From about the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Japanese poets practiced several versions of linked poetry.
With his rice and soup
the provincial taking
lodging
has no taste for flowers
a lamp lights the
evening hours
as the spring season lingers on.
Earl Miner, Japanese Linked Poetry
In the summer of 1960, jazz composer and alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell recorded This is Our Music for Atlantic Records.
They both challenged and reconstituted the ongoing stratification and sanctification of American culture during the 1960s.
Iain Anderson, This is Our Music
Before coming to constitute the subject of a particular branch of mathematics, the notion of set emerged as a useful tool for study of diverse problems in function theory, analysis, algebra and even geometry.
To this extent, Bourbaki was right and simply expressed the working convictions of the 20th century mathematician.
José Ferreirós, Labyrinth of Thought
How do we detect when a society is in trouble—real trouble?
It may even be that far reaching change will come much earlier and much faster than many now imagine.
Gar Alperowitz, America Beyond Capitalism
A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.
And as we become more comfortable with living in an information age, we can shed some of our anxieties about it.
Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety
“And you think that something happended…” Detective-Sergeant de Gier said hesitatingly, stressing the word “happended.”
“Soon” de Gier said, and hung up.
Janwillem van de Wetering, The Japanese Corpse
Schumpeter first used the phrase creative destruction in 1942, to describe how innovative capitalist products and methods continually displace old ones.
No matter how many times the experience is repeated, there always seems to be something new to discover.
Thomas K. McGraw, Prophet of Innovation
The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided.
And then—
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
It was a funeral to which they all came.
He died believing he had won his war.
Neal Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.
But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.
John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
It frequently happens in the history of thought that when a powerful new method emerges the study of those problems which can be dealt with by the new method advances rapidly and attracts the limelight, while the rest tends to be ignored or even forgotten, its study despised.
Unfortunately the deductivist style and the atomisation of the mathematical knowledge protect ‘degenerate’ papers to a very considerable degree.
Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations
Tony Cicoria was forty-two, very fit and robust, a former college football player who had become a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York.
Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity, and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and to others, at least for a while.
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
The letter, several pages in length and signed by Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, was addressed to Commander Thomas O. Selfridge.
The lock gates appeared to swing effortlessly and with no perceptible sound.
David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas
Once there was a man who sought after hidden knowledge.
In the long run we may find that they have greatly aided us toward the true transmutations we need.
Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul is about computation—taken in the broadest possible sense.
One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect.
Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
It was a dead time in the London underground — after lunch and before rush hour — when the last plaintive notes of a Chopin nocturne floated from Katie O’Brien’s violin down the tiled corridor.
And then she walked away.
Martha Grimes, The Anodyne Necklace
The value of Earth as man’s heritage, or of Man as earth’s great heritage, is gone far from him now in any big city centralization as built (but never designed).
in that lies hope.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City
The performers (in other words, the reader) are requested to refer back on the score to the third variation, M241, From Honey to Ashes, II, i.
In the present century, when man is actively destroying countless living forms, after wiping out so many societies whose wealth and diversity had, from time immemorial, constituted the better part of his inheritance, it has probably never been more necessary to proclaim, as do the myths, that sound humanism does not begin with oneself, but puts the world before life, live before man, and respect for others before self-interest: and that no species, not even our own, can take the fact of having been on this earth for one or two million years — since, in any case, mans stay here will one day come to an end — as an excuse for appropriating the world as if it were a thing and behaving on it with neither decently nor discretion.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Origin of Table Manners
His name was Paul Lewis…
…and
he didn't know he had seven minutes to live.
And he screamed.
Duane Swierczynski, Severence Package
What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I would like to claim for it is that of being true, at least in parts.
And as against (2), I should certainly like to say that nowhere could, to me, be a nicer place to lecture in than Harvard.
J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words
A small window in the sunlit, yellow side of the Hôtel Beauregard, Mentone, opened slowly, and through it a hand appeared, which, after depositing a compact brown suitcase upon the sill, speedily vanished.
Amanda was asleep.
Margery Allingham, Sweet Danger
The emperor of China sits on a raised dais in a vast hall thronged with the mandarins in their embroidered robes.
The effort will have to be greater than any other the Vietnamese have undertaken, but it will have to come, for it is the only way the Vietnamese of the south can restore their country and their history to themselves.
