Chris Leggatt > Chris's Quotes

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Often I've thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the differing political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under the new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood, caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on in my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination
they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Religions are like glow-worms: they need darkness in order to shine. A certain degree of general ignorance is the condition for the existence of any religion.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“Immediate reality is conditional upon individual consciousness. Thus the individual real existence of man also lies first and foremost in his consciousness. But this is as such necessarily ideational, and thus conditioned by the intellect and by the sphere and substance of the intellect's activity. The degree of clarity of consciousness, and consequently of thought, can therefore be regarded as the degree of reality of existence. But this degree of thought, or of clear consciousness of ones own existence and that of others, varies very greatly within the human race itself according to the measure of natural intellectual power, the extent to which this is developed, and the amount of leisure available for reflection.

- On Psychology”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion

“Do you think Americans are just too open and outgoing for their own good? Do Europeans still make fun of Americans on this count?' David asked.
Foucault replied, 'Yes, I have heard Europeans scoff at American friendliness, the American way of 'being nice', but they are mistaken. We spend a lot of time with strangers, so why not enjoy it? We probably spend at least three-fourths of our time in very short encounters with people, in chance encounters. This way of relating to people, then, is very important. Why buy hostility with your groceries? Be friendly with the checker and the stock clerk! Antagonism against each other only saps the energy that could and should be directed against the systems of power that oppress us.”
― Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]

“I now see the intellectual as something of a functionary. There are so many different types of intellectuals today. Some university intellectuals collaborate with business types, and there are other kind of intellectuals who sit on committees dealing with community problems. The intellectual is a toolmaker, and he cannot dictate or even foreknow how the tools he creates will be used by the people. Even in this respect the intellectual is not a prophet.'
'So you reject the whole Leninist-Lukács notion of the avant-garde, the party intellectuals who perceive the truth the masses can't see,' Call concluded.'
'Absolutely.”
― Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]

“old people have to go to children's or most often to rest homes where they are shunted into wheelchairs and made as fast as possible into zombies cause it's easier to handle a zombie, if you have to handle anything, than a human.”
― Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979

“glory be to those humans who are absolutely NOTHING for the opinions of other humans: they are the true owners of illusions, transformations and themselves”
― Kathy Acker, New York City in 1979

“These false conspiracy theories are a problem. They hurt individuals by affecting their life choices, in terms of money, health, and social interactions. They hurt society by distracting from the very real problems of corruption and decreasing citizens’ genuine participation in democracy.”
― Mick West, Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect

“The data that drives algorithms isn't just a few numbers now. It's monstrous tables of millions of numbers, thousands upon thousands of rows and columns of numbers....Matrices are created and refined by computers endlessly churning through Big Data's records on everyone, and everything they've done. No human can read those matrices, even with computers helping you interpret them they are simply too large and complex to fully comprehend. But the computers can use them, applying the appropriate matrix to show us the appropriate video that will eventually lead us to make an appropriate purchase. We are not living in "The Matrix," but there's still a matrix controlling us. What does this have to do with the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? It has everything to do with it. These algorithms are quickly becoming the primary route down the rabbit hole. To a large extent this has already happened, but it's going to get far, far worse. Tufekci described what happened when she tried watching different types of content on YouTube. She started watching videos of Donald Trump rallies. 'I wanted to write about one of [Donald Trump]'s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme. If you watch Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays [left-wing] conspiracy videos, and it goes downhill from there." Downhill, into the rabbit hole....Without human intervention the algorithm has evolved to a perfect a method of gently stepping up the intensity of the conspiracy videos that it shows you so that you don't get turned off, and so you continue to watch. They get more intense because the algorithm has found (not in any human sense, but found nonetheless) that the deeper it can guide people down the rabbit hole, the more revenue it can make.”
― Mick West, Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect

“To explode or to implode – said Qfwfq – that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration.”
― Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon

“I should have been happy: as I had dreamed, I was alone with her, that intimacy with the Moon I had so often envied my cousin and with Mrs Vhd Vhd was now my exclusive prerogative, a month of days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us, the crust of the satellite nourished us with its milk, whose tart flavour was familiar to us, we raised our eyes up, up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen, or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.”
― Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon

“I shall relate quite simply how things happened and without adding anything of my own, which is no small feat for an historian.”
― Voltaire, Micromegas

“He spoke to them with great kindness, although in the depths of his heart he was a little angry that the infinitely small had an almost infinitely great pride.”
― Voltaire, Micromegas

“I do not understand Greek very well," said the giant.

"Neither do I," said the philosophical mite.

"Why then," the Sirian retorted, "are you citing some man named Aristotle in the Greek?"

"Because," replied the savant, "one should always cite what one does not understand at all in the language one understands the least.”
― Voltaire, Micromegas

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii)”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else's luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“Kick is seeing things from a special angle. Kick is momentary freedom from the claims of the aging, cautious, nagging, fightened flesh.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not. Gains went further. He was not merely negative. He was positively invisible; a vague respectable presence. There is a certain kind of ghost that can only materialize with the aid of a sheet or other piece of cloth to give it outline. Gains was like that. He materialized in someone else’s overcoat.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky