Ashley > Ashley's Quotes

“Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water ...”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split.

I was split.

I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.”
― Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

“[Emerson] saw, in the beginning, no difference between abolitionism and the institutionalized religion he had rejected in the Divinity School address. They were both ways of discouraging people from thinking for themselves. "Each 'Cause,' as it is called," he wrote in 1842, explaining why the Transcendentalists were not a "party," "—say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism or Unitarianism, --becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Holmes writes, “…I also would fight for some things—but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like—or should like.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James’s particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French socialist Charles Fourier: ‘Man’s destiny on earth,’ as James expressed it in Substance and Shadow (1863), ‘…consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men.’ The chief impediment to arriving at this redeemed state was belief in an independent selfhood (what Swedenborg called the ‘proprium’). James considered this belief ‘the great parental fount of all the evils that desolate humanity.’ Belief in selfhood was bad because it led some people to regard themselves as superior to other people.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
― William James

“[Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. ‘It is society that prepares the crime and … the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,’ is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People who murder—like people who marry and people who commit suicide—are only fulfilling a quota that has been preset by social conditions.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals—molecules or humans—might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“…in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored … knowledge must therefore be social.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism denies the social altogether … ‘the community is to be considered as an end in itself’… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions—the assumption, for instance, that the reformer’s tastes or values are superior to the reformee’s, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not—is ineffectual and inherently false.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Addams’s] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare’s play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“…Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce’s cosmology, everyone’s beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America