Passages
Some excerpts from recent reading...
Creaking to the post office
on my rusty bike
I saw one purple iris
wild in the wet green
of the rice field.
I wanted to send it to you.
I can only tell you
it was there.
From Pure Heart Enlightened Mind,
The Zen Journal and Letters of Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran,
Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1994
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of
making progress.
--Niels Bohr
Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert
opinion.
--Richard Feynman
I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a
synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical
experience of unity, to be the mythos,
spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age.
--Werner Heisenberg, quoted in "Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical
Outlook," chapter 3.
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in
despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the
implacable grandeur of this life.
-- Albert Camus
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they
are free.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that
anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and
hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever
must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master
of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
--Winston Churchill
I have a gloomy premonition...that we will soon look back on this
troubled moment as a golden time of freedom and license to act and
speculate. One feels the sinews of the tiger, an ascetic, "moral" and
authoritarian reign of piety and iron.
--written in 1966 by Robert Lowell
Men want to liberate themselves, but they do not want to be free. They
are always looking to belong to something.
--Jean Daniel
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but
according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage --
torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of
civilians -- which does not change its moral color when it is committed
by 'our' side. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of
atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for
not even hearing about them.
-- George Orwell
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess
of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for
the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury,
with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal
policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the
world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have
progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from
spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty
to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to
complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage.
--Sir Alex Fraser
Tytler (1742-1813), a Scottish jurist and
historian
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.
--Groucho Marx