Quotes about brain (1834 quotes, page 11)

“Oh, rather give me commentators plain,
Who with no deep researches vex the brain;
Who from the dark and doubtful love to run,
And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun.”

George Crabbe (1754–1832) English poet, surgeon, and clergyman

The Parish Register (1807), Part i, "Introduction". Compare "How commentators each dark passage shun, / And hold their farthing candle to the sun", Edward Young, Love of Fame, Satire vii, Line 97.

Love , Sun

“The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land. …the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization. …the first archaic mammals… were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain… primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes… are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Life , Study , Time

“Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be … unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface?
The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.”

Frank Herbert book The Green Brain

The Green Brain (1966)

God , Appearance

“Pride swells the brain. Vanity carries with it smoke, minds. Hatred tightens the heart. Love warms the lungs. Admiration stops the heart. We breathe through desire. We want to pump up all that delights, and dilates. Sadness is inaction. The love that comes from the blood, the love that comes from the soul.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Love , Sadness , Soul , Heart

“Tarzan sat in a brown study for a long time after he finished reading the letter. It was filled with so many new and wonderful things that his brain was in a whirl as he attempted to digest them all.
So they did not know that he was Tarzan of the Apes. He would tell them.
In his tree he had constructed a rude shelter of leaves and boughs, beneath which, protected from the rain, he had placed the few treasures brought from the cabin. Among these were some pencils.
He took one, and beneath Jane Porter's signature he wrote: I am Tarzan of the Apes”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 18 : The Jungle Toll

Tree , Study , Time , Reading

“I think it's possible to be too quick-witted, too smart to be an actor. You have to turn off a lot of your brain, in a way. When you see a fellow actor just missing it, it's hard to keep your mouth shut, but you have to. Or see a director so stupid he couldn't direct vomit into a paper bag. And he's in charge, and it's really hard to keep your mouth shut.”

William H. Macy (1950) American actor, screenwriter, teacher and director in theater, film and television

Interview in The Guardian (2011)

Stupidity , Way , Thinking

“It's true feathers and scales are both made of keratin, same building block, that's true. But that's where the similarity stops, okay? Actually, birds and reptiles have different lung systems. And they have different reproductive systems, different body coverings, different brains, and different circulatory systems. Thousands of differences exist between dinosaurs and birds. That could be a whole seminar by itself.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

Bird

“Do you actually control what your brain says?”

Gavin Free (1988) English filmmaker

"Let's Play Minecraft - Episode 52 - Shopping List" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIz4j4y9A1A. youtube.com. May 24, 2013. Retrieved May 4, 2014.

“They say Archaeopteryx is proof for evolution. You got one here on the table, Brother, Archaeopteryx? Whenever you buy a bag of dinosaurs, they almost always stick one of these in there. Archaeopteryx. Wow. And this somehow gets the impression to the kids, "Wow, we've got proof that dinosaurs turned to birds. Here's one here with feathers on it." They're lying. It's still in the textbooks, I mean today, about Archaeopteryx. And it's been proven years ago, Archaeopteryx was just a bird, a perching bird. Alan Feduccia, who believes in evolution, says it's not a missing link. It had the right features for flight. All the features of the brain were for flight, okay? Archaeopteryx means "ancient wing," and he had claws on his wings. Well, that's kind of unusual, okay. But twelve birds today have claws on their wings. There is the swan, the ibis, the hoatzin… several birds have claws. They say, "Well, he had teeth in his beak." Well, not many birds have teeth, some do. There's the hummingbird that has teeth in his beak. But most birds don't have teeth, I agree. Actually, some mammals have teeth, some don't. Some birds have teeth, some don't. Some fish have teeth, some don't. Some of you have teeth, some don't, okay? Missing link!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Lies in the textbooks

Lying , Bird , Fish

“... you would be well advised to practice extreme discrimination on what filters through to that area of the brain that requires belief. Some or the more lucid, literate and better educated folks will tell you that they have conquered that base, primal nature of humanity and will inform that their brains do not require the gullible mechanism of blind acceptance called belief and their brains function far more clearly and with greater cogence. Just remember, Santa Claus is waiting.”

Kenny Young (1950) American songwriter

In reference to the subject of Alien Abductions in an e-mail from Young to Feeney on Wed, January 1, 2003. [citation needed]

Education , Nature , Waiting

“In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274

Change

“To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 64.

