Quotes
[B]ut what did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musique when the Angell comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me; and endeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife; that neither then, nor all the evening going home and at home, I was able to think of anything, but remained all night transported, so as I could not believe that ever any music hath that real command over the soul of a man as this did upon me[.]
Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1669
The criterion of selection here is the exact opposite to that of a press agent. Instead of picking a quotably flattering phrase out of context from an otherwise tepid review, the Lexicon of Musical Invective cites biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgments.
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of musical invective: critical assaults on composers since Beethoven's time, New York, 2000, p. 3
En mi corta experiencia de narrador he comprobado que saber cómo habla un personaje es saber quién es, que descubrir una entonación, una voz, una sintaxis peculiar, es haber descubierto un destino.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Spanish language in South America —a literary problem. El Gaucho Martín Fierro, London, 1964, p. 11
El más urgente de los problemas de nuestra época (ya denunciado con profética lucidez por el casi olvidado Spencer) es la gradual intromisión del Estado en los actos del individuo; en la lucha con ese mal, cuyos nombres son comunismo y nazismo, el individualismo argentino, acaso inútil o perjudicial hasta ahora, encontrará justificación y deberes.
Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones, Buenos Aires, 1952
I will now say something of what happened to me from and including my 80th birthday up to the end of 1968. I will begin with my 80th birthday.
December 30th., 1967 naturally began with showers of congratulatory letters and telegrams, and with some gifts. Among these, I will single out for mention a telegram from Bertrand Russell, a card of good wishes from the Kitchen Staff, and the gift of a beautiful silver penknife from Dr Husband.
At 4.20 pm, Bradfield fetched me in his car to his home, where I had tea with him and his wife and his son (“The Nord’). There was a superb cake with 80 candles, all of which I managed to blow out with one breath. (The practice of emitting hot air, of which philosophy so largely consists, had no doubt been a good training for me.)
C. D. Broad, Autobiographical notes (August 24 1954 to December 31 1968), in Joel Walmsley (ed.) C. D. Broad: key unpublished writings, London, 2022, pp. 13-110, pp. 82–83
Readers who have derived their ideas of Victorian Nonconformity and the middle-class Victorian home mainly from the novels and plays of left-wing writers of some fifty years ago, will be apt to jump to the conclusion that life in my grand-parents’ house was a drab and stuffy existence, punctuated by religious exercises, to which resentful and hypocritical children were driven by fanatical and gloomy parents. They had better dismiss that romantic rubbish from their minds at once.
C. D. Broad, Autobiography, in Paul A. Schilpp (ed.) The philosophy of C.D. Broad, New York, 1959, pp. 3–68, p. 10
Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del Mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.
Jorge Luis Borges, Discusión, Buenos Aires, 1932
The end of Education is to render the individual, as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings.
James Mill, Education, in Macvey Napier (ed.) Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, London, 1825
[Amos Tversky’s] confidence and brilliance combined to make for a cutting sense of humor. After he had given a talk, an English statistician approached him and said, “I don’t usually like Jews, but I like you.” Tversky responded, “I usually like Englishmen, but I don’t like you.”
David Leonhardt, From Michael Lewis, the story of two friends who changed how we think about the way we think, The New York Times, 2016
When an encyclopaedia is published in instalments, the later volumes will always contain items which were certainly not included in the original schedule. An example which reflects high credit on the editor’s ingenuity is to be found in the first volume of the Schweizer Lexikon, which came out in the autumn of 1945. Look up ‘Atom bomb’ and you will see that the leads have been deleted from the column so as to gain an additional line for ‘Atom bomb, see Nuclear Physics’!
Sigfrid H. Steinberg, Encylopaedias, Signature, vol. 12, 1951, pp. 3–22, p. 20
Disappointingly, rather than addressing this problem, many scientists in the fields of education, psychology, and sociology simply pretend it doesn’t apply to them. The sociologist Jeremy Freese summarized the situation as follows: Currently, many quarters of social science still practice a kind of epistemological tacit collusion, in which genetic confounding potentially poses significant problems for inference but investigators do not address it in their own work or raise it in evaluating the work of others. Such practice involves wishful assumptions if our world is one in which “everything is heritable.” Freese was writing in 2008, but the situation now is no different. Open almost any issue of a scientific journal in education or developmental psychology or sociology, and you will find paper after paper announcing correlations between parental characteristics and child development outcomes. Parental income and child brain structure. Maternal depression and child intelligence. Each of these papers represents a massive amount of investigator time and public investment in the research process, and each of these papers has, in Freese’s words, an “incisive, significant, and easily explained flaw”—that differences in children’s environments are entangled with the genetic differences between them, but no serious effort is being expended toward disentangling them.
The tacit collusion among many social scientists to ignore genetics is motivated, I believe, by well-intentioned but ultimately misguided fears—the fear that even considering the possibility of genetic influence implies a biodeterminism or genetic reductionism they would find abhorrent, the fear that genetic data will inexorably be misused to classify people in ways that strip them of rights and opportunities. Certainly, there are misuses of genetic data that need to be guarded against […]. But while researchers might have good intentions, the widespread practice of ignoring genetics in social science research has significant costs.
