Prose

Peace and Long Life

When one door closes, another opens.

— Scottish Proverb


Now all that was owed is repaid,
And all that was owned, returned.

Now all that was lost is found,
And all that was bound, free.

— Ursula Le Guin (1929 – 2018), Mountain Ways, Asimov's Science Fiction, 1996.


Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

— John Tolkien (1892 – 1970), The Lord of the Rings, 1968.

Nicolas de Caritat (1743 – 94) [Marquis de Condorcet]:
The time will come, when the sun will shine only on free men, who know no other master, but their reason.

Steven Pinker (1954):
The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion.
It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty … can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run.
(p 181)

People are better off abjuring violence, if everyone else agrees to do so, and vesting authority in a disinterested third party.
But since that third party will consist of human beings, not angels, their power must be checked by the power of other people, to force them to govern with the consent of the governed.
They may not use violence against their citizens beyond the minimum necessary to prevent greater violence.
And they should foster arrangements that allow people to flourish from cooperation and voluntary exchange.
(The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin, 2011, p 183)

George Shaw (1856 – 1950):
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Richard Dawkins (1941):
Science is the poetry of reality.
(Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Preface, Random House, 1973)

Nils Nilsson (1933):
Missing out on useful beliefs is the price we pay for extreme skepticism. …
Accepting bad beliefs is the price we pay for extreme credulity.
(Understanding Beliefs, MIT Press, 2014, p 20)

John Keynes (1883 – 1946):
In the long run we are all dead.
(A Tract on Monetary Reform, Ch 3, 1923, p 80)

John Clarke (1948 – 2017):
Reason is a tool.
Try to remember where you left it.
(John Clarke's Poetry, Earshot, ABC Radio National, 15 April 2017)

James Cabell (1879 – 1958):
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
(The Silver Stallion, 1926)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951):
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
(Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed, 1967, Blackwell, p 4)

Arthur Clarke (1917 – 2008):
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
(Profiles of the Future, 1962)

I would be greatly distressed if [Childhood's End] contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media … with mind-rotting bilge about UFOs, psychic powers, astrology, pyramid energies, "channelling" — you name it, someone is peddling it …
(pp vi-vii)

Far off were the mountains,

• where power and beauty dwelt,
• where the thumder sported above the glaciers and the air was clear and keen.

There the sun walked, transfiguring the peaks with glory, when all the land below was wrapped in darness.
(Childhood's End, 1953 / 90, p 211)

Isaac Asimov (1920 – 92):
[Science] gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

Democritus (c460 – c370 BCE):
The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of a great soul is the whole world.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527):
It is much safer to be feared than loved.
Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves.
But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective.

Ralph Emerson (1803 – 82):
The order of things is as good as the character of the population permits.
(The Conservative, 1841)

Jules Verne (1828 – 1905):
The sea is everything.
It covers seven tenths of the globe …
The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it.
It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.
(Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870)

Henry Mencken (1880 – 1956):
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Herman Melville (1819 – 1891):
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it …
(Moby Dick, Chapter 41, 1851)

Imam Ali (599 – 661):
Knowledge is power …
(Saying 146, Nahj Al-Balagha)

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827):
An intelligence that, at a given instant, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.
For such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes. (Philosophical Essay on Probabilities)

Plato (c428 – c347 BCE):
[How] can he who has magnificence of mind and is the spectator of all time and all existence, think much of human life?
(Republic, c380 BCE)

It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body …
[For] if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all.
For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure. …
And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body? …
And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death.
(Phaedo)

Pliny (23-79):
There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain …
(Naturalis Historia, II, p vii)

Aristides (530 BCE – 468 BCE) [Plataea, 479 BCE]:
This is not the moment to argue … about matters of ancestry and personal courage. …
We did not come here to quarrel with our allies, but to fight our enemies; not to boast about our ancestors, but to show our courage in defence of Greece.
This battle will prove clearly enough how much any city or general or private soldier is worth to Greece.
(Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens, Ian Scott-Kilvert, Translator, Penguin, 1960, p 114)

Lewis Wolpert (1929):
Galileo’s argument is as follows.
Imagine a perfectly flat plane and a perfectly round ball.
If the plane is slightly inclined the ball will roll down it and go on and on and on.
But a ball going up a slope with a slight incline will have its velocity retarded.
From this it follows that motion along a horizontal plane is perpetual,

for if the velocity be uniform it cannot be diminished or slackened, much less destroyed.

