Insights, Snippets, Quotes, Epiphanies & All That Sort of Things

Started by Wakefield, December 30, 2012, 01:55:32 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

springrite

Quote from: Xenophanes on July 21, 2013, 06:12:07 PM

My current favorite is: Life is hard, then you die.


Life is hard. And you will never get out of it alive!
Do what I must do, and let what must happen happen.

Wakefield

Roger Ebert on Belle de jour:

QuoteIt is possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best. That's because it understands eroticism from the inside-out--understands how it exists not in sweat and skin, but in the imagination. Belle de Jour is seen entirely through the eyes of Séverine, the proper 23-year-old surgeon's wife, played by Catherine Deneuve. Buñuel, who was 67 when the film was released, had spent a lifetime making sly films about the secret terrain of human nature, and he knew one thing most directors never discover: For a woman like Séverine, walking into a room to have sex, the erotic charge comes not from who is waiting in the room, but from the fact that she is walking into it. Sex is about herself. Love of course is another matter.
-- Roger Ebert, Great Movies

Also here: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-belle-de-jour-1967
"One of the greatest misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowards. They complain, keep quiet, dine and forget."
-- Voltaire

Florestan

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861)

IT HAS LONG (perhaps throughout the entire duration of British
freedom) been a common form of speech, that if a good
despot could be insured, despotic monarchy would be the
best form of government. I look upon this as a radical and
most pernicious misconception of what good government
is, which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally vitiate all our
speculations on government.

The supposition is, that absolute power, in the hands of an
eminent individual, would insure a virtuous and intelligent
performance of all the duties of government. Good laws
would be established and enforced, bad laws would be reformed;
the best men would be placed in all situations of
trust; justice would be as well administered, the public burdens
would be as light and as judiciously imposed, every
branch of administration would be as purely and as intelligently
conducted as the circumstances of the country and its
degree of intellectual and moral cultivation would admit. I
am willing, for the sake of the argument, to concede all this,
but I must point out how great the concession is, how much
more is needed to produce even an approximation to these
results than is conveyed in the simple expression, a good
despot. Their realization would in fact imply, not merely a
good monarch, but an all-seeing one. He must be at all times
informed correctly, in considerable detail, of the conduct and
working of every branch of administration, in every district
of the country, and must be able, in the twenty-four hours
per day, which are all that is granted to a king as to the humblest
laborer, to give an effective share of attention and superintendence
to all parts of this vast field; or he must at
least be capable of discerning and choosing out, from among
the mass of his subjects, not only a large abundance of honest
and able men, fit to conduct every branch of public administration
under supervision and control, but also the small
number of men of eminent virtues and talents who can be
trusted not only to do without that supervision, but to exercise
it themselves over others. So extraordinary are the faculties
and energies required for performing this task in any
supportable manner, that the good despot whom we are supposing
can hardly be imagined as consenting to undertake it
unless as a refuge from intolerable evils, and a transitional
preparation for something beyond. But the argument can
do without even this immense item in the account. Suppose
the difficulty vanquished. What should we then have? One
man of superhuman mental activity managing the entire affairs
of a mentally passive people. Their passivity is implied
in the very idea of absolute power. The nation as a whole,
and every individual composing it, are without any potential
voice in their own destiny. They exercise no will in respect
to their collective interests. All is decided for them by a
will not their own, which it is legally a crime for them to
disobey. What sort of human beings can be formed under
such a regimen? What development can either their thinking
or their active faculties attain under it? On matters of
pure theory they might perhaps be allowed to speculate, so
long as their speculations either did not approach politics, or
had not the remotest connection with its practice. On practical
affairs they could at most be only suffered to suggest;
and even under the most moderate of despots, none but persons
of already admitted or reputed superiority could hope
that their suggestions would be known to, much less regarded
by, those who had the management of affairs. A person must
have a very unusual taste for intellectual exercise in and for
itself who will put himself to the trouble of thought when it
is to have no outward effect, or qualify himself for functions
which he has no chance of being allowed to exercise. The
only sufficient incitement to mental exertion, in any but a
few minds in a generation, is the prospect of some practical
use to be made of its results. It does not follow that the nation
will be wholly destitute of intellectual power. The common
business of life, which must necessarily be performed
by each individual or family for themselves, will call forth
some amount of intelligence and practical ability, within a
certain narrow range of ideas. There may be a select class of
savants who cultivate science with a view to its physical uses
or for the pleasure of the pursuit. There will be a bureaucracy,
and persons in training for the bureaucracy, who will
be taught at least some empirical maxims of government and
public administration. There may be, and often has been, a
systematic organization of the best mental power in the country
in some special direction (commonly military) to promote
the grandeur of the despot. But the public at large remain
without information and without interest on all greater
matters of practice; or, if they have any knowledge of them,
it is but a dilettante knowledge, like that which people have
of the mechanical arts who have never handled a tool. Nor is
it only in their intelligence that they suffer. Their moral capacities
are equally stunted. Wherever the sphere of action
of human beings is artificially circumscribed, their sentiments
are narrowed and dwarfed in the same proportion. The food
of feeling is action; even domestic affection lives upon voluntary
good offices. Let a person have nothing to do for his
country, and he will not care for it. It has been said of old
that in a despotism there is at most but one patriot, the despot
himself; and the saying rests on a just appreciation of the
effects of absolute subjection even to a good and wise master.
Religion remains; and here, at least, it may be thought, is
an agency that may be relied on for lifting men's eyes and
minds above the dust at their feet. But religion, even supposing
it to escape perversion for the purposes of despotism,
ceases in these circumstances to be a social concern, and narrows
into a personal affair between an individual and his
Maker, in which the issue at stake is but his private salvation.
Religion in this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish
and contracted egoism, and identifies the votary as little
in feeling with the rest of his kind as sensuality itself.
A good despotism means a government in which, so far as
depends on the despot, there is no positive oppression by
officers of state, but in which all the collective interests of
the people are managed for them, all the thinking that has
relation to collective interests done for them, and in which
their minds are formed by, and consenting to, this abdication
of their own energies. Leaving things to the government,
like leaving them to Providence, is synonymous with
caring nothing about them, and accepting their results, when
disagreeable, as visitations of Nature. With the exception,
therefore, of a few studious men who take an intellectual
interest in speculation for its own sake, the intelligence and
sentiments of the whole people are given up to the material
interests, and when these are provided for, to the amusement
and ornamentation of private life. But to say this is to
say, if the whole testimony of history is worth any thing,
that the era of national decline has arrived; that is, if the
nation had ever attained any thing to decline from.


