Author: Tetman Callis
“My entire life I believed that we’re the good guys, that we’re the world’s leader when it comes to human rights. But that’s no longer who we are, and it saddens me. It scares me. We’re like the Russians in the 1950s and 1960s, like Chile in the 1970s, like Argentina in the 1980s. People are picked up in the middle of the night because somebody said something about them or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then they disappear.” – George Daly (as quoted by Mario Kaiser in “Death in Camp Delta”)
“The key element in any legal system is behavior—what people actually do. Otherwise rules are nothing but words, and the structures are a ghost town, not a living city.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“The central fact of American federalism is worth repeating: the United States is by and large an economic union, by and large a social union, but not a legal union, or at least not completely. State laws are, or can be, rather similar, but this is, first, because the states choose to harmonize their laws, and, second, because conditions in the states are fairly similar. A state is free to be different (if it wishes), within its zone. But since the 1860s, the central government has gotten stronger and stronger, and there has been a steady, marked change in relations between states and the federal government. It is obvious why this took place. Changes in technology and socioeconomic structure paved the way. In the age of e-mail, cyberspace, satellite communication, and jumbo jets, the country is a single entity to an extent undreamed of in 1787. When all is said and done, however, the states still maintain a substantial reservoir of power.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“Don’t be that jerk who complains when Aunt Barbara asks what you write about. Don’t say, ‘that question is impossible to answer!’ If you can’t answer what you write about then you don’t know what you write about, and that’s like not knowing what color hair you have. Do this right now (now!): figure out in two sentences how to explain what you write about.” – Marie-Helene Bertino, “Writing Dos and Don’ts” (emphases in original)
“If you brought back to life a nineteenth-century judge, he would be dumbfounded to learn about that state of civil-rights law today. He would even be amazed at what has happened in tort law, how far the courts have gone in making companies pay for damages caused by badly designed products, such as defective cold cream, soup, medicine, and automobiles. The wheels of doctrine have turned many times, in response to changes in the world outside the courtroom. True, some judges today stand on the right side of the political spectrum, while others stand on the left. But the point around which they revolve, the point from which they deviate, right or left, is determined by social forces, by the national agenda.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“In the United States, social issues often dress themselves up in legal costume and muscle their way into court. There are few countries in the world where abortion policy is decided, in the first instance, by judges. In few countries would courts draw the boundary lines of school districts or demand wholesale reform in state mental-health facilities. Yet these things happen in the United States. A movement is going on which is bringing these issues into court, which expands the very idea of what should or can be dealt with through law and litigation, and which causes ‘law’ to seep into nooks and corners where it never penetrated before. Nobody has quite found the right name for this movement or trend. We can call aspects of it judicialization, legalization, constitutionalization, the due-process revolution, or something similar. Whatever its name, it is certainly a significant trend. Courtlike procedures and habits extend their tentacles throughout government, big institutions, and society in general. Courts themselves have become final arbiters of many social issues, not just individual disputes.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“Technology is a great lawmaker and a great leveler. The railroad in many ways and in many fields practically rewrote the law books of the United States in the nineteenth century…. Accident law—the heart of the legal field we call torts—is basically the offspring of the nineteenth-century railroad; in the twentieth century, the automobile largely replaced the railroad as a source of accidents, and of accident law.” – Lawrence M. Friedman, American Law: An Introduction
“The doctor’s main concern is to identify all the resistances that are prejudicial to the effectiveness of the curative force, and to eliminate them as much as possible. Doctors have undoubtedly, since the start of the profession, helped the patient and will continue to do so forever. But undoubtedly, too, the doctor’s action very often creates or reinforces an inhibiting effect on the curative force. This is exactly what the doctor must be aware of: that he is a danger to his patient.” – Georg Groddeck (as quoted by Catherine Clément in The Weary Sons of Freud (trans. Ball))
“What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box”
“Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wishful world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery. The ethical demands on which religion seeks to lay stress need, rather, to be given another basis; for they are indispensable to human society and it is dangerous to link obedience to them with religious faith. If we attempt to assign the place of religion in the evolution of mankind, it appears not as a permanent acquisition but as a counterpart to the neurosis which individual civilized men have to go through in their passage from childhood to maturity.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (ed. Gay)
“If we are to give an account of the grandiose nature of religion, we must bear in mind what it undertakes to do for human beings. It gives them information about the origin and coming into existence of the universe, it assures them of its protection and of ultimate happiness in the ups and downs of life and it directs their thoughts and actions by precepts which it lays down with its whole authority. Thus it fulfills three functions. With the first of them it satisfies the human thirst for knowledge; it does the same thing that science attempts to do with its means, and at that point enters into rivalry with it. It is to its second function that it no doubt owes the greatest part of its influence. Science can be no match for it when it soothes the fear that men feel of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, when it assures them of a happy ending and offers them comfort in unhappiness. It is true that science can teach us how to avoid certain dangers and that there are some sufferings which it can successfully combat; it would be most unjust to deny that it is a powerful helper to men; but there are many situations in which it must leave a man to his suffering and can only advise him to submit to it. In its third function, in which it issues precepts and lays down prohibitions and restrictions, religion is furthest away from science. For science is content to investigate and to establish facts, though it is true that from its application rules and advice are derived on the conduct of life. In some circumstances these are the same as those offered by religion, but, when this is so, the reasons for them are different.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (ed. Gay; emphasis in original)
