The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).
Weaving the Web (1999)
Breaking the Spell (2006)
Source: Schwager, Jack D., Market Wizards, HarperCollins (1989), page 159, ISBN 0-88730-610-1
Tommy Lee Wallace on Crafting His Miniseries Masterpiece, IT https://dailydead.com/stephen-king-week-tommy-lee-wallace-on-crafting-his-miniseries-masterpiece-it/ (October 27, 2015)
"Goodbye, and Good Riddance, to Centrism" Rolling Stone, June 13, 2017 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-goodbye-and-good-riddance-to-centrism-w487628
Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 6, “Practical Designs” (p. 83)
Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)
“To commit a successful murder must be very much like bringing off a conjuring trick.”
The Moving Finger (1942)
Book One, Part II “The Warrior”, Chapter 2 (p. 49)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)
From the article White on White from Rolling Stone Magazine
On 'gimmicks
“The trick is that you have to stay naked. You must be naked.”
Discussing the secret to a successful relationship to Ryan Seacrest at the 2011 Grammy Awards.
On Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
Bono: The Rolling Stone Interview (2017)
Context: These last two albums mix up the personal and the political so that you don't know which one you're talking to. That's a kind of magic trick, and realizing that of course all the problems that we find in the exterior world are just manifestations of what we, you know, what we hold inside of us, in our interior worlds. The biggest fucker, the biggest asshole, the biggest, the most sexist we can be, the most selfish, mean, cunning, all those characters you are going to see them in the mirror. And that is where the job of transformation has to start first. Is that not what experience tells us?
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 53-54
"Books of the Times" in The New York Times (6 July 1981)
Context: The magaicians of the 19th century, enthralled by the science of optics, photography and electricity, opened the door to motion pictures and thereby rendered themselves obsolete. Any amateur with a pair of scissors can cut and edit a strip of film in order to make a woman vanish, sever a head, burn a body down to the skeleton and reverse time. Talent went out of style.… People either didn't believe Houdini when he said that his tricks on film were real, or they didn't care. Illusion became big bigness, and the magicians were out of work.
Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 59
Context: Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and “gives the whole show away.” The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.
Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 21
Context: It's not the machine itself that does the trick. The machine merely acts as an intermediary between the sensitive and the spiritual force. It is an extension of the sensitive. It magnifies the capability of the sensitive and acts as a link of some sort. It enables the sensitive to perform his function.
A Girl's World interview (2006)
"Last Chance to Think" Interview (2010) by Kylie Sturgess in Skeptical Inquirer. Vol 34 (1)
2000s
Context: The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!
Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1993, 1996)
Interview in The Guardian (2011)
Context: People have said, in one form or another, your diction is too good. At first you think, are you insane? And then I realised, I spent so much time in the theatre, and Mamet was such a stickler about that and I am, too – that I had been spoilt. It's a cute acting trick, this whispering, mumbling thing. I realised a long time ago, when people are mumbling or whispering they're either talking about sex, or money, or lying. So if you're not doing that, you'd better speak up.
Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 58
Context: Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I. Q. s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.
Address at the National Plowing Match (18 September 1948); as quoted in Miracle of '48: Harry Truman's Major Campaign Speeches and Selected Whistle-stops (2003); edited by Steve Neal. Truman's mention of an "old political trick" is often quoted alone as if it were a strategy he was advising rather than one he was criticizing.
Context: On the one hand, the Republicans are telling industrial workers that the high cost of food in the cities is due to this government's farm policy. On the other hand, the Republicans are telling the farmers that the high cost of manufactured goods on the farm is due to this government's labor policy.
That's plain hokum. It's an old political trick: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em." But this time it won't work.
“You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.”
As quoted in "Innocent Revisited" in TIME magazine (29 June 1970)
Context: I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, "Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?" Tracy replied, "What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?" You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.
Trip of a Lifetime (1999)
Context: What I always wanted to be was a magician... My real upbringing when I was a teenager was doing magic shows, all over the state, with my father and brothers. Doing magic, you not only have to be able to do a trick, you have to have a little story line to go with it. And writing is essentially a trick.
“I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.”