Exercises , Thinking

“If I sound grumpy, it is only because I have come across too many idiots of the "it can't be done" persuasion lately, the kind of managers who have an aquarium in their office because fifteen brains think better than one.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Upper limits of CL http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b3b24fb7512f220f (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking

“For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, pp. 31–32 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31
Quote About

Books , Way , Literature , Reading

“I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile.”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

God Is An Iron (1977)

People , Smile , Way , Thinking

“The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1860s, Life and Letters in New England (1867)

Men , Motivation

“Anything that gets the adrenalin moving like a 440 volt blast in a copper bathtub is good for the reflexes and keeps the veins free of cholesterol… but too many adrenaline rushes in any given time span has the same effect on the nervous system as too many electro-shock treatments are said to have on the brain: after a while you start burning out the circuits. When a jackrabbit gets addicted to road-running, its only a matter of time before he gets smashed — and when a journalist turns into a politics junkie he will sooner or later start raving and babbling in print about things that only a person who has Been There can possibly understand.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

1970s, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 (1973)

Understanding , Time , Personality

“The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. […] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off.”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

"Play It Again, Pac-Man" http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/pop-cult.991, Postmodern Culture, vol. 2 no. 1 (September 1991)

Game , Idea , Help , Patience

“Constitutions do not emerge perfectly formed from the brain of the philosopher king, as Mr. Trudeau himself discovered in 1980 and 1981. They are always messy processes that are easier to knock down or tear apart than they are to construct.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Seven, The Three Questions and the Question of Canada, p. 158

Tear

“I know a little of why there is blood in my body, pumping life into my limbs and thought into my brain. I am wanted by God. He is wanting to preserve me, to guide me through the darkness of the shadow of death, up into the highlands of His presence and afterlife. I understand that I am temporary, in this shell of a thing on this dirt of an earth. I am being tempted by Satan, we are all being tempted by Satan, but I am preserved to tell those who do not know about our Savior and Redeemer. This is why Paul had no questions. This is why he could be beaten one day, imprisoned the next, and released only to be beaten again and never ask God why. He understood the earth was fallen. He understood the rules of Rome could not save mankind, that mankind could not save itself; rather, it must be rescued, and he knew he was not in the promised land, but still in the desert, and like Joshua and Caleb he was shouting, "Follow me and trust God!"”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Life , Death , God , Understanding

“There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters.”

Michael S. Gazzaniga (1939) American neuroscientist

[Interview with Michael Gazzaniga, 2011, 12 April, Annals of the New York Academy of Science]

Way , Question , Study

“As knowledge of the alphabet and its permutations and combinations is to traditional literacy, and as a knowledge of numbers and their permutations and combinations is to mathematics, so a knowledge of the biological and conceptual alphabets of the brain and its apparently infinite permutations and combinations is to mental literacy.”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

Mathematics , Knowledge

“Every time I open a child's head and see a brain, I marvel at the mystery: This is what makes every one of us who we are. This is what hold all our memories, all our thoughts, all our dreams. This is what makes us different from each other in millions of ways.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 234

Dreams , Way , Memory , Time

“So limp of brain that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 2 (p. 403)

Idea

“I said I could to get the part. It made me go slightly mad, because my brain would be spinning all night. But after my big fight scene, where it was just kick, kick, kick, turn, in a freezing graveyard at 5am, I remember coming home on fire, because my brain hadn't kicked in once. Which was really, really a relief.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

FILM: Beauty and the Beasts Article http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040312/ai_n12769890/pg_1. The London Independent. March 12, 2004.
Guillory speaks about Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

Home , Fight , Parting , Madness

“Evolution doesn't design things… The brain is… like a big, old house with piecemeal renovations done on every floor, and less like new construction.”

Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind

The Organized Mind (2014)

Housing

“Surely we all know scores of professional men and women who, apart from their professional concerns, seem not to have enough brains to butter a biscuit. They probably had intelligence once. But when their university had given them its blessing, they thought that enough had been done for one lifetime.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Reading (1990)

Women , Men , Intelligence , Universe

“Brain damage ever since the day I was born, drugs is what they used to say I was on. They say I never knew which way I was goin.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

But everywhere I go they keep playin' my song.
"Brain Damage" (Track 4).
1990s, The Slim Shady LP (1999)

Way

“As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 115

Nature , Animals

“Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Alexander the Great

Thinking , Personality

“The long, extended play sessions of my youth were essential to the creator I am today. It helped exercise those world-building and problem solving pathways in my brain, and in turn enabled access to those deep recesses of the creative mind. Like learning a second language, it sinks in more thoroughly when you start young.”

