“Verbal nonsense (Ganser syndrome) and physical nonsense (buffoonery syndrome) within the realm of medical science are pathologized conditions. Verbal nonsense (as in vaudeville, joking) and physical nonsense (as in slapstick, clowning) within the realm of entertainment (both on and off the stage) are conditions of art.” – Mady Schutzman, “Being Approximate: The Ganser Syndrome and Beyond”
“The more one has experienced, the more there is to be astonished by. Our capacity for wonder grows with experience, becomes more urgent.” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“Don’t say it’s too late: how can you know you don’t still have thirty years to begin a new life? Don’t say it’s too early: how can you know that you won’t be dead in a month and that other people won’t fashion lives for themselves out of the ruins of yours?” – Elias Canetti, “Selected Notes from Hampstead” (trans. John Hargraves)
“History is not Tragedy. To understand historical reality, it is sometimes necessary not to know the outcome.” – Pierre Vidal-Naquet (quoted by Julian Jackson in France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (emphasis in original))
“Adhesives: The promises you promise not to break. The forgiveness when you do.” – Beth Kephart, “Love in the Knots of the Coptic Stitch”
“Agent livelock differs from agent deadlock in that the livelocked agent is not blocked or waiting for anything, but is continuously given tasks to perform and can never catch up or achieve its goal.” – Wayne Jansen and Tom Karygiannis, Mobile Agent Security
“As long as people feel cheated, bored, harassed, endangered, or betrayed at work, sabotage will be used as a direct method of achieving job satisfaction – the kind that never has to get the bosses’ approval.” – Martin Sprouse, Sabotage in the American Workplace
“There is only one unpardonable sin—deliberate cruelty. All else can be forgiven. That, never.” – Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor (emphasis in original)
“There was a movement on our right. Probably a scout. We let him pass. Another passed even closer. Then a compact mass of men came within our sights on the scarp and the beach below. ‘Give it to them, Chae,’ I whispered, and as he opened up, I started chucking grenades as fast as I could. It was short. They went down like tenpins, and those that didn’t scurried for cover under the scarp.
It was all we could do. I placed a grenade on the breech of the gun and we raced away through our familiar camp area. We hadn’t gone twenty yards when we heard high-pitched scream behind us that brought us to a stunned halt. Lim. That was Lim. We both recognized her voice, even in terror. Back we went now, crouching and beating toward the beach from where the scream had come.
We snaked over the scarp. The beach was free of Reds. They’d taken to the high ground in pursuit of us, but a white patch half hung over the scarp ahead. Chae was there before me. It was Lim. Blood covered her face and bare breasts. Her small shoulder jacket had been jerked off in tossing her aside. The side of her head had been caved in by a single blow, probably from a rifle.
‘Come, Chae, we must get out of here,’ I said as gently as possible, but with urgency.
‘No, Taicho-san, leave me. She must be taken care of. I won’t leave her to the Red dogs. I’m going with her.’ His voice was coarse with passion and hatred.
‘You can do nothing, Chae,’ I said, misunderstanding the implication. ‘Come. If you wish, we’ll take her with us,’ and I moved forward to pick her up. He brushed me aside and gave me a shove that threw me down to the beach. Before I could recover my feet, a jagged explosion rent the air and felled me again. Chae had blown himself to bits with a grenade.
