“The human brain is evolution’s most magnificent disaster, a beautiful and glorious cesspool of brilliant analytical powers, infinite creativity, and pure madness.”
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Guy P. Harrison 21
American skeptic author 1963Related quotes
“It is magnificent, but it is not war; it is madness.”
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie.
Of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Quoted in "Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations" - Page 346 - by Robert Debs Heinl - 1966
Source: Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 727
Context: The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.
“Nationality is the creative power of human culture, culture is the creative power of nationality.”
From Naţionalitatea în artă ("Nationality in Art"), Bucureşti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1905.
“A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.”
English Traits, Aristocracy
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Arthur Wesley Dow & American Arts & Crafts, Nancy E Green & Jessica Poesch Exhibt Cat. New York (1999)
Other
“But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty.”
Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)
Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Six, The Arts 1914-1945
Epilogue, p. 360.
The Art and Science of Negotiation (1982)
