Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
“rules exist for a reason. Rules exist because when people don't follow them, people get hurt.”
Source: Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover
“There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.”
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: Mind has come up with this brilliant way of looking at the world — science — but it can’t look at itself. Science has no place for the mind. The whole of our science is based upon empirical, repeatable experiments. Whereas thought is not in that category, you can’t take thought into a laboratory. The essential fact of our existence, perhaps the only fact of our existence – our own thought and perception is ruled off-side by the science it has invented. Science looks at the universe, doesn’t see itself there, doesn’t see mind there, so you have a world in which mind has no place. We are still no nearer to coming to terms with the actual dynamics of what consciousness is.
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
Source: On organizational learning (1999), p. 438 as cited in: Leni Wildflower, Diane Brennan (2011) The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching. p. 159
“The rule of law is not an exception to rule by fear; it is the fulfillment of rule by fear.”
Fear: The History of a Political Idea
“There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption.”
A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption. Ho Chi Minh never underestimated America. His avowed hero was George Washington and he remained in awe of the U. S., all his life. He remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.
p 44
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)