Walter Wick (1953) American photographer and creator of children's books

The Value Of Imaginative Play http://www.walterwick.com/blog/2015/10/13/floor-games (October 13, 2015)

Youth , World , Exercises , Problem

“The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

"Do Humans Alone 'Feel Your Pain'?", in The Chronicle (26 October 2001) http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i09/09b00701.htm

Parting

“In the universe where everything works the way it common-sensically ought to, everything about the study of Artificial General Intelligence is driven by the one overwhelming fact of the indescribably huge effects: initial conditions and unfolding patterns whose consequences will resound for as long as causal chains continue out of Earth, until all the stars and galaxies in the night sky have burned down to cold iron, and maybe long afterward, or forever into infinity if the true laws of physics should happen to permit that. To deliberately thrust your mortal brain onto that stage, as it plays out on ancient Earth the first root of life, is an act so far beyond "audacity" as to set the word on fire, an act which can only be excused by the terrifying knowledge that the empty skies offer no higher authority.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Above-Average AI Scientists http://lesswrong.com/lw/uc/aboveaverage_ai_scientists/

Life , Law , Way , Star

“I could almost hear him scrabbling about in his brain for a deft, light opening. His Oscar Wilde touch. Martland has only two personalities – Wilde and Eeyore.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, Don't Point That Thing At Me (1972), Ch. 1.

Light , Personality

“When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. …behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.6 Threading a New Tapestry

Behavior , Idea

“In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

pg 397
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Fear , Rage , Parting , Personality

“If humor be the safety of our race, then it is due largely to the infusion into the American people of the Irish brain.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Irish Humor, address in Hot Springs, Virginia (5 August 1908) http://www.authentichistory.com/1900s/1908election/19080805_William_H_Taft-Irish_Humor.html.

People

“Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

To George Sand, A Desire http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/ebbrowning/bl-ebbrown-togeorge1.htm (1844).

Heart

“To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

Quoted in "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership" - by Joachim C. Fest - History - 1999 - Page 220

Fate , Religion , Soul , Heart

“Plato (427-347 B. C.) in his philosophical writings, stressed the inner psychological reality in contrast to the reality of the external world. He believed that the human soul consists of three parts. 1) The rational soul, which resided in the brain. 2) The anima soul, controlling emotions and passions, was located in the chest. 3) The vegetative soul, controlling physiological needs, was located in the abdomen, When dreams occurred in sleep, the irrational soul reasserted themselves.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990), p. 23

World , Dreams , Soul , Reality

“The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote. However, this suits people a hell of a lot better than setting out at age 6 to become a great ballet dancer and achieving their goal 20 years later after every tendon and muscle and joint has been asked to perform just a little bit more than nature ever intended over and over and over again. To most people, this is insanity. But in reality, it's art, and it's the art in what we do that makes us human.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

read the fine manual, please http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab91864 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Pain , People , Age , Art

“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”
“What is it?”
“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Men , Truth , Idea

“It [the city Berlin] stinks of perfume, they have water on their brains and they live as food for bacilli and shamelessly like dogs.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

in a letter to Nolde's friend, 1902; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 36
1900 - 1920

Food , Dogs , Water

“A seed is small in size. But it carries in its womb leaves, flowers, fruits, nay even the whole tree. The human brain is very much like a seed. It may not have a great shape and size. But it traps within itself endless possibilities. It is a fountainhead of thoughts and promises that can be fulfilled.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 113.