Playboy interview (1996)
Context: I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
“I won't fall for the oldest trick in the book”
"That's Just What You Are" · Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArXL7uEQsEg
Song lyrics, I'm with Stupid (1995)
Context: In our endeavor we are never seeing eye to eye;
No guts to sever so forever may we wave goodbye.
And you're always telling me that it's my turn to move,
When I wonder what could make the needle jump the groove.
I won't fall for the oldest trick in the book,
So don't sit there and think you're off of the hook.
By saying there is no use changing 'causeThat's just what you are.
That's just what you are.
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 17. How the Sphere, Having in Vain Tried Words, Resorted to Deeds
Context: "Now I shall come back to you. And, as a crowning proof, what do you say to my giving you a touch, just the least touch, in your stomach? It will not seriously injure you, and the slight pain you may suffer cannot be compared with the mental benefit you will receive."Before I could utter a word of remonstrance, I felt a shooting pain in my inside, and a demoniacal laugh seemed to issue from within me. A moment afterwards the sharp agony had ceased, leaving nothing but a dull ache behind, and the Stranger began to reappear, saying, as he gradually increased in size, "There, I have not hurt you much, have I? If you are not convinced now, I don't know what will convince you. What say you?"My resolution was taken. It seemed intolerable that I should endure existence subject to the arbitrary visitations of a Magician who could thus play tricks with one's very stomach. If only I could in any way manage to pin him against the wall till help came!
Source: The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
Context: Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was — an ordinary man who'd had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he'd wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it — it took a man to do that.
The fire began to die on the hearth and the wind before morning to blow. The light was getting gray in the room when Dan'l Webster finished. And his words came back at the end to New Hampshire ground, and the one spot of land that each man loves and clings to. He painted a picture of that, and to each one of that jury he spoke of things long forgotten. For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something. And when Dan'l Webster finished he didn't know whether or not he'd saved Jabez Stone. But he knew he'd done a miracle. For the glitter was gone from the eyes of the judge and jury, and, for the moment, they were men again, and knew they were men.
Part Troll (2004)
On Democracy (6 October 1884)
Context: Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.
Katastroika (1988)
The Age of Empathy (2009), p. 6
Context: Don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or by keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also our closest relatives, the primates. In a study in Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards, licking their blood, carefully removing dirt, and waving away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions, and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick for which we have fallen for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.
“It is your false self that keeps you away from your true Self by every trick it knows.”
7 Absolute Honesty, p. 8.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)
Context: Absolute honesty is essential in one's search for God (Truth). The subtleties of the Path are finer than a hair. The least hypocrisy becomes a wave that washes one off the Path.
It is your false self that keeps you away from your true Self by every trick it knows. In the guise of honesty this self even deceives itself. For instance your self claims, I love Baba. The fact is, if you really loved Baba you would not be your false self making the self-asserting statement!
Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=807&chapter=88152&layout=html&Itemid=27 (6 January 1816) ME 14:384
1810s
Context: Like a dropsical man calling out for water, water, our deluded citizens are clamoring for more banks, more banks. The American mind is now in that state of fever which the world has so often seen in the history of other nations. We are under the bank bubble, as England was under the South Sea bubble, France under the Mississippi bubble, and as every nation is liable to be, under whatever bubble, design, or delusion may puff up in moments when off their guard. We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce nothing; that it is an idle dream to believe in a philosopher’s stone which is to turn everything into gold, and to redeem man from the original sentence of his Maker, “in the sweat of his brow shall he eat his bread.”
What then must we do? (1886)
Context: This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching it is observation. The trick played by this science is to destroy man's faith in reason and conscience by directing attention to the grossest deviations from the use of human reason and conscience, and having clothed the deception in a scientific theory, to assure them that by acquiring knowledge of external phenomena they will get to know indubitable facts which will reveal to them the law of man's life. And the mental demoralization consists in this, that coming to believe that things which should be decided by conscience and reason are decided by observation, these people lose their consciousness of good and evil and become incapable of understanding the expression and definitions of good and evil that have been formed by the whole preceding life of humanity. All this, in their jargon, is conditional and subjective. It must all be abandoned - they say - the truth cannot be understood by one's reason, for one may err, but there is another path which is infallible and almost mechanical: one must study facts. And facts must be studied on the basis of the scientists' science, that is, on the basis of two unfounded propositions: positivism and evolution which are put forward as indubitable truths. And the reigning science, with not less misleading solemnity than the Church, announces that the solution of all questions of life is only possible by the study of the facts of nature, and especially of organisms. A frivolous crowd of youths mastered by the novelty of this authority, which is as yet not merely not destroyed but not even touched by criticism, throws itself into the study of these facts of natural science as the sole path which, according to the assertions of the prevailing doctrine, can lead to the elucidation of the questions of life. But the further these disciples advance in this study the further and further are they removed not only from the possibility but even from the very thought of solving life's problems, and the more they become accustomed not so much to observe as to take on trust what they are told of the observations of others (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth state of matter,1 &c.), the more and more does the form hide the contents from them; the more and more do they lose consciousness of good and evil and capacity to understand the expressions and definitions of good and evil worked out by the whole preceding life of humanity; the more and more do they adopt the specialized scientific jargon of conventional expressions which have no general human significance; the farther and farther do they wander among the debris of quite unilluminated observations; the more and more do they lose capacity not only to think independently but even to under-stand another man's fresh human thought lying outside their Talmud; and, what is most important, they pass their best years in growing unaccustomed to life, that is, to labour, and grow accustomed to consider their condition justified, while they become physically good-for-nothing parasites. And just like the theologians and the Talmudists they completely castrate their brains and become eunuchs of thought. And just like them, to the degree to which they become stupefied, they acquire a self-confidence which deprives them for ever of the possibility of returning to a simple clear and human way of thinking.
"Journal Entries", p. 186
Memory and Dream (1994)
Context: I've always had these bouts of depression; I hide them well but doesn't mean they aren't there. … I didn't have anyone around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better.
"A History of Eternity" in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
Context: I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Return Trip to Nirvana from Sunday Telegraph (1967).
Context: I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his advocacy of 'the chemical opening of doors into the Other World', and with his belief that drugs can procure 'what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace'. Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
Source: The Flame is Green (1971), Ch. 5 : Muerte De Boscaje
Context: Things are set up as contraries that are not even in the same category. Listen to me: the opposite of radical is superficial, the opposite of liberal is stingy; the opposite of conservative is destructive. Thus I will describe myself as a radical conservative liberal; but certain of the tainted red fish will swear that there can be no such fish as that. Beware of those who use words to mean their opposites. At the same time have pity on them, for usually this trick is their only stock in trade.
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 112
Source: Silence Speaks, from the chalkboard of Baba Hari Dass, 1977, p.11
“The witch has been playing a semantic trick on us.”
Source: Space Chantey (1968), Ch. 6
Context: The witch has been playing a semantic trick on us. We were already pretty salty animals when we came here! It is toy animals she has turned us into. We have been working against ourselves, trying to be men again, but to be her idea of men, since we live in her context. But she does not know real animals, or men. … Be you not toys any longer! Stir up the wild business in you. You have to be real animals before you can be men.
Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.9
Songfacts interview (2007)
Context: I think the trick for any songwriter is authenticity. For the young songwriter coming up who is connected to his generation, as I was connected to mine, write honestly about what's going on in the center of your life. You know, when "We've Only Just Begun" was a Number 1 record, I think the Number 1 album in the country was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." So it was as far away from what was happening in the music scene as you can get. And yet it was a hit. I think it was a hit because of, obviously, Karen's amazing vocal, but I think that any time we write authentically and honestly about what's going on in the center of our chest, because people are so much alike, there's a big a chance that it's going on in the center of your chest, too.