“Of the three powers which may dispute the basic position of science, religion alone is to be taken seriously as an enemy. Art is almost always harmless and beneficent; it does not seek to be anything but an illusion. Except for a few people who are spoken of as being ‘possessed’ by art, it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality. Philosophy is not opposed to science, it behaves like a science and works in part by the same methods; it departs from it, however, by clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe which is without gaps and is coherent, though one which is bound to collapse with every fresh advance in our knowledge. It goes astray in its method by over-estimating the epistemological value of our logical operations and by accepting other sources of knowledge such as intuition.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Question of a Weltanschauung” (ed. Gay)
“Crime is common. Logic is rare.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”
“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive, or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society. Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one—if, that is to say, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet, as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.” – Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (ed. Gay)
“The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (ed. Gay)
“Since it is an awkward task to separate what God Himself has demanded from what can be traced to the authority of an all-powerful parliament or a high judiciary, it would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and honestly admit the purely human origin of all the regulations and precepts of civilization. Along with their pretended sanctity, these commandments and laws would lose their rigidity and unchangeableness as well. People could understand that they are made, not so much to rule them as, on the contrary, to serve their interests; and they would adopt a more friendly attitude to them, and instead of aiming at their abolition, would aim only at their improvement. This would be an important advance along the road which leads to becoming reconciled to the burden of civilization.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (ed. Gay)
“Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world—such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (ed. Gay)
“The less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgement of the future. And there is the further difficulty that precisely in a judgement of this kind the subjective expectations of the individual play a part which it is difficult to assess; and these turn out to be dependent on purely personal factors in his own experience, on the greater or lesser optimism of his attitude to life, as it has been dictated for him by his temperament or by his success or failure. Finally, the curious fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naïvely, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it—the present, that is to say, must have become the past—before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.” – Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion” (ed. Gay)
“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”
“Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator; and it is by the love of those nearest him that the incomplete human being is induced to respect the decrees of necessity and to spare himself the punishment that follows any infringement of them.” – Sigmund Freud, “Some Character Types” (ed. Gay)
“For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Red-Headed League”
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.” – William Faulkner (interview with Jean Stein in Paris Review)
“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling ‘Kilroy was here’ on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.” – William Faulkner (interview with Jean Stein in Paris Review)
“A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read. Sometimes on the other hand we remember a name well enough but do not know whether anything of the individual who bore it survives in our pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? and if she is, in what part of the ground does she lie? we no longer know, and how are we to find her beneath the flowers?” – Marcel Proust, Time Regained (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.” – William Faulkner (interview with Jean Stein in Paris Review)
“A man born with sensibility but without imagination might, in spite of this deficiency, be able to write admirable novels. For the suffering inflicted upon him by other people, his own efforts to ward it off, the long conflict between his unhappiness and another person’s cruelty, all this, interpreted by the intellect, might furnish the material for a book not merely as beautiful as one that was imagined, invented, but also in as great a degree exterior to the day-dreams that the author would have had if he had been left to his own devices and happy.” – Marcel Proust, Time Regained (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
“The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews. The critic too is trying to say ‘Kilroy was here.’ His function is not directed toward the artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist is writing something which will move the critic. The critic is writing something which will move everybody but the artist.” – William Faulkner (interview with Jean Stein in Paris Review)
“The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to take notes and make sketches, but it is disastrous for him to do so. Yet when he writes, there is not a single gesture of his characters, not a trick of behaviour, not a tone of voice which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory; beneath the name of every character of his invention he can put sixty names of characters that he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimaces, another for the monocle, another for the fits of temper, another for the swaggering movement of the arm, etc. And in the end the writer realises that if his dream of being a sort of painter was not in a conscious and intentional manner capable of fulfillment, it has nevertheless been fulfilled and that he too, for his work as a writer, has unconsciously made use of a sketch-book. For, impelled by the instinct that was in him, the writer, long before he thought that he would one day become one, regularly omitted to look at a great many things which other people notice, with the result that he was accused by others of being absent-minded and by himself of not knowing how to listen or look, but all this time he was instructing his eyes and ears to retain for ever what seemed to others puerile trivialities, the tone of voice in which a certain remark had been made, or the facial expression and the movement of the shoulders which he had seen at a certain moment, years ago, in somebody of whom perhaps he knows nothing else whatsoever, simply because this tone of voice was one that he had heard before or felt that he might hear again, because it was something renewable, durable.” – Marcel Proust, Time Regained (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)