Flowers , Tree

“It is not too much to say that when the Great War broke out our Generals had the most important lessons of their art to learn. Before they began they had much to unlearn. Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber, packed in every niche and corner.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

War Memoirs (1938)
War Memoirs

War , Art , Learning

“Cybernetics is a young discipline which, like applied mathematics, cuts across the entrenched departments of natural science; the sky, the earth, the animals and the plants. Its interdisciplinary character emerges when it considers economy not as an economist, biology not as a biologist, engines not as an engineer. In each case its theme remains the same, namely, how systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves.
A cybernetic laboratory has a varied worksheet - concept formation in organized groups, teaching machines, brain models, and chemical computers for use in a cybernetic factory. As pure scientists we are concerned with brain-like artifacts, with evolution, growth and development; with the process of thinking and getting to know about the world. Wearing the hat of applied science, we aim to create what Boulanger,' in his presidential address to the International Association of Cybernetics, called the instruments of a new industrial revolution - control mechanisms that lay their own plans.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 11. Partly cited in: A.M.E. Salazar, A. Espinosa, J. Walker (2011) A Complexity Approach to Sustainability: Theory and Application. p. 11.

World , Mathematics , Question , Nature

“It gives my brain a rest, painting flowers. I don't feel the same tension as when I have a model in front of me. When I paint flowers, I put on colours and try out values boldly, without worrying about wasting a canvas. I wouldn't dare to do it with a figure; I'd be afraid of spoiling the whole thing. And the experience I gain this way is then applied to my pictures.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 196 : quote on painting flowers, to art-buyer George Riviere, who was watching a flower still-life of Renoir.

Way , Feeling , Flowers , Painting

“Viewing the brain from the outside, Libet has shown that the experienced intention to perform an act is preceded by cerebral initiation. Why should the experienced decision to veto that intention, or to actively or passively promote its completion, be any different?”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Max Velmans (1991) " Consciousness From a First-Person Perspective http://cogprints.org/594/1/199802004.html," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14, (4) 702-719; p. 705.

Decision

“You', the ego, live in your left brain. When we say that man is the only creature who spends 99 per cent of his time inside his own head, we mean, in fact, inside his left cerebral hemisphere. And in the basement of the left hemisphere is the library full of filing cabinets -- the stuffy room that we mistake for reality.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 9

Reality , Time

“The first punch causes the brain to go to one side of the skull.”

Wong Shun Leung (1935–1997) martial artist

Wong Shun Leung
Wisdom Quotes
Variant: ..... when you punch the head the brain hits the side of the skull.

“For man to become successful, for man to establish himself as the ruler of the planet, it was necessary for him to use his brain as something more than a device to make the daily routine of getting food and evading enemies a little more efficient. Man had to learn to control his environment.”

Isaac Asimov book The Tragedy of the Moon

"The Tragedy of the Moon," The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (July 1972)
General sources

Food , Learning , Success

“If you use conventional data compression on the [human brain's] genome, you get about 23 million bytes (a small fraction of the size of Microsoft Word), which is a level of complexity we can handle.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“The beauty of the brain is that you can still be as greedy as you like for knowledge and it doesn’t show.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Radio Times interview (2013)
1990s

Beauty , Knowledge

“By the time I was twenty-four I had constructed a complete system of philosophy. It rested on two principles: The Relativity of Things and The Circumferentiality of Man. I have since discovered that the first was not a very original discovery. It may be that the other was profound, but though I have racked my brains I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

section 66
The Summing Up (1938)

Life , Time

“My generation comes from a world that has been molded by crass TV programs, movies, comic books, popular music, advertisements and commercials. My brain is a huge garbage dump of all this stuff and it is this, mainly, that my work comes out of, for better or for worse. I hope that whatever synthesis I make of all this crap contains something worthwhile, that it's something other than just more smarmy entertainment—or at least, that it's genuine high quality entertainment. I also hope that perhaps it's revealing of something, maybe. On the other hand, I want to avoid becoming pretentious in the eagerness to give my work deep meanings! I have an enormous ego and must resist the urge to come on like a know-it-all. Some of the imagery in my work is sorta scary because I'm basically a fearful, pessimistic person. I'm always seeing the predatory nature of the universe, which can harm you or kill you very easily and very quickly, no matter how well you watch your step. The way I see it, we are all just so much chopped liver. We have this great gift of human intelligence to help us pick our way through this treacherous tangle, but unfortunately we don't seem to value it very much. Most of us are not brought up in environments that encourage us to appreciate and cultivate our intelligence. To me, human society appears mostly to be a living nightmare of ignorant, depraved behavior. We're all depraved, me included. I can't help it if my work reflects this sordid view of the world. Also, I feel that I have to counteract all the lame, hero-worshipping crap that is dished out by the mass-media in a never-ending deluge.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 363