Francis FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake
MARRIAGES Wimsey-Vane
— John Donne, ECOLOGUE FOR THE MARRIAGE OF THE EARL OF SOMERSET
Dorothy Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon
It was an exceptionally clear summer morning.
The challenge was to put it to work in ways that would make me a stronger, better leader.
Rudolph Giuliani, Leadership
This study was undertaken as a result of the writer’s desire to re-evaluate the book that has served to the present day as the primary source of information about the theory and practice of Neo-Impressionism: Paul Signac’s D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionnisme (Paris, 1899).
Had he lived well into the twentieth century, European and American painting might have benefited all the more from the influence of his fertile mind and brush.
William Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting
As we approach the twenty-first century, a remarkable convergence of political and economic institutions has taken place around the world.
Now that the questions of ideology and institutions has been settled, the preservation and accumulation of social capital will occupy center stage.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
The propensity to barter and exchange is an innate human characteristic.
The pendulum swings back and forth between economic liberty and constraint.
Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost
In the fall of 1981 there appeared, with a complete absence of fanfare, the first of three books I have set out to write on the subject of right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981).
And we owe it to the democracies that have given us to much, and to our quest for the truth, to preserve the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Bob Altemeyer, Enemies of Freedom
While it is not strictly true that I caused the two great financial crises of the late twentieth century—the 1987 stock market crash and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund debacle 11 years later—let’s just say I was in the vicinity.
But, like the coarse response mechanism of the cockroach, when faced with the inevitable march of events that we cannot even contemplate, simpler financial instruments and less leverage will create a market that is more robust and survivable.
Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design
February 1968: It is early morning in Wisconsin, in Appleton, air heavy with the rot of wood pulp.
It is comforting — needed comfort — to reflect that this is so, that we can survive our own creed’s dissolution; for Nixon, by embodying that creed, by trying to bring it back to life, has at last reduced it to absurdity.
Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes
Nietzsche became a myth even before he died in 1900, and today his ideas are overgrown and obscured by rank fiction.
He offered fascinating ideas and theories, but he also taught “the courage for an attack on one’s convictions” (XVI, 318).
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche
Part I of this book examines the process of formulation of classical political economy, or the evolution of the ‘theories of surplus’.
Most strikingly, it has provided an overview of the variety of that development while the guides for further reading which accompany each chapter indicate the variety of interpretation to which this epilogue draws attention.
Gianni Vaggi and Peter Groenewegen, A Concise History of Economic Thought
It’s really your parents’ fault.
Somebody made the connection and wondered if Disney had been frozen too.
William Poundstone, Big Secrets
One day in the late 1980s, as a young graduate student coming home from the university campus, I was waiting for the bus in downtown Los Angeles when I was approached by two homeless women who were begging beside the bus stop on what was a bitterly cold night.
My hope is that when we do this we will be unable to look at the subject of religion and politics in quite the same way again.
Brendan Sweetman, Why Politics Needs Religion
The first version, that of 1926 I believe: a carefully drawn pipe, and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking, artificial script, a script from the convent, like that found heading the notebook of schoolboys, or on a blackboard after an object lesson), this note: “This is not a pipe.”
Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.
Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe
More than three hundred and fifty thousands persons, since 1921, have been members of the public speaking courses using this book.
You will get out of them only what you put into them—nothing more, nothing less.
Dale Carnegie, Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business
—Yes, you wrote me the title of your book.
The end.
Andrew Field, Nabokov, His Life in Part
If mathematics is the Queen of Sciences, as the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss christened it in the nineteenth century, then physics is king.
There’s not much more one could ask for in this life without being wishful.
Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant
When King Lear proposes “our darker purpose” as the subdivision of his kingdom, he is expressing a politically daring and avant-garde intent for the early seventeenth century:
Only we still retain
The name, and all th’ additions to a king. The sway,
Revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons, be yours; which to confirm,
This coronet part betwixt you.
These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media into any society whatever, need special study and will be the subject of another volume on Understanding Media in the world of our time.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Buddhism enjoys a unique place in Asian history, as the single shared experience among half the world’s population.
The Prajnaparamita is especially effective in its portrayal of the feminine ideal, for it surpasses the idealism of a world of countless Venus, goddess and Madonna images, to project an aura of assurance and power usually reserved for male figures.
Robert E. Fisher, Buddhist Art and Architecture
Gordon McKay based his plan for a new city in the West on bees because of their energy.
Soon he would be among the classes, enjoying their gratitude, feeling at ease and light-hearted.
