Author: Tetman Callis

“I wouldn’t trust a man that wouldn’t try to steal a little.” – Elizabeth Sarnoff, “Suffer the Little Children,” Deadwood

“Some goddamned time a man’s due to stop arguin’ with hisself. Feeling he’s twice the goddamned fool he knows he is. Because he can’t be somthin’ he tries to be every goddamned day without once getting to dinnertime and not fucking it up.” – Elizabeth Sarnoff, “Here Was a Man,” Deadwood

“People never prize what they have always had in abundance.” – Anton Chekhov, “The Trousseau” (trans. Constance Garnett)

“Oh, dreams! In one night, lying with one’s eyes shut, one may sometimes live through more than ten years of happiness.” – Anton Chekhov, “A Living Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)

“Blind love finds ideal beauty everywhere.” – Anton Chekhov, “A Living Chattel” (trans. Constance Garnett)

“In a starfish, none of the separate arms knows what the others are up to or what is happening to them. There is no integration at a neural level. Or consider an image on your computer screen; each pixel is quite independent from the pixels around it; you can change one without altering the others. Human beings are very different. Change one neuron and changes will occur in hundreds if not thousands of others. Read about Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, or Proust’s Marcel in La Recherche and you’ll see that everything that happens to them is immediately mixed up with everything else. Everything connects. A human being is the ultimate causal Gordian knot. You can’t disentangle it.” – Riccardo Manzotti, “Does Information Smell?”

“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

“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

“I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember – so that if I had dusted it and forgot – that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” – Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, quoted by Viktor Shklovsky in “Art as Technique” (trans. unknown)

“For the first time in our Nation’s history, a grand jury has charged a former President with committing crimes while in office to overturn an election that he lost. In response, the defendant claims that to protect the institution of the Presidency, he must be cloaked with absolute immunity from criminal prosecution unless the House impeached and the Senate convicted him for the same conduct. He is wrong. Separation-of-powers principles, constitutional text, history, and precedent all make clear that a former President may be prosecuted for criminal acts he committed while in office—including, most critically here, illegal acts to remain in power despite losing an election.” – from “Introduction” by Special Counsel Jack Smith, et al., “Answering Brief for the United States”, Filed December 30, 2023, Circuit Court for the District of Columbia

“Civil war, in which father kills son, brother brother, is the worst thing of all.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“In the field of base construction, the needless refinements, such as special ovens, meat grinders, steam tables, etc., appear excessive in a combat theater and exceed the capabilities of the constructing units.” – Colonel Joseph A. Jansen, “Operational Report – Lessons Learned, Headquarters, 168th Engineer Combat Battalion, Period Ending 31 July 1967 ”

“Airfield repair during use of facility – As often happens in Vietnam tactical necessity dictates immediate heavy usage of an abandoned or deteriorated runway. In order to insure continued use during the emergency, and to upgrade the field for greater capacity, an engineer repair force is airlifted to the assault field. Military police must keep unnecessary traffic off the runway.” – Lieutenant Colonel John R. Manning, “Operational Report – Lessons Learned, Headquarters, 168th Engineer Combat Battalion, Period Ending 31 July 1967 ”

“Blasting – substitute for delay caps – The non-availability of delay caps called for the innovation of some type delay firing system. The problem was successfully solved by removing the rheostat from a fan speed control box so that five (5) circuits could be fired in rapid sequence by simply turning the knob.” – Lieutenant Colonel John R. Manning, “Operational Report – Lessons Learned, Headquarters, 168th Engineer Combat Battalion, Period Ending 31 July 1967 ”

“Safety equipment – The primary hazards to Rome plow operators are sniper fire, shrapnel, and being struck by limbs and trees. In addition red ants and bees cause a great deal of discomfort. The wearing of flak jackets and steel helmets must be mandatory. No Rome plow should be operated without the protective cab. An ample supply of insect repellant should be on hand at all times.” – Lieutenant Colonel John R. Manning, “Operational Report – Lessons Learned, Headquarters, 168th Engineer Combat Battalion, Period Ending 31 July 1967 ”

“There is an old maxim of school-teachers: ‘Don’t say “Don’t”.’ Don’t say, ‘Don’t draw on the walls,’ to children who, until that moment, had never thought of doing so.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker