“[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”

— James Joyce

James Joyce, “Daniel Defoe,” translated from Italian manuscript and edited by Joseph Prescott, Buffalo Studies 1 (1964): 24-25

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James Joyce 191

Irish novelist and poet 1882–1941

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“Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.”

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Source: Ulysses

“Quite a few political economists advocate the thesis that a Robinson Crusoe — or what amounts to the same thing, a controlled economy — calculates in terms of profits and losses.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Otto Neurath (1935) "What is Meant by a Rational Economic Theory?" 1935/1987, p. 95; as cited in Cat (2014)
1930s

“The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Writing", p. 22
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“A piece of knowledge about boat-building, about whose correctness Crusoe has no doubts at all, will not be seen as a hunch and will be valued according to Menger's Law. It may be said that Crusoe is well aware that he possesses this kind of information; he will deploy and value it in the same way as he may be imagined to deploy and value other resources he believes are definitely at his disposal. But concerning Crusoe's hunches and his visions in the face of a changing, uncertain environment, it cannot be said at all that Crusoe knows he has a hunch or a vision of the future. He does not act by deliberately utilizing his hunch about the future; instead, he finds that his actions reflect his hunches…In other words, it turns out, the essence of entrepreneurial vision, and what sets it apart from knowledge as a resource, is reflected in Crusoe's lack of self-consciousness concerning it…Crusoe may…gradually come to be aware of his vision. When he does, that vision ceases to be entrepreneurial and comes to be a resource. Moreover, Crusoe's realization that he possesses this definite information resource may itself be entrepreneurial. As soon as he 'knows' that he possesses an item of knowledge, that item ceases to correspond to entrepreneurial vision; instead, as with all resources, it is Crusoe's belief that he has the resources at his disposal that may now constitute his entrepreneurial hunch.”

Israel Kirzner (1930) American economist

Israel Kirzner, (1979: 168-169); as cited in: " Israel Kirzner's Entrepreneurship http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/subjecti/workpape/kirz_ent.pdf" by the Constitution Society, May 31, 2004

“The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like 'religion', to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

No. 142: letter to his friend Robert Murray, S.J. (December 1953)
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

“I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

“Thursday is practically Friday and Friday is Friday.”

Malcolm Azania book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad

Source: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad (2004), Chapter 1 “I Wash Dishes for Scumbags” (p. 8)

“Here am I who have written on all sorts of subjects calculated to excite hostility, moral, political, and religious, and yet I have no enemies — except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Statement to a friend shortly before his death, as recounted in Men of Letters by Lord Henry Brougham

“Most works in realism tell a succession of such abject truths; they are deeply in earnest, every detail is true, and yet the whole finally tumbles to the ground — true but without significance. How did Jane Austen save her novels from that danger? They appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with R. Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Elliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Thornton Wilder, A preface for Our Town (1938)

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James Joyce 191

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