In the past few years, the field of psychology has been rocked by a “replication crisis,” in which it has become clear that many of the field’s splashy findings, published in the top journals, could not be reproduced and are likely to be false. Writing about the methodological practices that led to the mass production of illusory findings (practices known as “p-hacking”), the psychologist Joseph Simmons and his colleagues wrote that “everyone knew [p-hacking] was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it is wrong to jaywalk.” Really, however, “it was wrong the way it is wrong to rob a bank.”
Like p-hacking, the tacit collusion in some areas of the social science to ignore genetic differences between people is not wrong in the way that jaywalking is wrong. Researchers are not taking a victimless shortcut by ignoring something (genetics) that is only marginally relevant to their work. It’s wrong in the way that robbing banks is wrong. It’s stealing. It’s stealing people’s time when researchers work to churn out critically flawed scientific papers, and other researchers chase false leads that will go nowhere. It’s stealing people’s money when taxpayers and private foundations support policies premised on the shakiest of causal foundations. Failing to take genetics seriously is a scientific practice that pervasively undermines our stated goal of understanding society so that we can improve it.
Kathryn Paige Harden, The genetic lottery: why DNA matters for social equality, Princeton, 2021, pp. 185–186
There are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. For example, if I do something stupid when I’m driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it’s not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun.
Steven Pinker, A history of violence: Edge master class 2011, Edge.org, 2011
[H]asta ahora el asunto se ha debatido entre los elogios de los adictos y las diatribas de los adversos—unos y otras sin mesura—pues para esos y éstos la verdad era una consecuencia de sus entusiasmos, no el objetivo principal. Tan escolásticos los clericales como los jacobinos, ambos adoptaron una posición absoluta y una inflexible lógica para resolver el problema, empequeñeciendo su propio criterio al encastillarse en tan rígidos principios; pero es justo convenir en que el jacobinismo sufrió la más cabal derrota, infligida por sus propias armas, vale decir el humanitarismo y la libertad. Producto de la misma tendencia á la cual combatía por metafísica y fanática, el instrumento escolástico falló en su poder, tanto como triunfaba en el del adversario para quien era habitual, puesto que durante siglos había constituído su órgano de relación por excelencia, cuando no su más perfecta arma defensiva. Uno y otro descuidaron, sin embargo, el antecedente principal—la filiación de la orden discutida y de la empresa que realizó. Dando por establecido que los jesuitas son absolutamente buenos ó absolutamente malos, el estudio de su obra no era ya una investigación, sino un alegato; resultando así que para unos, las Misiones representan un dechado de perfección social y de sabiduría política, mientras equivalen para los otros al más negro despotismo y á la más dura explotación del esfuerzo humano. No pretendo colocarme en el alabado justo medio, que los metafísicos de la historia consideran garante de imparcialidad, suponiendo á las dos exageraciones igual dosis de certeza, pues esto constituiría una nueva forma de escolástica, siendo también posición absoluta; algo más de verdad ha de haber en una ú otra, sin que pertenezca totalmente á ninguna[.]
Leopoldo Lugones, El imperio jesuítico: ensayo histórico, Buenos Aires, 1904, pp. 9–11
The caption under his picture identified him as Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, Director of the Intelligence Bureau of the Serbian General Staff. But at Belgrade’s political cafes one knew much more than that about him. There, whispers referred to him as Apis—the sacred bull of ancient Egypt.
Like his namesake he was a myth to his adherents. No ordinary earthly concerns tethered him: no wife, no lover, no family, no children, neither hobby nor recreation. He was not the liver of a life but the demon of an idea. At night he slept a few hours at his brother-in-law’s. The rest of his time he spent in the Belgrade Ministry of War, in an office whirring with telephone wires, telegraph keys, decoding devices, couriers and departing. Restaurants and theaters did not exist him. He was beyond normal frivolities. All his waking arriving for hours served one unmerciful passion: to carve Greater Serbia out of the rotting body of the Habsburg Empire.
Frederic Morton, Thunder at twilight: Vienna 1913/1914, New York, 1989, pp. 190–191
To illustrate the counter-intuitive nature of power-law distributions, consider a world where the heights of Americans are power-law distributed, but with the same average as reality (about 1.7 m), and I line them up in a random order. In this world, nearly 60,000 Americans would be as tall as the tallest adult male on record (2.72 m), 10,000 individuals would be as tall as an adult male giraffe, one would be as tall as the Empire State Building (381 m), and 180 million diminutive individuals would stand only 17 cm tall. As we run down the line of people, we would repeatedly observe long runs of relatively short heights, one after another, and then, rarely, we would encounter a person so astoundingly tall that their singular presence would dramatically shift our estimate of the average or variance of all heights. This is the kind of pattern that we see in the sizes of wars.
