Forbidden books always acquire an attractive immortality of their own, quite apart from whatever merits they contain.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses
“The future of humanity is simple. You have a choice—you have Star Trek or Mad Max. Those are your options. We can explore the heavens, or we can stay here and kill each other over books written about heaven.” – Justin King, “The Roads to Planetary Defense, Asteroids, and NASA,” June 27, 2024
“The nineteenth century, even among its poets, lost contact with The Metamorphoses, or rather, The Metamorphoses showed aspects of mythology as well as human conduct that the age did not care to advertise. An extremely un-Italian Victorian Olympus came into view. It had been introduced by Lord Elgin’s marbles shipped from Greece to London. Pictorially and in sculpture the nymphs and goddesses became ideal English girls, represented in dreamy yet modest poses by Sir Frederic Leighton; they looked freshly bathed, well-fed, and nearly sexless.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses
“When the Protestants abolished Purgatory they had nothing left beyond the grave but heaven, from which no soul would wish to return, and hell, from which no one could escape.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker
“Patience is the honest man’s revenge.” – Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy