Quotes
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DeLanda Destratified
De Landa Destratified on Techgnosis. Some quotes I like: I don’t believe there is such a thing as postmodernism. It’s exhausted. We truly need a complete new thing, and [Deleuze and Guattari’s] A Thousand Plateaus is the direction. Those guys are fifty or sixty years ahead of everyone else. You read it at first and […]
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How much the culture of learning has changed
The bestselling novel of 1961 was Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. Millions of people read this 690-page political novel. In 2016, the big sellers were coloring books. Fifteen years ago, cable channels like TLC (the “L” stood for Learning), Bravo and the History Channel (the “History” stood for History) promised to add texture and information […]
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Alfred Korzybski
Korzybski’s fundamental idea was that the structure of the language molds human thought process, often in a detrimental manner. From an article on Cut the Knot
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John Stuart Mill on truth and debate
I just discovered this quote from one of Jordan Peterson’s videos: He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if […]
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Clever
Lacan, Seminar II chapter III, addressing his students: In other words, the only criticism I have to make of you, if I may, is that you all want to appear too clever. Everybody knows you are. So why do you want to appear as such? And, in any case, what is so important, either about […]
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Past times
A quote I dug up in my notes from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Complete Sherlock Holmes He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I […]
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Mycroft
Forty-four percent of the way through the complete Sherlock Holmes works on Kindle and Mycroft is finally introduced: “My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a […]
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Learning from doing
We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do.’ Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than to propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. Gilles Deleuze, Difference […]
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I know that I am mortal by nature…
“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia” Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest
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From the little…
From the little reading I had done I had observed that the men who were most in life, who were moulding life, who were life itself, ate little, slept little, owned little or nothing. They had no illusions about duty, or the perpetuation of their kith and kin, or the preservation of the State… The […]