“As a lifelong habit of marijuana I was used to having even the most dreadful phenomena prove, on further inspection, to be only the figments of my paranoid fancy…”
Wonder Boys (1995)
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Michael Chabon96
Novelist, short story writer, essayist 1963Related quotes
Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) physicist and physiologist
"On the Conservation of Force" (1862), p. 279
Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1881)
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting
Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
David Brin (1950) novelist, short story writer
A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: I've long felt that the best minds of the right had useful things to contribute to a national conversation — even if their overall habit of resistance to change proved wrongheaded, more often than right. At least, some of them had the beneficial knack of targeting and criticizing the worst liberal mistakes, and often forcing needful re-drafting.
That is, some did, way back in when decent republicans and democrats shared one aim — to negotiate better solutions for the republic.
Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun-up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine. Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.
It's the stupidity. The vast and nearly uniform dumbitudinousness of ignoring what has happened to conservatism, a transformation of nearly all of the salient traits of Barry Goldwater from:
Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician
Third Lecture, Critical Discussion of the Foundations of Probability, p. 74
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist
Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 133-134 - (VSD)
“The only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.”
Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Sower
Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), p. 143
“There the sons of obscure Night hold their habitation, Sleep and Death, dread gods.”
Hesiod Greek poet
Source: The Theogony (c. 700 BC), line 758.