This is the most accurate description of Communism in regards of civic life I've ever read.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

MishaK

Quote from: Florestan on July 31, 2013, 09:35:01 AM
This is the most accurate description of Communism in regards of civic life I've ever read.

You know, there are other despotisms besides Communism. In other words, this doesn't touch any peculiarities of Communism. All this describes is the fallout of accepting a despot with absolute power of whatever political ilk. It doesn't speak at all to the perniciousness of Communism and what top down absolute control of the economy and lack of private ownership of anything does to a society's development.

Florestan

Quote from: MishaK on July 31, 2013, 03:06:30 PM
You know, there are other despotisms besides Communism. In other words, this doesn't touch any peculiarities of Communism. All this describes is the fallout of accepting a despot with absolute power of whatever political ilk. It doesn't speak at all to the perniciousness of Communism and what top down absolute control of the economy and lack of private ownership of anything does to a society's development.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

The new erato

Quote from: Florestan on January 18, 2013, 12:16:05 AM
People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral. - Heinrich Heine

;D
It also took convictions to burn heretics at the stake.


kishnevi

Quote from: MishaK on July 31, 2013, 03:06:30 PM
You know, there are other despotisms besides Communism. In other words, this doesn't touch any peculiarities of Communism. All this describes is the fallout of accepting a despot with absolute power of whatever political ilk. It doesn't speak at all to the perniciousness of Communism and what top down absolute control of the economy and lack of private ownership of anything does to a society's development.

Actually, if one leaves out the portions specific to despotism, it's a fairly good description of USA 2013.