The Judging of Jurgen (1920)
Context: In Philistia to make literature and to make trouble for yourself are synonyms,… the tumblebug explained. — I know, for already we of Philistia have been pestered by three of these makers of literature. Yes, there was Edgar, whom I starved and hunted until I was tired of it: then I chased him up a back alley one night, and knocked out those annoying brains of his. And there was Walt, whom I chivvied and battered from place to place, and made a paralytic of him: and him, too, I labelled offensive and lewd and lascivious and indecent. Then later there was Mark, whom I frightened into disguising himself in a clown's suit, so that nobody might suspect him to be a maker of literature: indeed, I frightened him so that he hid away the greater part of what he had made until after he was dead, and I could not get at him. That was a disgusting trick to play on me, I consider. Still, these are the only three detected makers of literature that have ever infested Philistia, thanks be to goodness and my vigilance, but for both of which we might have been no more free from makers of literature than are the other countries.…
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Romila Thapar, ‘A history of India 1. Pelican. (also quoted in https://aboutfilm.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/romila-thapar-%E2%80%93-a-history-of-india-and-the-absence-of-satan/ https://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2012/04/romila-thapar-on-hinduism.html)
On adapting a literary masterpiece for the big screen in “Interview: Benjamin Bratt” https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Benjamin-Bratt-6673.html in Cinema Blend
Failed Venezuela coup was fake news — designed to fool people in two nations https://www.salon.com/2019/05/08/failed-venezuela-coup-was-fake-news-designed-to-fool-people-in-two-nations/, Salon, (9 May 2019)
Watership Down (1972)
The Longest Voyage (p. 171)
Short fiction, The Book of Poul Anderson (1975)
Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.
The Beast of Property (1884)
Source: The Man Who Never Missed (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 56-57)
M. Walshe, trans. (1987), Sutta 1, verse 1.13
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Digha Nikaya (Long Discourses)
Observations of w:John Morley on Minto-Morley Reforms in India for full fiscal and political autonomy within the empire in Gopala Krishna Gokhale, D. N. Bannerjea (1866-1915), 4 December 2013, Bangla Library http://web.archive.org/web/20131017195504/http://forum.banglalibrary.org/viewtopic.php?id=1398,
“I’m happy Black is a hit. It marks my hat-trick after Hum Tum and Veer-Zaara.”
citation needed
The Actress' Take On Films
Source: The Kingdom of Gods (2011), Chapter 12 (p. 301)
It does not. You cannot charge a woman $39.95 to hold the baby that she has just given birth to. You cannot constantly operate hospitals at close to capacity in order to maximize profits. The pursuit of private money in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically.
Coronavirus is revealing how broken America’s economy really is, 6 April 2020
Political Register (5 June 1830), p. 730
1830s
Commissar-General Delane Oktar:
Warhammer 40,000 Works, Gaunt's Ghosts (novel series), First & Only
Source: Chapter 2 (pp. 29-30) Vorkosigan Saga, The Warrior's Apprentice (1986)
'Strong president, parliament needed to achieve goals' (June 22, 2018) https://www.aa.com.tr/en/economy/strong-president-parliament-needed-to-achieve-goals/1182516
Larry Page Q&A Zeitgeist Americas 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=4Mzlp6mIaC4#t=748s, at the annual Zeitgeist conference in Arizona. Published on October 16, 2012. Answering the question asked by Larry Aidem http://www.linkedin.com/pub/larry-aidem/42/229/6b7: "And I'm just curious what you do both at Google and also in the way you've managed the YouTube acquisition, which I think you could look at as one of the most successful examples of somebody buying something and not screwing it up. What's consciously done to keep that ethos, both at the Google level and then at YouTube?"
Source: The Long Tomorrow (1955), Chapter 14
Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe, (1998), Quotations from "Journey to Ixtlan" (Chapter 8)
Introduction
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
Source: The Heritage Universe, Resurgence (2002), Chapter 8, “Theories, Theories, Theories” (p. 84)
Source: Letter to William Chillingworth (15 September 1637), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume V—History of His Chancellorship, &c (1853), p. 184
"Can't Get Enough of You" (song)
Song lyrics
Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Can't Get Enough of You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51SnVzay3Y (song on YouTube)
The Book of Martha
Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995)
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (1997)
The Galton Case (1959)
Source: Short fiction, Home is the Hangman (1975), p. 149
Source: Short fiction, Home is the Hangman (1975), p. 138
