from the desk of H. Bowie...

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Commonplace Book:

Latest Quotes

These are the latest additions to my commonplace book.

“Skepticism and Openness”

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

Carl Sagan, 1987 from the essay “The Burden of Skepticism”

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“The Myth of Simple Truths”

It would be a wonderful world were the Simple Truth Thesis true. Our political task simply would be to empower those who know the simple truth, and rebuke the fools who do not. But the Simple Truth Thesis is not true. In fact, it’s a fairytale—soothing, but ultimately unfit for a serious mind. For any Big Question, there are several defensible positions; it is precisely this feature that makes them big. Of course, to say that a position is defensible is not to say that it’s true. To oppose the Simple Truth Thesis is not to embrace relativism (which is itself a version of the Simple Truth view), nor is it to give up on the idea that there is truth; it is rather to give up on the view that the truth is always simple.

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse, 2016-01-04 from The Myth of Simple Truths

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“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned”

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

Nick Cave, 2022-04 from the web page The Red Hand Files

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“How to Grow Old”

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Bertrand Russell, 1953 from How to Grow Old

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“The language of religion and poetry”

We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.

Niels Bohr, 1927 from the book Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations

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“The freedom to enact other forms of social existence”

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021 from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

© 2021 David Graeber and David Wengrow

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“Three basic forms of social liberty”

But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these pages we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021 from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

© 2021 David Graeber and David Wengrow

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“Mistrust of experts”

Mistrust of experts, in spite of all that the apologists for technocracy can advance against it, is deeply rooted in the English character, and Fen, whose habit of mind was not cosmopolitan, shared in it abundantly.

Edmund Crispin, 1950 from the book Sudden Vengeance

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“Superstition is not mere intellectual error”

Superstition is not mere intellectual error; it is a part of the emotional life, and the worldly-wise who suppress it do so at the risk of impoverishing their souls, an eventuality which for the most part they do not succeed in avoiding.

Edmund Crispin, 1950 from the book Sudden Vengeance

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“A burst of astonishment at our own existence”

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

G. K. Chesterton

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“A miraculous world”

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.

G. K. Chesterton

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“On Turning Eighty”

If at eighty you’re not a cripple or an invalid, if you have your health, if you still enjoy a good walk, a good meal (with all the trimmings), if you can sleep without first taking a pill, if birds and flowers, mountains and sea still inspire you, you are a most fortunate individual and you should get down on your knees morning and night and thank the good Lord for his savin’ and keepin’ power. If you are young in years but already weary in spirit, already on the way to becoming an automaton, it may do you good to say to your boss — under your breath, of course — “Fuck you, Jack! You don’t own me!” … If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you’ve got it half licked.

Henry Miller, 1972 from the book On Turning Eighty

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“To refuse Apocalypse in all its forms”

She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

Leif Enger, 2024 from the book I Cheerfully Refuse

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“Your generation must come to terms with the environment”

The stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.

Therein lies our hope and our destiny.

Rachel Carson, 1962-06 from 1962 Commencement Address at Scripps College

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“An assembly that meshes over a specific problem”

To manifest possibility in the zone of dialogical imagination, David [Graeber] learned, there was no need to persuade everybody to agree on every issue. ‘You don’t even want to achieve ideological uniformity,’ he averred. An assembly that meshes over a definition of a specific problem and a commitment to a specific course of action forms ‘a community of purpose without a community of definition.’ The rules of discourse can support a revisable consensus. Do not blow up minor moral differences into mortal threats. Do extend the benefit of the doubt. Do not reduce perspectives to a juxtaposition of opposite extremes. Do look for zones of affinity. If such rules do not yield a creative synthesis that everybody can accept, then the rules can change. Deliberative assemblies, when properly facilitated, encompass a plurality of perspectives from a perspective that refuses to impose itself as a worldview. The crux is that everybody gets a say.

John Summers, 2024-05-24 from David Graeber’s Magic Words

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“A church you could bear”

We stayed with the blues and Francie sensing a vein of covenant sang in her scratchiest aching voice, the reason we cajoled her into the band to start with, and it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

Leif Enger, 2024 from the book I Cheerfully Refuse

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“Computer Errors”

I know there’s a proverb which says ‘To err is human’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.

Agatha Christie, 1968 from Halloween Party

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