Leonard Shlain > Quotes

“A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“The Talmud expresses subtle relationship in an apocryphal story of a dialogue between God and Abraham. God begins by chiding Abraham: „If it wasn´t for Me, you wouldn´t exist.“Lord, and for that I am very appreciative and grateful. However, if it wasn´t for me, You wouldn´t be known.”
― Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light

“Democrtitus, in the fifth century B.C. had declared that all the world was composed of only two elements: atomes and the void. This reduction of the myriad of forms to only two was the ultimate in dualistic reasoning. Christianity adopted dualism when it created the strict division between good and evil and heaven and hell.”
― Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light

“Visionaries are those in the field of art and science who recognize novel patterns. They see beauty before the rest of us do.”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness while everyone else was still asleep. —Dmitry Merezhkovsky”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“This dichotomy between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus suggests that the Greeks allegorically understood the different functions between the right and left brain.”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“The hunter who consistently brought meat back displayed daring and courage, two qualities that females desired in a potential mate. Thus hunting possessed an erotic overtone: meat was an aphrodisiac.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“How could a slight, five-foot-tall, two-legged animal create such sublimity and yet wreak so much havoc in so minuscule an interval of earth’s history?”
― Leonard Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution

“Leonardo is both an extraordinary left-brained academician obsessed with portraying perspective correctly and an impish right-brained trickster who takes delight in fooling the viewer with perspectivist sleights of hand.”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“The brain accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s volume, yet consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy. A pearly gray, gelatinous, three-pound universe, this exceptional organ can map parsecs and plot the whereabouts of distant galaxies measured in quintillions of light-years. The brain accomplishes this magic trick without ever having to leave its ensorcelled ovoid cranial shell. From minuscule-wattage electrical currents crisscrossing and ricocheting within its walls, the brain can reconstruct a detailed diorama of how it imagines the Earth appeared four billion years ago. It can generate poetry so achingly beautiful that readers weep, hatred so intense that otherwise rational people revel in the torture of others, and love so oceanic that entwined lovers lose the boundaries of their physical beings.”
― Leonard Shlain

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“Art and science represent the difference between “being” and “doing.” Art’s raison d’être is to evoke an emotion. Science seeks to solve problems by advancing knowledge. Candace Pert reminds us that in spite of our curiosity about science, we call ourselves, “human beings, not human doings.”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“The intense effort to develop artificial intelligence has increased our understanding of neural networks because at its core, AI is but an attempt to improve artificially what the brain already does effortlessly.”
― Leonard Shlain, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius

“If the skulls of the people who have been killed in the name of God, Jesus, and Allah in religious wars and persecutions could be piled in one place, they would form an immense mountain. If we tallied the cost in human suffering for the belief in monotheism, we might not think of the other religions of the world as primitive.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“Sophocles once warned, “Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”3 The invention of writing was vast; this book will investigate the curse. There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes. For the most part, these changes can be characterized as progress. But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed: writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook. Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women’s power”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself.6”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“In the Old Testament, guilt enters the world by way of a bite from a fruit.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“The right brain is better than the left in perceiving space and making judgments as to balance, harmony, and the composition of gestalts, from which we make aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“Prince Modupe, a young West African who, in his autobiography, related his encounter with the written word: The one crowded space in Father Perry’s house was his bookshelves. I gradually came to understand that the marks on the pages were trapped words. Anyone could learn to decipher the symbols and turn the trapped words loose again into speech. The ink of the print trapped the thoughts; they could no more get away than a doomboo could get out of a pit. When the full realization of what this meant flooded”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“The proposition that the alphabet has hindered women’s aspirations and accomplishments seems, at first glance, to be antithetical to historical facts.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental…. The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing. —Robert Logan”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“On ignorance depends karma; on karma depends consciousness; on consciousness depend name and form; on name and form depend the five organs of sense; on the five organs of sense depends contact; on contact depends sensation; on sensation depends desire; on desire depends clutching; on clutching depends existence; on existence depends birth; on birth depend old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair. —The Buddha’s twelvefold concatenation of cause and effect”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“Writing was a gift eagerly accepted by the ancients. Unfortunately, hiding among the neat rows of carefully incised script was an unwelcome demon—misogyny. In trying to understand what went wrong between the sexes, these two cultures are at the pivot of history.”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“There is one fact that can be established: the only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing … is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the population is made to work for the other part.5”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image

“But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man. —Galileo1”
― Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image