“With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.”

— Guy Debord , book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988)

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Guy Debord 29

French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding mem… 1931–1994

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“My notion of a fruitful economic science would be that it can help us explain and understand the course of actual economic history. A scholar who seriously addresses commentary on contemporary monthly and yearly events is, in this view, practicing the study of history—history in its most contemporary time phasing.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

New millennium, An Interview with Paul A. Samuelson, 2003

“We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist… The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.”

C.G. Jung book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 5

“In history, nothing fabulous can be agreeable.”

Lucian (120) ancient Greek writer

How to Write History

C.G. Jung book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 5
Context: We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.

“Unlike the members of the physical and biological sciences, the economist is asked to explain his work in a manner that is interesting and convincing to a weary listener. Yet there is no reason to believe that the explanation of our economic and social world is inherently simpler than the explanation of our physical world.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"George J. Stigler - Banquet Speech," 1982

“The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will…The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences (1988), Chapter 2, “Probability and Coincidence” (pp. 37-38; ellipsis represents elision of examples)

“Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Variant: Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.
Source: Gatsby Girls

“All history is contemporary history.”

Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) Italian writer, philosopher, politician

[Allan, George, 1972, Croce and Whitehead on Concrescence, 2, 2, Process Studies, 95–111, http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2328, . Allan lists the sources Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941 (see [Croce, 1938] ) and Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, New York: Russell & Russell, 1960., 10.5840/process19722215, 27 June 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20111102045431/http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2328, 2 November 2011, dead]

“Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible—though very unlikely—that our whole world is controlled by elves. But supernatural explanations like these are simply never needed; we manage to understand the natural world just fine using reason and materialism.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

Source: Why Evolution is True (2009), pp. 224-225

“What is striking about the books which were written, especially during the eighteenth century, to defend Christianity against these attacks, is the degree to which they accept the assumptions of their assailants. Christianity is defended as being reasonable. It can be accommodated within these assumptions, which all reasonable people hold. There is little suggestion that the assumptions themselves are to be challenged. The defense is, in fact, a tactical retreat. But, as later history has shown, these tactical retreats can--if repeated often enough--begin to look more like a rout.”

Lesslie Newbigin (1909–1998) Christian missionary

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989 (reprinted 2002),3.

“With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.”

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