Its hatred of silence

W.H. Auden in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. In an essay "Apologies to the Iroquois", page 69. On contacts between industrial and agricultural societies.

I find it immensely depressing that when unmechanized societies, whether Indians or Greek peasants, come into contact with ours, the one aspect of ours which none of them, but none, can resist is that which, to me, is the most intolerable: its hatred of silence - noise-makers have replaced liquor as our most potent agent of corruption.

Complexity horizon

John Allen Paulos in A Mathmetician Plays the Stock Market, page 194.

. . . the market's movements are therefore beyond the "complexity horizon" of human forecasters

They keep dropping in

W.H. Auden in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. In an essay "Apologies to the Iroquois", page 67. On the differences in the intellectual envrionments of the USA and UK.

Mr. Wilson is a bit of an anglophobe. Though, naturally, I do not share his feelings, I can understand them. It may take greater moral courage to become a Dandy in the United States than in England; nevertheless, I believe it is easier. British intellectual society is less boring, more intelligent and infinitely more charming than its American counterpart, which makes its collective influence much more dangerous to the individual - to resist seems rather piggy. Further, thanks to the physical size of this country, it is much easier here, if one wishes to be alone, to be left alone (in England, all one's intellectual relatives live within calling distance, and they keep dropping in).

The executioner

Joseph de Maistre:

All social order depends on one man, the executioner.

Democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth

From Flight from Truth by Jean-Francois Revel.

Democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth. It cannot survive if the degree of truth in current circulation falls below a minimal level. A democratic regime, founded on the free determination of important choices made by a majority, condemns itself to death if most of the citizens who have to choose between vairous options make their decisions in ignorance of reality, blinded by passions or misled by fleeting impressions.

Inimical to knowledge

From Plagues of the Mind by Bruce S. Thorton, page XVI.

More to the purpose of the essay, the "horizontal" spread of knowledge, its dissemniation through widespread literacy, universal education, and high-tech media of transmission, has not banished ignorance, false knowledge, interested error, or institutionalized lies. The increase in facts and data has simply created a glut of decontextualized information that is inimical to knowledge, let alone wisdom.

Chandler and Fleming

For Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler fans, here is a conversation between them recorded by the BBC in 1958.

Count it a bondage to fix a belief

From Fancis Bacon, Book of Essays.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be, that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting. And though the sects of philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits, which are of the same veins, though there be not so much blood in them, as was in those of the ancients. But it is not only the difficulty and labor, which men take in finding out of truth, nor again, that when it is found, it imposeth upon men's thoughts, that doth bring lies in favor; but a natural, though corrupt love, of the lie itself. One of the later school of the Grecians, examineth the matter, and is at a stand, to think what should be in it, that men should love lies; where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets, nor for advantage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. But I cannot tell; this same truth, is a naked, and open day-light, that doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs, of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men's minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds, of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

Ouch!

From a book review in The Economist:

Here are two predictions about the world economy. First, the West's malaise and the rise of emerging economies will yield a mountain of books. Second, few of these are likely to be as bad as "How the West Was Lost".

The myth

John F. Kennedy in Conversations with Kennedy by Benjamin Bradlee.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - presistent, persuasive and unrealistic.