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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 120893b | And did I lose my faith in raffles about the same time and for approximately the same reasons that I quit believing that virgins can have babies; or that if I slay only those people the government encourages me to slay, I'll be allowed to spend all of eternity in some vaguely located puffyland sipping milk and honey with a huzzahing throng of cheery nonthinkers? | Tom Robbins | ||
| bb2caf1 | this so-called animisn that not so much the Fan Nannies but everybody else around here subscribes to. can we really just write it off as primitive superstition run amok? Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can't we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine in them as in some ol' anthropomorphic Sunday school Boom Daddy with.. | Tom Robbins | ||
| e73a055 | But, Foley, my lad, it isn't beauty per se that makes wire-walking Zen or makes it art. It's the extremity of the risks that are assumed by each exquisite gesture, each impossible somersault. Here's a more extreme version of the dangerous beauty bullfights used to possess before the matadors became preening cowards and stacked the desk against the beasts. We only rise above mediocrity when there's something at stake, and I mean something mo.. | Tom Robbins | ||
| b5df0c8 | the notion of life implies a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment | Tom Robbins | ||
| 2f9551b | Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure? | Tom Robbins | ||
| 03ba283 | The old memories were making him angry, boiling up inside of him. That was good. It meant he was still alive. Dead men couldn't fight. Only living men, fuming at injustice and enraged at the loss of their fellows, fought, and won wars. "Cap'n," -- | Nick Webb | ||
| 3bec117 | long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produ.. | Nick Webb | ||
| 82ee12c | A few minutes later his XO appeared, saluting the marine guard as she crossed the threshold to the bridge, which sensibly resided deep within the armored core of the ship rather than being perched precariously on the top of the vessel like an old-style soda can on the fence, ready to be picked off as alien target practice. | Nick Webb | ||
| 182d6a6 | And it was gone--the super-carrier Justice. At least three thousand souls manning its gun crews, engine rooms, half a dozen flightdecks ... all gone in a brilliant, pixelated flash of light. The massive ship fractured into two main pieces, and the aliens, not content with the destruction, blasted the remaining larger half until it too exploded into several dozen smaller pieces. | Nick Webb | ||
| ae7ceeb | world of elliptical allusions and allegory. And a lot of what they wrote was designed | Terry Jones | ||
| 383754e | Labour had become expensive and your average lord could now make more money out of sheep than he could out of his peasants. There was more wool on sheep, for a start, and you could also eat them - which is possible with peasants but socially taboo - so the lords started to throw the expensive, troublesome and uneatable peasants off their land and replace them with sheep. The | Terry Jones | ||
| b9f970b | In the United States medical treatment is the third highest cause of death (iatrogenic death) after cancer and heart disease. So, despite our undoubted progress in understanding the chemistry and biological structure of the body, and great advances in the techniques of medical intervention, we are not exceeding the achievements of medieval doctors as much as we might expect. In their terms we are doing worse, because the objective of their .. | Terry Jones | ||
| e55038c | The world of the Druids had been destroyed and would not be revived. But the power of Rome was so much more brutal, more inhuman, more oppressive that it would not need an invasion to get rid of it. It withered because it was so hated by the people who had to endure it. And because most of them saw no point to it any more. | Terry Jones | ||
| b962473 | The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: .. | Terry Jones | ||
| 9a25495 | Criminal law, in which the state detects the offence, takes the accused to court and demands and imposes punishment, simply did not exist in early medieval society. | Terry Jones | ||
| 9334ad6 | Terry Jones' Barbarians is about all those peoples whom the Romans wrote off as uncivilized, but it's also a chance to take a look at the Romans themselves from an alternative point of view - from the point of view of the people they trashed. And as such it fits into a thesis we've been banging on about in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives and in Terry's radio series The Anti-Renaissance Show. That thesis is that we've all been sold a false histo.. | Terry Jones | ||
| d21a706 | But Decebalus was not one to be cowed easily, and still showed his spirit by taunting the Romans. As Trajan reached the Iron Gates, Decebalus sent him a warning inscribed rather surprisingly, according to Dio Cassius, on 'a large mushroom'. This was probably a mushroom-shaped dish used for ritual purposes, and sadly not the only instance in history of diplomatic correspondence by fungi. The inscription advised Trajan to turn back and 'keep .. | Terry Jones | ||