Aaron Clauset, On the frequency and severity of interstate wars, in Nils Petter Gleditsch (ed.) Lewis Fry Richardson: His Intellectual Legacy and Influence in the Social Sciences, Cham, 2020, pp. 113–127, p. 116
En 1988—siendo ya titular de Sociología—la Audiencia de Palma me condenó a dos años y un día de reclusión, al considerarme culpable de narcotráfico. La pena pedida por el fiscal—seis años—se redujo a un tercio, pues a juicio de la Sala el delito se hallaba «en grado de tentativa imposible». Efectivamente, quienes ofrecían vender y quienes ofrecían comprar—por medio de tres usuarios interpuestos (uno de ellos yo mismo)—eran funcionarios de policía o peones suyos. Apenas una semana después de este fallo, la Audiencia de Córdoba apreciaba en el mismo supuesto un caso de delito provocado, donde procede anular cualesquiera cargos, con una interpretación que andando el tiempo llegó a convertirse en jurisprudencia de nuestro país.
Receloso de lo que pudiera acabar sucediendo con el recurso al Supremo—en un litigio donde cierto ciudadano alegaba haber sido chantajeado por la autoridad en estupefacientes, mientras ella le acusaba de ser un opulento narco, que oculta su imperio criminal tras la pantalla del estudioso—preferí cumplir la condena sin demora. Como aclaró entonces un magistrado del propio Supremo, el asunto lo envenenaba el hecho de ser yo un portavoz del reformismo en la materia, notorio ya desde 1983. Dado el caso, absolver sin condiciones incriminaba de alguna manera al incriminador, y abría camino para exigir una escandalosa reparación.
Tras algunas averiguaciones, descubrí que en el penal de Cuenca—gracias a su comprensivo director—me concedían las tres cosas necesarias para aprovechar una estancia semejante: interruptor de luz dentro de la celda, un arcaico PC y aislamiento. Durante aquellas vacaciones humildes, aunque pagadas, se redactaron cuatro quintas partes de esta obra.
Antonio Escohotado, Historia general de las drogas, Madrid, 2002, pp. 9–10
I would like to acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Joe Bankman and our sons, Sam and Gabe. When Sam was about fourteen, he emerged from his bedroom one evening and said to me, seemingly out of the blue, “What kind of person dismisses an argument they disagree with by labelling it ‘the Repugnant Conclusion’?” Clearly, things were not as I, in my impoverished imagination, had assumed them to be in our household. Restless minds were at work making sense of the world around them without any help from me. In the years since, both Sam and Gabe have become take-no-prisoners utilitarians, joining their father in that hardy band. I am not (yet?) a card-carrying member myself, but in countless discussions around the kitchen table, literally and figuratively, about the subject of this book, they have taught me at least as much as I have taught them. More importantly, they have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person—alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us—as one.
Barbara H. Fried, Facing Up to Scarcity: The Logic and Limits of Nonconsequentialist Thought, Oxford, 2020, p. xv
I taught a class with Ken Arrow and John Rawls in ’68-’69. I was visiting here at Harvard. Arrow was then on the faculty of Harvard for some years, and Rawls was very established at Harvard. So the three of us together, we did a class on justice and social choice, which was quite fun. I remember, while flying to a meeting in Washington, my neighbor on the plane asked me what did I do? I said, “I teach in Delhi, but at the moment I’m visiting Harvard.” I told him that I’m concerned with justice and social choice involving aggregation of individuals’ disparate views. And he said, “Oh, let me tell you: There is a very interesting class taught by Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls, and some unknown guy on this very subject. You should check it out!”
Amartya Sen, I, The Harvard Gazette, 2021
The possibility of the destruction of mankind was always in his mind. Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones.
As mentioned before, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had made a great impression on the President. “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,” he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. “If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move. I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary.”
After it was finished, he made no statement attempting to take credit for himself or for the Administration for what had occurred. He instructed all members of the Ex Comm and government that no interview should be given, no statement made, which would claim any kind of victory. He respected Khrushchev for properly determining what was in his own country’s interest and what was in the interest of mankind. If it was a triumph, it was a triumph for the next generation and not for any particular government or people.
At the outbreak of the First World War the ex-Chancellor of Germany, Prince von Bülow, said to his successor, “How did it all happen?” “Ah, if only we knew,” was the reply.
Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen days: A memoir of the cuban missile crisis, New York, 1969
Although I will be defending a hierarchical approach to animal ethics, I do so with considerable misgivings, for I am afraid that some may come away thinking that my aim is to defend an approach that would justify much or all of our current treatment of animals. […] [N]othing like this is remotely the case. Our treatment of animals is a moral horror of unspeakable proportions, staggering the imagination. Absolutely nothing that I say here is intended to offer any sort of justification for the myriad appalling and utterly unacceptable ways in which we mistreat, abuse, and torture animals. […] [I]t seems to me to be true both that animals count for less than people and yet, for all that, that they still count sufficiently that there is simply no justification whatsoever for anything close to current practices.
Shelly Kagan, How to count animals, more or less, Oxford, 2019, pp. 4–5