–J.A. Whipple, early daguerreotype of the moon. February 26, 1852. From the Harvard Daguerreotype Collection.
People who frequent low drinking resorts eight nights a week are liable to get –vulgarity says it best– they get fucked up. They are assaulted by too much truth and, at the same time, too many lies; they lose their sense of proportion, of balance; their vision of reality is chronically blurred by alcohol and elation and hangover and depression; they get manic, they are at turns garrulous and quarrelsome, their dispositions sour, they fight among themselves over imagined slights and shadowy suspicions; in the dark of their minds they brood upon mortality and, worse, upon the death of love. A dreadful affliction, all in all….
—Ed McClanahan, Famous People I Have Known. 1986, Penguin Books
While we ate we talked. People say that conversation is a lost art: how often I have wished it were.
American girls are getting larger all the time, and she was a woman of the future.
—Randall Jarrell, Pictures From An Institution. 1954, University of Chicago Press
In the mid-centre of America a man can go blank for a long, long time. There is no community to give him life; so he can get lost as if he were in a jungle. No one will pay any attention. He can simply be as lost as if he had gone into the heart of an empty continent. A sensitive child can be lost too amidst all the emptiness and ghostliness. I am filled with terror when I think of the emptiness and ghostliness of mid-America. The rigors of conquest have made us spiritually insulated against human values. No fund of instinct and experience has been accumulated, and each generation seems to be more impoverished than the last.
It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man’s creative powers. Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as subject as the rest of creation.
—E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. 1973, Perennial Library
The council, which assembled on this occasion, was conspicuous for the absence of the essential thing known among the common people as common sense. In general, we somehow don’t seem to be made for representative assemblies.
…after organizing some charitable society for the benefit of the poor and subscribing a considerable sum, we at once gave a dinner to the prominent dignitaries of the town in honor of so laudable an undertaking and, needless to say, spend half of the subscribed funds on it; with what is left of the money we at once rent magnificent offices with heating facilities and porters for the members of the committee, and all that is left for the poor is five and a half rubles, and even over the distribution of this sum the members cannot agree.
—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls. 1842, Penguin Classics
Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, most chimpanzees, in fact all that have been observed, persist in being good chimpanzees, and do not become quasi-human morons. Nevertheless I think that the average psychologist is rather longingly hoping for that chimpanzee who will disgrace his simian ancestry by adhering to more human modes of conduct.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. 1950, Avon/Discus
What a country calls its its vital economic interests are not the same things which allow its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
—Simone Weil, The Need For Roots. 1949, Beacon Press
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