Wakefield

QuoteJames Reston wrote in The New York Times (July 7, 1957):
A health director... reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her
full-grown cat... Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The extensions of man (1964) 

:laugh:
"One of the greatest misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowards. They complain, keep quiet, dine and forget."
-- Voltaire

springrite

Some insightful Chinglish (Chinese English) word people here have invented to more accurately represent the situation here in China:

Democrazy
Freedamn
Smilence
Shitizen
Innernet
Departyment
Sexretary
Gunvernment
Goveruption
Do what I must do, and let what must happen happen.

Karl Henning

Very nice (although I had heard sexretary long since from, of all people, my high school band director).
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Parsifal

Quote from: karlhenning on August 14, 2013, 08:49:14 AM
Very nice (although I had heard sexretary long since from, of all people, my high school band director).

That's odd, because the band director in my high school got booted out for having sex with the students, not secretaries.

Karl Henning

After that post, it will not sound quite right to add that my high school band director did not have a secretary.

But that is the simple fact; and his behavior would have withstood the closest scrutiny.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

North Star

Charles Babbage, the English mathematician who developed the programmable computer, wrote to the young poet Tennyson. "In your otherwise beautiful poem," he said, "one verse reads,
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

" ... If this were true," he went on, "the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next edition of your poem should read:"
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

"Strictly speaking," Babbage added, "the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

kishnevi

Nothing actually insightful,  but certainly witty--seen on Facebook:
a New Hampshire licensce plate.  Currently, New Hampshire features as suitable decoration a moose on the left side.  The car owner ordered a vanity plate (as opposed to random assigned number) which reads

& SQIRL.


I'm sure Karl at least will appreciate that one.

Wakefield

QuoteI owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the far end of a hallway in a large country house on Calle Gaona, in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is misleadingly titled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal (though also laggardly) reprint of the 1902 Encyclopœdia Britannica.

The event took place about five years ago. Bioy Casares had come to dinner at my house that evening, and we had lost all track of time in a vast debate over the way one might go  about composing a first-person novel whose narrator would omit or distort things and engage in all sorts of contradictions, so that a few of the book's readers—a very few—might  divine the horrifying or banal truth. Down at that far end of the hallway, the mirror hovered, shadowing us. We discovered (very late at night  such a discovery is inevitable) that there is something monstrous about mirrors. That was when Bioy remembered a saying by one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar: Mirrors and copulation  are abominable, for they multiply the number
of mankind
. I asked him where he'd come across that memorable epigram, and he told me it was recorded in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar.

-- first two paragraphs from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", a short story by Jorge Luis Borges

:)
"One of the greatest misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowards. They complain, keep quiet, dine and forget."
-- Voltaire

Wakefield

Quote from: North Star on August 15, 2013, 09:17:24 AM
Charles Babbage, the English mathematician who developed the programmable computer, wrote to the young poet Tennyson. "In your otherwise beautiful poem," he said, "one verse reads,
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

" ... If this were true," he went on, "the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next edition of your poem should read:"
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

"Strictly speaking," Babbage added, "the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

It's interesting, but maybe, if something, "moment" is a poetical notion more than a mathematical one? I mean strictly speaking.  :D
"One of the greatest misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowards. They complain, keep quiet, dine and forget."
-- Voltaire

North Star

Quote from: Gordon Shumway on August 15, 2013, 09:46:23 PM
It's interesting, but maybe, if something, "moment" is a poetical notion more than a mathematical one? I mean strictly speaking.  :D
Nah, it's too hard to swallow that Tennyson was more interested in poetry than demography.  8)
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

Karl Henning

Quote from: Jeffrey Smith on August 15, 2013, 07:45:52 PM
Nothing actually insightful,  but certainly witty--seen on Facebook:
a New Hampshire licensce plate.  Currently, New Hampshire features as suitable decoration a moose on the left side.  The car owner ordered a vanity plate (as opposed to random assigned number) which reads

& SQIRL.


I'm sure Karl at least will appreciate that one.

As would any no-good-nik!
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Karl Henning

Quote from: North Star on August 16, 2013, 03:57:59 AM
Nah, it's too hard to swallow that Tennyson was more interested in poetry than demography.  8)

Too hard, as well, to imagine that a mathematician would be unaware that words have some non-quantifiable readings  :D
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot