Connections (1979), 9 - Countdown
“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 6: "The Nineteenth Century"
Paul Virilio (1932–2018) French philosopher
Politics of the Very Worst, New York: Semiotext(e), 1999, p. 89
“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor
Look at the Harlequins! (1974).
“We hadn't invented 'Not Invented Here', yet.”
Alan Kotok (1941–2006) American computer scientist
quoted in [Peter Hurley or Jack H. Stevens, A History of TOPS in alt.sys.pdp10 <1995Jan13.151041.8661@eisner>, 13 January, 1995, http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sys.pdp10/msg/17a1d08377234f79, 2006-12-26]
“Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion.”
Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Statement (8 June 1990), as quoted in The Economics of the Environment and Natural Resources (2004) by R. Quentin Grafton, p. 277
As quoted in The Guardian [London] (21 June 1990)
1990s
Variant: The market came with the dawn of civilization and it is not an invention of capitalism. … If it leads to improving the well-being of the people there is no contradiction with socialism.
“Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.”
William Shenstone (1714–1763) English gardener
"Detached Thoughts : On Writing and Books", p. 129
Essays on Men and Manners (1804)
“The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented.”
Novalis book Blüthenstaub
Fragment No. 114
Blüthenstaub (1798)
Context: The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!
