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The mastery of Nature. This appeared to be Fabyan’s preoccupation.
“The sole question is—what are
the facts? These cannot be determined by slight and imperfect examinations, preconceived ideas, abstract contemplation, or vigor of denunciation.”
The radical idea that made Bacon a legend is one of the epigraphs of this book: “Knowledge itself is power” (his admirers often shortened it to “knowledge is power”).
All that’s required is a “biliteral alphabet,” an alphabet made of any two forms that are recognizably different. Write a manifesto with candies, send a love letter with bullets. As long as you specify an a-form and b-form, you can make anything stand for anything else. Omnia per omnia.
He enjoyed science because it was an interesting way of being alive.
a totally different way of looking at language than what she was used to. All her life she had celebrated the improbable bigness of language, the long-lunged galaxy that exploded out from the small dense point of the alphabet,
To chip off flakes from the smooth rock of the message and place them in piles and ask questions about them. It involved a kind of hard-hearted analytic violence
Hoover was a chauvinist of the old school. When he first took charge of the bureau in 1922, there had been three female agents. He got rid of them. The next two female agents wouldn’t join the bureau until after his death in 1972. He argued that women weren’t agent
The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh argued in popular radio speeches that it would be foolish and hypocritical to fight Germany. He said America had no standing to accuse the Nazis of aggression and barbarism because America had sometimes been aggressive and barbaric itself. Later he argued that American Jews were a “danger to this country” on account of their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Lindbergh became the public face and champion of an antiwar group called the America First Committee. “America First,” a campaign slogan of
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year the America First Committee was holding rallies at Madison Square Garden.
his experience of fighting the war had permanently destroyed his faith in the way the world was put together. Earlier that year, his daughter asked him in a letter if he believed in Zionism, the project to create a Jewish homeland. He said no. “Zionism is only one of many virulent forms of a detestable disease known as ‘nationalism,’ ” William wrote to Barbara. “The sooner we realize that we are all God’s children regardless of color, race, creed, nationality, etc., the better for all nations and the world as a whole.” He didn’t believe in nations anymore, not even his own.
“I think it is too bad that this whole installation was not left absolutely intact to serve as an everlasting and terrible monument to the folly of a people led to perdition by a madman’s lust for power.”
agreed that there was no point in having fought a war to preserve freedom if people used that freedom to start more wars. She wondered
The Friedmans wrote that while Fabyan possessed “great natural gifts of energy and dynamism,” he was a salesman, not a scientist, and suppressed facts he didn’t like.