Books , World , Fear , Hope

“What is imagination? Psychologists tell us that it is the plastic or creative power of the soul; but materialists confound it with fancy. The radical difference between the two, was however, so thoroughly indicated by Wordsworth, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, that it is no longer excusable to interchange the words. Imagination, Pythagoras maintained to be the remembrance of precedent spiritual, mental, and physical states, while fancy is the disorderly production of the material brain.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XI

Soul , Imagination

“You all wrong. You try to hit home run every time but you no can do. No man can do. I wish you try to hit ball like you did when you joined team last July. Then you just try to meet ball because you want to make good showing after coming from minors. You swing easy and ball goes into centerfield seats. Next day, you swing easy again and ball goes over left field wall. Now you swing too hard. Try to hit home run every swing. You wrong. You have no timing, you miss ball. Please, for me, just try to meet ball when we open season. You have so much power, you just meet ball and whoosh—it goes over fence. Stu, with my brains, if I have your power, I make $200,000 in baseball.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Advice given to teammate Dick Stuart on April 7, 1959, as quoted in "The Scoreboard: Meet Ball, Homers Will Come, Clemente Assures Stuart" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=IEIqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aU4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7149,2639076 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Wednesday, April 8, 1959), p. 43
Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1959</big>

Home , Time , Season

“Any man could, if he were so inclined, be the sculptor of his own brain.”

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) Spanish neuroscientist

Advice for a Young Investigator (1897), p. xv

“The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part V, Chapter XIX, The Reservoir Plan and Tradition, p. 234 (See also; Karl Marx, Capital)
Storage and Stability (1937)

People , Nature

“What does it mean when people say I cannot walk by myself, I cannot travel by myself? I have a mouth to talk, I have a brain to think, I can walk, and I have a cane to find my way around. Then why can I not travel by myself? I was like a bird in a cage, not allowed to come out without an escort. But now my life has been transformed.”

Tiffany Brar (1988) Indian Social Activist

As quoted in They Say the Blind Should Not Lead the Blind. She Proves Them Wrong. https://www.thebetterindia.com/40485/tiffany-brar-working-for-blind/ (December 22, 2015) by Ranjini Sivaswamy, The Better India.

Life , People , Way , Travel

“So What's Left? Let's consider where we are, circa early 2030s. We've eliminated the hearth, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 307

Sex

“We can not gaze into space and understand that space has no end. There is no brick wall at the end of space, because if there was, what would be behind the brick wall? It just goes on and on……never ending. The thought of infinity hurts my brain – I can not understand it. The Bible teaches us that God is eternal, without beginning and without end. We being finite, can not understand a world without time. Time is just a dimension that God has created and subjected man to Eternity and infinity are too much for our tiny brains to comprehend.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God , World , Understanding , Time

“The left side of the brain is responsible for speech, but then it would say that.”

Harry Hill (1964) English comedian, doctor

"Hooves" Live

“Rona Barrett: Would you like to be the President of the United States?
Donald Trump: I really don't believe I would, Rona. But I would like to see somebody as the president who could do the job, and there are very capable people in this country.
Barrett: Why wouldn't you dedicate yourself to public service?
Trump: Because I think it's a very mean life. I would love, and I would dedicate my life to this country but I see it as being a mean life, and I also see it in somebody with strong views, and somebody with the kind of views that are maybe a little bit unpopular, which may be right, but may be unpopular, wouldn't necessarily have a chance of getting elected against somebody with no great brain but a big smile.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

An interview https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/politics/trump-archive/docs/rona-barrett-1980-interview-of-donald-trump.pdf with Rona Barrett (1980)
1980s

Love , Life , People , Smile

“6050. Your Head's so hot, that your Brains bubble over.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

Books , Feeling , Home , Game

“In a stroke of imaginative genius our understanding of consciousness was radically transformed, but in an entirely unexpected way. Critical clues came from diffuse nerve nets and, even more extraordinarily, plant neurobiology. Banished forever was the idea that the brain alone was the seat of consciousness. Rather, it is an 'antenna' embedded in a hyperdimensional matrix. The depths of reality are only now being uncovered, but now the springs of imagination, intuition, abstraction and even pre-cognition are revealed. What was once called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics was simply a clue to a superbly structured universe where mind is an integral component, instantiated at the big bang or maybe even before? Future exploration offers dizzying prospects, but we are not the first to venture forth. Far in advance of the emergence of human consciousness, innumerable galactic civilisations had slipped into what we now call the Mortimer Manifold.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

"King of Sweden" presenting "Professor Mortimer" with the 2056 Nobel prize, in "Simon Conway Morris forecasts the future" at NewScientist.com (15 November 2006) http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/science-forecasts/dn10477-simon-conway-morris-forecasts-the-future.html.

