"Anonymity: An Enquiry"
Source: Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)
Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist
Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. ix; as cited in: Simon Guy and John Henneberry (2000) " Understanding Urban Development Processes: Integrating the Economic and the Social in Property Research http://bentboolean.com/people/mm/private/SOA/548_DS/StrataProposal/research%20doct's/world_urban/UrbanDevtProperty.pdf," Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 13, 2399–2416, 2000.
Harry Markowitz (1927) American economist
On Winston Churchill http://www.amazon.com/review/R7UQOFFBBBUNN/
“The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.”
Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)
Speech in Kansas City (12 May 1905), PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 16:99
Unsourced variant: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
1900s
“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro.”
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet
Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.
Paris Review Interview (1990)
L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology
Dianetics 55! (1954).
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
1930s, Wisehart interview (1930)
Context: Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.
“For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?”
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director