| d80f825 | Robbers of the world; having exhausted the land by their universal plunder, they rifle the deep. If their enemy is rich, they are rapacious; if he is poor, they lust for power; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. Robbery, slaughter and plunder they misname 'empire'; they make a wilderness and call it peace.45 | Terry Jones | ||
| 5b18538 | Oddly, none of the chroniclers who describe this 'sack of Rome' seem at all interested in the fact that what was being taken had actually been brought to the city as loot in the first place. And whereas the Romans had destroyed the places from which they took their plunder, not a single building in Rome was destroyed by the Vandals. | Terry Jones | ||
| 215452a | WHO WERE THE BARBARIANS? Nobody ever called themselves 'barbarians'. It's not that sort of word. It's a word used about other people. In fact, it's a term of otherness. It had been used by the Ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they couldn't understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: 'Ba ba ba'. The same word, Barbara, appears in Sanskrit, the language of ancient India, meaning 'stammering, gibberi.. | Terry Jones | ||
| 0d1aed9 | Today we expect but one thing from our doctors: to make us better. The medieval doctor was trying to do a lot more than that. He was taking care of the soul as well as the body. Unlike modern doctors he did not try to stop a patient dying at all costs . . . rather, if death seemed inevitable, he was duty-bound to try and help him or her die in the best possible way for their immortal soul. | Terry Jones | ||
| 747019d | From 235, over a period of 50 years, 49 men were proclaimed emperor by different groups of soldiers. We know that at least 25 of them were killed, not counting the three who committed suicide and one who seems to have been struck by lightning. In fact, apart from Gothicus, only one of them is known to have died a natural death - Valerian, who held on to the job for seven years and was safely locked away as a prisoner of the Persians when he.. | Terry Jones | ||
| ef4f20a | Oddly enough, fear seems to have played a key role in the history of Rome, and despite the might and power of the Romans, there is something curiously desperate about their whole story. It's almost as if the grandeur of Rome was born of paranoia and desperation. | Terry Jones | ||
| ddaacba | They agreed to pay 5000 lb of gold, 30,000 of silver, 3000 scarlet sheepskins (the Goths must have been a very well turned out army) and 3000 lb of pepper (they were already, of course, well seasoned). | Terry Jones | ||
| 5c54a93 | So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| fdcdf2a | What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 02e6d8e | There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 653319a | When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting .. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 86e674a | The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who -- with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and .. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 3112f40 | The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inq.. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 2b8634f | Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| a2fbb33 | Morality, as I understand it, has to do particularly with how we ought to conduct ourselves in our relations with others. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| fc07809 | The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 2de11bb | What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say. It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main.. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| 3b637e7 | When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially.. | critical-examination critical-thinking depiction logic marketing philosophy reality speech truth | Harry G. Frankfurt | |
| 93e3023 | From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough. | Harry G. Frankfurt | ||
| cec8cbe | Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer? | tank | Charles Stross | |
| c965304 | We are, after all, . | Charles Stross | ||
| 17a72e2 | He put this engine [a silver pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out th.. | timelessness | Jonathan Swift | |
| cef2836 | Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 0c72771 | When I gave that free censure of the country and its inhabitants, he made no further answer than by telling me, "that I had not been long enough among them to form a judgment; and that the different nations of the world had different customs;" | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 6cb90e6 | I should perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 2b59555 | leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labour while we were in the ship. | Jonathan Swift | ||
| 943ebb3 | frequently exercised in my sight, to accustom themselves to me. | Jonathan Swift |