Thomas McMahon, McKay’s Bees
A man was crossing a river with his wife and mother.
The clock is ticking.
William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma
In New York State, Route 9 is Broadway.
Would I lie to you?
Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Snapper
The man sitting across the desk from Charlie Bradshaw was one of the wealthiest men in Saratoga Springs.
“And don’t forget the bacon.”
Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Bestiary
She was thirty and lived in a terraced bungalow colony on the south slope of a low mountain range in western Germany, just above the fumes of a big city.
She was lightly dressed, with no blanket on her knees.
Peter Handke, The Left-Handed Woman
War is not the continuation of policy by other means.
Unless we insist on denying it, our future, like that of the last Easter Islanders, may belong to the men with bloodied hands.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare
Who as ever dreamed that he has become a murderer and from then on has only been carrying on with his usual life for the sake of appearances?
Apart from the suit, which was light blue, the man was wearing white socks and yellow shoes; he was walking fast, and his loosely knotted tie swung to and fro…
Peter Handke, A Moment of True Feeling
It’s been almost ten years since I first ran for political office.
My heart is filled with love for this country.
Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
It was to be the consultant physician’s last visit and Dalgliesh suspected that neither of them regretted it, arrogance and patronage on one side and weakness, gratitude and dependence on the other being no foundation for a satisfactory adult relationship however transitory.
Wrong diagnosis or not, it was nice of them, he thought sleepily, looking up into the ring of smiling eyes, to look so pleased that he wasn’t going to die after all.
P.D. James, The Black Tower
In the early 1950s, the Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann was toying with the idea of machines that make machines.
Creation can be simple.
William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe
Charlie Bradshaw was leaving Saratoga.
He had, after all, found Sam Chaney.
Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Longshot
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull.
So Yevgenia’s second book too was a Black Swan.
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
The little girl stood in her flannel nightdress holding the telephone receiver.
Then he turned with his coat slung over his shoulder and walked out into the dark where, not far away, the prison rose through the mists of Dartmoor and hung over Princetown like a huge raven.
Martha Grimes, Help the Poor Struggler
In the twentieth century it is not easy to comprehend the view that prevailed a few hundred years ago as to the nature of life and living creatures.
Future discoveries may soon render inescapable the conclusion toward which science has for so long been trending—that the regular and predictable operation of a single body of physical law is sufficient, without supplementation by any form of extra-scientific or “vitalistic” principle, to account for all aspects of human experience.
Dean Wooldrigdge, The Machinery of Life
Why is the mastery of risk such a uniquely modern concept?
It is for this reason that probability is to us the “guide of life” since to us, as Locke says, “in the greatest part of our concernment, God has afforded only the Twilight, as I may say, of Probability, suitable I presume, to the state of Mediocrity and Probationership He has been pleased to place us in here.”
Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods
On the morning of Bernie Pryde’s death—or it may have been the morning after, since Bernie died at is own convenience, nor did he think the estimated time of his departure worth recording—Cordelia was caught in a breakdown of the Bakerloo Line outside Lambeth North and was half an hour late at the office.
Won’t you come in?
P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
In some very important respects, the institution of war is clearly in decline.
If the process continues, war, already substantially reduced to its thuggish remnants, will recede from the human experience.
John Mueller, The Remnants of War
Where do problems come from, and what do with do with them once we have them?
As with the case of turning Euclid’s parallel postulate inside out and asking “What-If-Not” with regard to a 2000-year-old assumption, we need at the very least to entertain the possibility that our most cherished beliefs might not only be wrong but meaningless as well!
Stephen Brown and Marion Walker, The Art of Problem Posing
Thomas John Watson began his life at age 40, after Dayton, Ohio, nearly ruined him.
Watson would probably approve, seeing the business blood lines running from IBM’s past out into its future.
Kevin Maney, The Maverick and his Machine
The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as sliver rods.
Arms about each other’s shoulders, the Babbitt men marched into the living-room and faced the swooping family.
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Reasoning, says Shopenhauer, is of feminine nature: it can give only after it has received.
It is one of the rewards we learn for thinking by what we see.
Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking
A thunderclap preceded sudden hard-driving ran, blotting out the shots, two insignificant little bangs compared to the divine anger bursting forth, booming in splendor.
Such horribly foul language.
Janwillem van de Wetering, Hard Rain
This page last modified on 11 January 2009.