The Kingdom of Speech Quotes

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals,” he said, “to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Darwin’s goal was to show that all Müller’s and Wallace’s Higher Things evolved from animals—animals even as small as earwigs. He had no evidence, causing him to fall back over and over on the life and times of my dog. Fellow”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“The theory and the atheistic bias that came with it spread quickly to Germany, Italy, Spain, and to self-professed intellectual elites in the United States, even”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Huxley became such an ardent Darwinist not because he believed in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—he never did—but because Darwin was obviously an atheist, just as he was. No”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo's David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Chomsky was born and raised in Philadelphia, but his parents were among tens of thousands of Ashkenazic Jews who fled Russia following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881.110 Jewish anarchists were singled out (falsely) as the assassins, setting off waves of the bloodiest pogroms in history. On top of that, thousands of Jews were forcibly removed from their homes in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and adjoining regions and led off, some in chains, to the so-called Pale of Settlement, a geographical ghetto along Russia’s western frontier. They risked severe punishment if they ventured beyond the Pale…pale, as in the pales of a fence. Even inside the Pale they were restricted from entering cities such as Kiev and Nikolaev, from owning or even leasing property, receiving a college education, or engaging in certain professions. By 1910, 90 percent of Russia’s Jews—5.6 million in all—were confined to the Pale.111 Anarchism had been a logical enough reaction. The word “anarchy” literally means “without rulers.” The Jewish refugees from Russian racial hatred translated that as not merely no more czars…but no more authorities of any sort…no public officials, no police, no army, no courts of law, no judges, no jailers, no banks—no money—no financial”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution’s components. A”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“The first person to refer to Darwin’s tales as Just So Stories was a Harvard paleontologist and evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, in 1978.61”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Only such a power, “a new power of definite character,” can account for “ever-advancing” man.53 Whatever that power is, it is infinitely more important than mere natural selection.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“The power of the human brain was so far beyond the boundaries of natural selection that the term became meaningless in explaining the origins of man.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTIONa It seems that eight heavyweight Evolutionistsb—linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists—had published an article announcing they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works. “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” they concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we’ll keep trying, they said gamely…but we’ll have to start from zero again. One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. “In the last 40 years,” he and the other seven were saying, “there has been an explosion of research on this problem,” and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia. Now, that was odd…I had never heard of a group of experts coming together to announce what abject failures they were…”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“when he came down with the dreaded Genghis ague (rhymes with “bay view”), today known as malaria.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“he published a manifesto with a title Darwinists have been quoting ever since: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.”78”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Darwin’s notion that language had somehow evolved from imitation of animal sounds…Müller called that the bow-wow theory. The”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“As Sigmund Freud would put it thirty-five years later in similar circumstances, “Many enemies, much honor.” Darwin”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“If a monkey has become a man—what may not a man become?”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“In the Navajo cosmogony the agent of change (as distinct from the creator) was alive. It was Locust. In Darwin’s cosmogony it had to be scientifically inanimate. Locust was renamed Evolution.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“In no way, said Wallace, can natural selection account for such a thing. But neither can natural selection account for man’s hairless body, especially his bare back, which makes him highly vulnerable to wind, cold, and rain. All other primates, even in Africa and the tropics, grow hides or coats of hair that protect them to the point of making them waterproof. The hair of the coats is layered at a downward angle. Rain rolls right off. Does man miss that? All the time, said Wallace. In fact, since time immemorial, men have been using animal hides and anything else they could think of to keep their backs covered.50 There you had it—an obvious case of what Darwin said couldn’t happen: injurious evolution. “A single case of this kind,” Darwin himself had said, tempting Fate, “would be fatal to [the] theory.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“The Science of Language will yet enable us to withstand the extreme theories of evolutionists and to draw a hard and fast line between man and brute.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“The difference in Darwin’s case was that he put together his story in an increasingly rational age. It”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“All cosmogonies, whether the Apaches’ or Charles Darwin’s, faced the same problem. They were histories or, better said, stories of things that had occurred in a primordial past, long before there existed anyone capable of recording them. The Apaches’ scorpion and Darwin’s cells in that warm pool somewhere were by definition educated guesses. Darwin,”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“And why is it that Homo sapiens was descended from hairy apes but wound up naked—as Wallace had gone to some pains to point out? Even in hottest horrid-torrid Africa, animals such as antelopes had fur to protect them from the wind and rain. So did man…way back in that invisible past, where Evolution lives. Starting out, said Darwin, man was as hairy as the hairiest ape. Why no longer? Blind, aren’t you, Wallace? You didn’t get the second half of my title, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, did you. Evolution, said Darwin, had turned Homo sapiens into a more sensitive animal, which in turn gave him something approaching aesthetic feelings. The male began to admire females who had the least apelike hides because he could see more of their lovely soft skin, which excited him sexually. The more skin he saw, the more he wanted to see. Obviously valued by the males because their hides were much less hairy, the most sought-after females began to look down their noses at the old-fashioned hairy males, one crude step away from the apes themselves. Generation after generation went by, thousands of them, until, thanks to natural selection, males and females became as naked as they are today, with but two clumps of hair, one on the head and the other in the pubic area, plus wispy, scarcely visible little remnants of their formerly hirsute selves on the forearms and lower legs and, in the case of some males, the chest and shoulders.b Yes, their backs got cold, terribly cold, as Wallace had argued. But what poor Wallace didn’t know was that the heat of passion conquered all…and that was “How Man Lost His Hair Over Love.” (Got that, Wallace?)”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“it consisted of sudden, uncontrollable vomiting and every sort of pain in his distended belly and bowels, every known belch, retch, heave, gas-pass, watery rush, and loathsome gush, plus foul wind erupting from one end of his digestive tract and foul sounds eructing grrrrekkk from the other.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“If language sealed off man from animal, then the Theory of Evolution applied only to animal studies and reached no higher than the hairy apes. M”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“often in The Descent of Man, “my dog” steps forth as major evidence.”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the “doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal” will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods”—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in “wars such as never have been fought before.” If”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below. There”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech

“In this respect, Darwinism was typical of the more primitive cosmogonies. They avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo. Darwin”
― Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech