
BBC radio interview (December 13, 2006)
2007, 2008
The Naked Communist (1958)
BBC radio interview (December 13, 2006)
2007, 2008
news.bostonherald.com (March 12, 2008)
2007, 2008
“Suspense is worse than disappointment.”
Letter to Thomas Sloan, (1 September 1791)
“With him suspension of judgment is a system.”
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), Note I : Hâjî Abdû, The Man
Context: The Hâjî regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind… Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals, — the development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment is a system.
Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 4
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)
Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 6 (p. 111)
“It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.”
"The Novel Alive or Dead," A Gathering of Fugitives: New Essays (1956)
“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV