David

“There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

“-My criticism was that you never understood the larger picture, said the Dead Father. Young men never understand the larger picture.

-I don't suggest I understand it now. I do understand the frame. The limits.

-Of course the frame is easier to understand.

-Older people tend to overlook the frame, even when they are looking right at it, said Thomas. They don't like to think about it.”
― Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

“-You are asking me to give up my sword?

-I am.

-Then I shall be swordless. Think what that means.”
― Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

“But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form of government. In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet - the scientific poet - of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretentions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million schoolteachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence