“For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears.”

— Northrop Frye

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: The particular myth that's been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it's really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that tis main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quite for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer [to] heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.

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Northrop Frye 137

Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Why Are The Drums So Silent"
Sunshine, Dust and The Messenger (2002)

“We will not have any more crashes in our time.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Conversation with Felix Somary in 1927, reported in Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich, London: C. Hurst, 1986 (1960), 146-7
Attributed

“Beyond all question the future is with the vegetarian. It seems certain that in the future — and I hope it may be in the near future — we shall be looking back upon this time with disgust and with horror. In spite of all its wonderful discoveries, in spite of its marvellous machinery, in spite of the enormous fortunes that have been made in it, I am certain that our descendants will look back upon this age as one of only partial civilisation, and in fact but little removed from savagery.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: Vegetarianism and Occultism (1913), p. 28

“I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”

Jerome David Salinger book The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Context: Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

“There are three departments of architecture: the art of building, the making of time-pieces, and the construction of machinery.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter III "The Departments of Architecture" Sec. 1

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”

John Connolly The Book of Lost Things

Source: The Book of Lost Things

“I know, I know, I'm going to be called a hatemonger for this, you know, conversation that we have, whatever, that's fine. They also called people like Benjamin Franklin a hatemonger. They said that he was crazy. I wonder if they've said that about me yet. Yeah, Benjamin Franklin was crazy, he was the first real abolitionist. Boy that man stood up every single time. And in our modern-day slavery, I will be happy to be called crazy right along with Benjamin Franklin.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

Glenn Beck
Television
Fox News
2009-10-09
After ranting about how "illegal immigration is modern-day slavery," Beck compares himself to Ben Franklin
Media Matters for America
2009-10-09
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200910090056
2000s, 2009

“When we participate actively in our lives and open our senses to all the stimuli around us, we build memories that can be retrieved and enjoyed the rest of our lives.”

Marilu Henner (1952) American actress

Total Memory Makeover (2012), p. 23 https://books.google.it/books?id=LCPiLFodRHMC&pg=PA4023.

“If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology, with all its miraculous machinery, must go.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

“[Vertigo] was before its time, really. I was not appreciated in my time. I think I'm appreciated more now. I'm glad to know that I'm still around to know that I'm more appreciated now.”

Kim Novak (1933) American actress

“For all its wonderful machinery, we know it's really a crazy ramshackle building, and at ay time may crash around our ears.”

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