So, on a flat slope, with no resistance, an initial impetus will keep the ball moving forever, even though there is no force.
Thus the natural state of a physical object is motion along a straight line at constant speed, and this has come to be known as Newton’s first law of motion.
(The Unnatural Unnatural Nature of Science, Harvard University Press, 1989)

Richard Dawkins (1941):
A given gene … either passes to a given offspring … or it does not.
There are no half measures, and genes never blend with one another.
Heredity is all-or-none.
[It’s] digital. …
A gene is a sequence of code letters, drawn from an alphabet of precisely four letters, and the genetic code is universal throughout all known living things.
Life is the execution of programs written using a small digital alphabet in a single, universal machine language.
This realization was the hammer blow that knocked the last nail into the coffin of vitalism and, by extension, of dualism.
(The Oxford Book of Science Writing, Oxford University Press, 2008, p 30)

Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832):
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
(A Critical Examination of the Declaration of Rights, Anarchical Fallacies, 1843)

Brian Greene (1963):
Much as a black hole’s mass increases when it absorbs anything that carries positive energy, so its mass decreases when it absorbs anything that carries negative energy.
(p 249)

It is common to speak of the center of a black hole as if it were a position in space.
But it’s not.
It is a moment in time.
When crossing the event horizon of a black hole, time and space (the radial direction) interchange roles.
If you fall into a black hole, for example, your radial motion represents progress through time.
You are thus pulled toward the black hole’s center in the same way you are pulled to the next moment in time.
The center of the black hole is, in this sense, akin to a last moment in time.
(Note 15, p 334)

Upon crossing the horizon, time and space interchange roles — inside the black hole, the radial direction becomes the time direction.
This implies that within the black hole, the notion of positive energy coincides with motion in the radial direction toward the black hole’s singularity.
When the negative energy member of a [virtual] particle pair crosses the horizon, it does indeed fall toward the black hole’s center.
Thus the negative energy it had from the perspective of someone watching from afar becomes positive energy from the perspective of someone situated within the black hole itself.
This makes the interior of the black hole a place where such particles can exist.
(Note 4, The Hidden Reality, Penguin, 2011, p 348)

Michael Dirda (1948):
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 78) believed it was only when] people lived unmediated existences in accord with Nature and themselves — when they dwelt like animals in a perpetual present [— that] they found life simple, fulfilling, and appropriate.
On some evil day, however, one man began to compare himself with another.
This led to reflection, self-awareness, and eventually competitiveness, then to specialization and a division of labor to maximize individual strengths and weaknesses, and before long the floodgates were opened to envy, accumulation, possessiveness, and excess.
The clever soon exploited their fellows, stockpiled provisions, and gained superfluous wealth — and these inevitably needed to be protected: by guards, by armies, by laws and statutes.
And so paradise was lost. …

[So, in order] to ameliorate inequities, we [should] establish kindlier, small city-states (he thought of Geneva and Corsica) where governmental regulation could be minimized and civic life made human-scaled.
Most of all, we can liberate ourselves.
(Classics for Pleasure, Harcourt, 2007, pp 160-1)

John Haldane (1892 – 1964):
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
(Possible Worlds, 1927)

Jacob Bernoulli (1655 – 1705):
We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be

• the best,
• the most appropriate,
• the most certain,
• the best advised;

this is the only object of

• the wisdom of the philosopher, and
• the prudence of the statesman.

(Ars Conjectandi, 1713)

Neal Stephenson (1959):
[After] a while, she said:

Do you need transportation?
Tools?
Stuff?

Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,

I said:

We have a protractor.

(Anathem, Harper Collins, 2008, p 320)

Alan Milne (1882 – 56):

'Rabbit's clever,' said Pooh thoughtfully.

'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'

'And he has Brain.'

'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit has Brain.'

There was a long silence.

'I suppose,' said Pooh, 'that that's why he never understands anything.'

(Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh, 1982)