Way , Imagination , Spring , Mathematics

“His brain ached with the want of knowing.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Dying Earth (1950), Chapter 6, "Guyal of Sfere"

“It seems that the evolutionist must conclude, along with the writer Vladimir Nabokov, that ‘our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’. Brains that think otherwise – brains that deny they are brains and believe instead that they are eternal souls - are brains that hold false beliefs about themselves.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 150

Soul , Thinking , Light , Falseness

“Islam has never been misunderstood. Islam is the problem. But no one is stating the truth. No one is taking a hard look at the root of terrorism which is the brain washing machine called Islam. Islam is not up to me, is not up to any Muslim – man or woman. Islam is exactly what the prophet Muhammad did and said. In order to understand Islam you have to read the biography of Muhammad. It is very traumatising. It is very shocking. He married his second wife when she was six years old. He was over fifty. […] His third wife was Sophia. She was a Jewish woman. It was well documented, well written in our school books that he attacked her tribe. He killed her father, her brother, and her husband. At the same day, he slept with her. That's what I call Islam.”

Wafa Sultan (1958) American psychistrist

Speech at Restoration Weekend, Palm Beach, Florida 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up3yuQDAWKQ

Truth , Books , School , Understanding

“The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709021854.LAA12794@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Way

“She's online with her friends, and little boys are starting to call the house. Oh, my God, we had a kid call the house at two in the morning. Oh, I lost it. 'Cause first of all, I'm off in La-la land with Shania Twain in the mountains somewhere. I hear a phone ring and I'm like "Who's got a phone in the mountains??" So when I realize it's my phone, I'm already a little miffed, so I go, "Hello!" And this little voice says "Uh... is Emily there?" And I go, "Dude, if you have a brain in your skull, you will hang this phone up right now!" Click. Then my wife turns to me and goes, "Bill, you've got to be nice."”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

And I go, "No, ma'am. "Nice" stops at midnight!"
Blue Collar Comedy Tour, Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)

God , Mountain , Boy , Housing

“Hands are integral with brains, almost another lobe for intelligence. What one does not know through one's hands, one does not truly know.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

Intelligence

“Having spent a lifetime analyzing the game of chess and comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I've often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind, and are then refined and improved by experience.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Opening Gambit, Why Chess?, p. 4
2000s, How Life Imitates Chess (2007)

Art , Game , Science , Success

“Engels once called the British army the most brutal army. During the Second World War, the German fascist army surpassed the barbarism of the British army. No human brain could ever imagine more diabolic and terrible cruelty then those done by the Hitler gangsters at that time. But in Korea, the Americans have far exceed the Hitlerites!”

Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

Kim Il-sung to the Swedish communist leader Frank Baude in 1993. Quote and translated fr Mot strömmen, pg. 186: "Engels kallade en gång den brittiska armén den mest brutala armén. Under andra världskriget överträffade den tyska fascistarmén brittiska armén i barbari. Ingen mänsklig hjärna kunde någonsin föreställa sig mer djävulska och förfärliga grymheter än dem som begicks av Hitler-skurkarna vid den tiden. Men i Korea har amerikanerna långt mer överträffat hitleristerna."

War , World , Imagination , Time

“With all the clever brains in America it would be great to see more investment and focus on this essential research!”

Louise Burfitt-Dons (1953) Activist, writer, blogger

Video message sent to Joe Biden in response to his suggestions for green jobs (2009)

“Privilege tends to soften the brain, or so I’ve observed.”

