
“After a certain point, the past becomes irrelevant.”
Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 38 (pp. 387-388)
Comment
“After a certain point, the past becomes irrelevant.”
Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 38 (pp. 387-388)
“It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.”
"The magician" by Maya Jaggi in The Guardian (17 December 2005) http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1669112,00.html
Context: Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
“Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.”
Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 97
Context: A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.
Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.
Ants Marching
Remember Two Things (1993)
As cited by Eric G.E. Zuelow " Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm" on nationalismproject.org. 1999-2007.
Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994)
Early schema for author's now-familiar approach to historic events and persons; "The Go Big Red Fan" (prologue)
The Big U (1984)