I picked myself up, cursing at the things love made people do, and headed for the mudflat.” – Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN, The Secrets of Inchon
“There is a great temptation on the part of the guerrilla leader to try to take over politically and then to bargain with his outside supporters for political power. This situation may become downright embarrassing to those trying to conclude a treaty that will ensure a lasting peace.” – Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN, The Secrets of Inchon
“My eyes grew accustomed to the dim glow of the embers and I studied the faces about us. The sunken cheeks and bony forearms and hands that extended out of long white sleeves showed that the grim specter of malnutrition was present. The normally healthy brown pigmentation of the skin had given way to a sickly chalklike yellow, which effect was aggravated by a loosening of the skin as the stored-up fat tissue burned away. I had seen this before many times, and although it now didn’t upset me as at first, still I couldn’t control an involuntary shudder at its awful presence. As visual evidence of the utter horror of war, I had yet to decide which was the worse to look upon—death or famine.” – Commander Eugene Franklin Clark, USN, The Secrets of Inchon
“It’s the freaking American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so you can someday move up to a somewhat less dangerous craphole. And finally maybe you get a mansion.” – George Saunders, “Sea Oak”
“I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?” – Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch”
“It is worth attention, that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness, than any of their neighbours.” – Bishop Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
“Life turned out to be a string of small disasters twisted together with a bunch of thankless work. So many things. It was hard to even catch your breath.” – Mary Jones, “A Longer and Slightly More Complicated History of Her Heart”
“The man that will not when he may, sall have nocht when he wald.” – Robert Henryson, “Robin and Makyne”
“Originalism is the only approach to text that is compatible with democracy. When government-adopted texts are given a new meaning, the law is changed; and changing written law, like adopting written law in the first place, is the function of the first two branches of government—elected legislators and (in the case of authorized prescriptions by the executive branch) elected executive officials and their delegates. Allowing laws to be rewritten by judges is a radical departure from our democratic system.” – Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (emphasis in original)
“There’s nobody less salvageable than a ruined good boy.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“I am no such pil’d cynique to believe that beggery is the onely happinesse, or, with a number of these patient fooles, to sing, ‘My minde to me a kingdoms is,’ when the lanke hungrie belly barkes for foode.” – Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour
“Every word employed in the constitution is to be expounded in its plain, obvious, and common sense, unless the context furnishes some ground to control, qualify, or enlarge it. Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings.” – Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
“The ordinary-meaning rule is the most fundamental semantic rule of interpretation. It governs constitutions, statutes, rules, and private instruments. Interpreters should not be required to divine arcane nuances or to discover hidden meanings.” – Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts
“The less fear the better. Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us.” – Philip Roth, Nemesis
“The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.” – Stephen King, The Stand
“Normal humans in all societies manifest a sense of sympathy: an ability to treat the interests of others as comparable to their own. Unfortunately, the size of the moral circle in which sympathy is extended is a free parameter. By default, people sympathize only with members of their own family, clan, or village, and treat anyone outside this circle as less than human. But under certain circumstances the circle can expand to other clans, tribes, races, or even species. An important way to understand moral progress, then, is to specify the triggers that prompt people to expand or contract their moral circles. It has been argued that the circle may be expanded to include people to whom one is bound by networks of reciprocal trade and interdependence, and that it may be contracted to exclude people who are seen in degrading circumstances. In each case, an understanding of nonobvious aspects of human nature reveals possible levers for humane social change.” – Steven Pinker, “Why nature & nurture won’t go away”
“Developmental psychology has shown that infants have a precocious grasp of objects, intentions, numbers, faces, tools, and language. Behavioral genetics has shown that temperament emerges early in life and remains fairly constant throughout the life span, that much of the variation among people within a culture comes from differences in genes, and that in some cases particular genes can be tied to aspects of cognition, language, and personality. Neuroscience has shown that the genome contains a rich tool kit of growth factors, axon guidance molecules, and cell adhesion molecules that help structure the brain during development, as well as mechanisms of plasticity that make learning possible. These discoveries not only have shown that the innate organization of the brain cannot be ignored, but have also helped to reframe our very conception of nature and nurture.” – Steven Pinker, “Why nature & nurture won’t go away”
“Every evening our eyes tell us that the sun sets, while we know that, in fact, the Earth is turning us away from it. Astronomy taught us centuries ago that common sense is not a reliable guide to reality. Today it is neuroscience that is forcing us to readjust our intuitions. People naturally believe in the Ghost in the Machine: that we have bodies made of matter and spirits made of an ethereal something. Yes, people acknowledge that the brain is involved in mental life. But they still think of it as a pocket PC for the soul, managing information at the behest of a ghostly user. Modern neuroscience has shown that there is no user. ‘The soul’ is, in fact, the information-processing activity of the brain. New imaging techniques have tied every thought and emotion to neural activity. And any change to the brain—from strokes, drugs, electricity or surgery—will literally change your mind.” – Steven Pinker, “How to think about the mind”
“Though visible signs of the ability to prevail in a fight are the most salient advertisements of authority, they are not necessarily the qualifications that earned the authority in the first place. Dominance in humans is tied up with status: the possession of assets like talent, beauty, intelligence, skill, and wisdom. And in the end, dominance and status are social constructions that depend crucially on the perception of others and of oneself. How much authority one possesses depends on how much authority one is prepared to claim, and on how much authority others are willing to cede to you.” – Steven Pinker, “The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts”
“Law, without equity, though hard and disagreeable, is much more desirable for the public good, than equity without law: which would make every judge a legislator, and introduce most infinite confusion.” – William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England
“Judges should not be allergic to acknowledging that any one of our legal conclusions might be wrong. Judges are just humans in robes. We try to have as high a batting average as possible, but no one can get it right all of the time. All a judge can do is try his or her best to fairly, honestly, and faithfully interpret and apply the statute at issue and the relevant caselaw.” – Judge Lee P. Rudofsky, Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. The Arkansas Board of Apportionment