Kage Baker book Mendoza in Hollywood

Part 3 “The Island Out There” Chapter 2 (p. 294)
Mendoza in Hollywood (2000)

“Digging deep in a Martian desert
men discovered an enormous brain.
It suddenly started to think at them —
So they covered it up again…”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

"The Deceptive Truth", The Dark Sun Rises (2002)

Men , Thinking

“[… language, as an example of a semiotic system, contains all four levels of organization as follows:]
First, it is transmitted physically, by sound waves traveling through the air; secondly, it is produced and received biologically, by the human brain and its associated organs of speech and hearing; thirdly it is exchanged socially, in contexts set up and defined by the social structure; and fourthly it is organized semiotically as a system of meanings”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday (2006, p. 68) as cited in: Andrew Halliday and Marion Glaser (2011).
1970s and later

Travel

“Tracking the individual learning curves of the major technologies that comprise the infrastructure of information technology provides a more detailed account of the present and future state-of-the art of the technologies underlying convergence. The base technologies of digital electronics, general-purpose computer architectures, software and interaction are mature and provide solid foundations for computer science. The upper technologies of knowledge representation and acquisition, autonomy and sociality, support product innovation and provide the beginnings of foundations for knowledge science. Well's dream of a world brain making available all of human knowledge is well on its way to realization and it is in the representation, acquisition, and access and effective application of that knowledge that the commercial potential and socio-economic impact of convergence lies.”

Brian R. Gaines (1938) British computer scientist

Last paragraph
Convergence to the Information Highway (1996)

World , Dreams , Art , Way

“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

[Witnessing, 2007-01-03, 2012-08-16, http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/#Witnessing]

Love , Men , Idea , Courage

“[Religion] is literally a delusion, but one caused by conditioning rather than pathology. There are a number of studies showing a negative correlation of faith as debilitating certain areas of the brain. So religion can lead to, conceal, or even encourage mental disorders without actually being one itself.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Anti-theist Answers to Christian Questions http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/22/anti-theist-answers-to-christian-questions/ (November 22, 2015)

Faith , Religion , Study

“Gaskell… had to keep his stately soldiers upright and uniformly oriented… by crafting the brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below. …Gaskell thought that his move would rescue the theory of linear progress, with its necessary transition of arthropod into vertebrate, from the absurdities of the old inversion theory.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 327
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“[War] isn't a Nintendo game… There's no hitting reset and coming back to life. If you turn your head around the corner in the streets of Baghdad and take one between the eyes, your brain is gone. Maybe you turn around the corner and you take one in your chest and it'll sever your spinal cord and you can spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. That's war! Maybe you step on a landmine and there goes your leg, you lose an arm, you lose eyesight. That's war! And we're talking about going to war. There better be a hell of a good reason for this. There better be a reason worthy of the sacrifice we're asking Americans to make. And you know, it's not just going to be Americans dying in this war; we're going to be killing Iraqis, by the thousands. I have to tell you, as a former Marine, I was involved with the worlds most efficient killing machine. We were the best led, best trained, best equipped warriors anybody's ever seen, and we are today. When we go to war we will slaughter those who oppose us, because that's what we do, and we do it better than anyone else. If you get in my way, I will kill you. You try hurt one of my marines, I'm taking you down. And I will continue to go until my government tells me to stop. We are the dogs of war and when we are unleashed there is nothing but hell. That's the reality of war. For God's sake, don't unleash the dogs of war unless there's an absolute necessary to do so.”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

Keynote address, California Institute of Technology http://sass.caltech.edu/events/ritter.shtml November 13, 2002
2000

Life , God , War , World

“The economic crisis was a reflection of narcissism and very primitive defense mechanisms (such as a complete denial of economic reality) built into the financial system. The best and brightest MBA students have been going into investment banking; many of them used their brains essentially to play casino games, and not to add much value to society.
Now, we’ve seen the result. Look at the least-admired professions in most countries over the years: telemarketers and used-car salesmen. Today, you have bankers and CEOs achieving the same low rating. Companies like Citibank — which was the brainchild of one of the most visibly narcissistic executives in the world, Sanford Weill — have essentially collapsed. They have grown too complex for the people who work there to understand. I strongly question what the different parts of Citibank have in common. No matter what kinds of regulatory reforms are initiated, more companies will collapse this way, because narcissism breeds this kind of unmanageable grandiosity.”

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries (1942) Dutch academic

Manfred Kets de Vries in: " The Thought Leader Interview: Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10209?gko=cbe31," in: Strategy + business. May 10, 2010. Originally published by Booz & Company.

People , World , Cars , Way