Gregory Chaitin as quoted by Edward Rothstein in [A Man Who Would Shake Up Science; Physicist Says He's Explained The Way Nature Operates, 11 May 2002, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/books/man-who-would-shake-up-science-physicist-says-he-s-explained-way-nature-operates.html]
Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 2
Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 1, pp. 7–8
Context: The modern man is no longer a unity, but a confused bundle of complexes and nerves. He is so dissociated, so alienated from himself that he sees himself less as a personality than as a battlefield where a civil war rages between a thousand and one conflicting loyalties. There is no single overall purpose in his life. His soul is comparable to a menagerie in which a number of beasts, each seeking its own prey, turn one upon the other. Or he may be likened to a radio, that is tuned in to several stations; instead of getting any one clearly, it receives only an annoying static.If the frustrated soul is educated, it has a smattering of uncorrected bits of information with no unifying philosophy. Then the frustrated soul may say to itself: "I sometimes think there are two of me a living soul and a Ph. D." Such a man projects his own mental confusion to the outside world and concludes that, since he knows no truth, nobody can know it. His own skepticism (which he universalizes into a philosophy of life) throws him back more and more upon those powers lurking in the dark, dank caverns of his unconsciousness. He changes his philosophy as he changes his clothes. On Monday, he lays down the tracks of materialism; on Tuesday, he reads a best seller, pulls up the old tracks, and lays the new tracks of an idealist; on Wednesday, his new roadway is Communistic; on Thursday, the new rails of Liberalism are laid; on Friday, he-hears a broadcast and decides to travel on Freudian tracks: on Saturday, he takes a long drink to forget his railroading and, on Sunday, ponders why people are so foolish as to go to Church. Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it.
“When a tree is very old, yet still lives, sometimes the limbs are strangely twisted.”
"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" (1970), Orbit 7, ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Seven, Right Power
“The limbs will quiver and move after the soul is gone.”
Northcote, 487
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Johnsoniana
2000s, Democratic National Convention speech (2008)
Hocheng Hong (2018) cited in " Breaking the Class Ceiling https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=12,33&post=140317" on Taiwan Today, 1 September 2018
