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Jerry Adler . . . "A Font a Day", 1994 Walter Truett Anderson . . . Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, 1990 Hannah Arendt . . . Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963 Hannah Arendt . . . The Human Condition, 1958   Jose Barreiro, ed. . . . Indian Roots of American Democracy, 1992 Jacques Barzun . . . The House of Intellect, 1959 Alice S. Baum & Donald W. Burnes . . . A Nation in Denial, 1993 Peter Bergmann . . . Nietzsche, the Last Antipolitical German, 1987 Ambrose Bierce . . . The Devil's Dictionary, 1911 Allan Bloom . . . The Closing of the American Mind, 1987 Alain de Botton . . . How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997 Marion Bradley . . . The Mists of Avalon Louis D. Brandeis . . . Olmstead v United States, 1962 Nathaniel Branden . . . The Art of Living Consciously, 1997 Paul Brodeur . . . Currents of Death, 1989 Paul Brodeur . . . Secrets, 1997 Suzanne Brogger . . . Deliver Us From Love, 1976 Andrew Buckoke . . . Fishing in Africa, 1991 Julie Burchill . . . Sex and Sensibility, 1992 Lynette Burrows . . . Good Children, 1986   Fritjof Capra . . . The Web of Life, 1996 Ernst Cassirer . . . Myth of the State, 1961 William J. Chambliss . . . Harry King, A Professional Thief's Journey, 1984 Iris Chang . . . The Rape of Nanking, 1997 Jung Chang . . . Wild Swans, 1991 Bernard Connolly . . . The Rotten Heart of Europe, 1995 Agatha Christie . . . An Autobiography Michael Crichton . . . The Lost World, 1995 Robert X. Cringely . . . Accidental Empires, 1992 Joan Delfattore . . . What Johnny Shouldn't Read, 1992 Karl W. Deutsch . . . Politics and Government, 1974 Albert V. Dicey . . . Law and Public Opinion, 1920 Peter F. Drucker . . . The New Realities, 1989 Peter H. Duesberg . . . Inventing the AIDS Virus, 1990 Umberto Eco . . . Travels in Hyperreality, 1987   Joel Feinberg . . . Offense to Others, 1985 Alain Finkielkraut . . . The Defeat of the Mind, 1995 Stephen Fry . . . Paperweight, 1993 R. Buckminster Fuller . . . Critical Path, 1981 Mel & Norma Gabler . . . What Are They Teaching Our Children?, 1981 John Kenneth Galbraith . . . "Writing, Typing and Economics," 1978 Mike Godwin . . . Cyber Rights, 1998 Nadine Gordimer . . . The Essential Gesture, 1989 Richard B. Gregg . . . The Power of Nonviolence, 1935 John Grisham . . . The Runaway Jury, 1996   Joshua Halberstam . . . Everyday Ethics, 1993 Paul Hawken . . . The Ecology of Commerce, 1993 Friedrich A. Hayek . . . The Constitution of Liberty, 1978 Jane M. Healy . . . Endangered Minds, 1990 James Hillman . . . The Soul's Code, 1996 Peter Hoeg . . . Smilla's Sense of Snow, 1992 Philip K. Howard . . . The Death of Common Sense, 1994 William Hubben . . . Four Prophets of Our Destiny, 1952 Robert Hughes . . . Culture of Complaint, 1993 Stevi Jackson . . . Childhood and Sexuality, 1982 Paul Jacobs & Saul Landau . . . To Serve the Devil, 1971 Wendy Kaminer . . . I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, 1993   Ursula K. LeGuin . . . Always Coming Home, 1985 Paul Leinberger & Bruce Tucker . . . The New Individualists, 1991 Flora Lewis . . . Europe, Road to Unity, 1992 Jean Liedloff . . . The Continuum Concept, 1986 David Lodge . . . Paradise News Robert K. Logan . . . The Alphabet Effect, 1986 Jerry Mander...Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978 Jerry Mander . . . In the Absence of the Sacred, 1992 Michael Marin . . . The Road To Hell, 1997 Gregory Mcdonald . . . A World Too Wide, 1987 John Stuart Mill . . . On Liberty, 1859 Henry Miller . . . The Air Conditioned Nightmare, 1945 Kate Millett . . . The Politics of Cruelty, 1994 Montesquieu . . . The Spirit of Laws, 1748 Maria Montessori . . . The Child in the Family Thomas More . . . Utopia, 1516   Frederick Nietzsche . . . On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887 Thomas Paine . . . Common Sense, 1776 Thomas Paine . . . Letter Addressed to the Addressors, 1792 Peace Pilgrim . . . Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, 1994 Steven Pinker . . . The Language Instinct, 1994 Tom Peters & Nancy Austin . . . A Passion for Excellence, 1985 Neil Postman . . . Technopoly, 1992 Marcel Proust . . . How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1997 Daniel Quinn . . . The Story of B., 1996 Daniel Quinn . . . My Ishmael, 1997   Herbert Rappaport . . . Marking Time, 1990 Stephen Raushenbush . . . The March of Fascism, 1939 Brian Reading . . . Japan, The Coming Collapse, 1992 Garry Reed . . . Collateral Damage & Roosting Chickens, 2001 Richard M. Restak . . . The Self Seekers, 1982 Jean-Francois Revel . . . Democracy Against Itself, 1993 Jean-Francois Revel . . . The Flight From Truth, 1991 Richard G. Rieben . . . Reciprocia, 2000 Richard G. Rieben . . . The Libido of Liberty, 2000 Richard G. Rieben . . . Ethics for Earthlings, 2000 Richard G. Rieben . . . Blundering Social Bodies, 2001 Richard G. Rieben . . . Handbook for Liberty, 2001   John Robbins . . . Reclaiming Our Health, 1996 Tom Robbins . . . Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1990 Tom Robbins . . . Jitterbug Perfume, 1993 Tom Robbins . . . Still Life With Woodpecker, 1994 Tom Robbins . . . Skinny Legs and All, Bantam, 1995 Tom Robbins . . . Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1996 Tom Robbins . . . Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, 2000 Jay Rosen . . . Not Necessarily the New Age Barry Rosenberg . . . Notes From a Native Son Theodore Roszak . . . The Cult of Information, 1986 Bertrand Russell . . . Portraits from Memory 1956   Carl Sagan . . . Not Necessarily the New Age Edward W. Said . . . Culture and Imperialism, 1994 Melita Schaum & Karen Parrish . . . Stalked Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. . . . The Disuniting of America, 1998 Howard P. Segal . . . Future Imperfect, 1994 Yefim Shubentsov & Barbara Gordon . . . Cure Your Cravings, 1998 Jim Sleeper . . . The Closest of Strangers, 1990 Starhawk . . . The Fifth Sacred Thing, 1993 Bruce Sterling . . . The Hacker Crackdown, 1992 Clifford Stoll . . . Silicon Snake Oil, 1995 Anne Sullivan . . . Letter to Helen Keller, 1887 Jonathan Swift . . . Gulliver's Travels, 1726 Charles J. Sykes . . . Dumbing Down Our Kids, 1995 Charles J. Sykes . . . A Nation of Victims, 1992   Gordon Thomas . . . Journey Into Madness, 1989 Lewis Thomas . . . The Lives of a Cell, 1975 Henry David Thoreau . . . Walden Roderick Thorp . . . Devlin, 1992 Leo Tolstoy . . . The Kingdom of God, 1893 Michael Tooley . . . Abortion and Infanticide, 1985 Mark Twain . . . Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894 Jill Tweedie . . . In the Name of Love, 1979 Peter Ustinov . . . Dear Me Joseph Weizenbaum . . . Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976 Geoffrey Wheatcroft . . . The Controversy of Zion, 1996 Eugene Wheeler & Robert Kallman . . . Stop Justice Abuse, 1986 Oscar Wilde . . . Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 Colin Wilson . . . Access to Inner Worlds Norbert Wiener . . . The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950 Elie Wiesel . . . The Town Beyond the Wall, 1964 Naomi Wolf . . . Fire With Fire, 1994 Robert Wright . . . The Moral Animal, 1994

 

Jerry Adler
"My old word processor printed out exactly one font, which was the typeface of the typewriter it was attached to. Any nuances I chose to convey I had to supply myself, through my choice of words and the skill with which I juggled as many as five different kinds of punctuation in a single sentence. I'm a writer; that's what I do. WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows offers dozens of quasi-geometric shapes into which text can be squeezed, stretched and contorted for dramatic effect. I would no more want to see my words treated this way than my child."
HOME	Jerry Adler, "A Font a Day", Newsweek, Oct. 24, 1994, p. 43	INDEX

 

Walter Truett Anderson
“Multiculturalism is fine as long as all concerned are in a postmodern frame of mind about their traditions – and especially about their religious beliefs. This means that no particular group, no particular minority community, has any basis for enforcing fidelity to its cultural heritage.”
HOME	Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn't What It Used To Be, Theatrical Politics, Ready-To-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World, Harper & Row, S.F., 1990, p. 242	INDEX

 

Hannah Arendt
“Politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we know of in which the Nazis met with open native resistance, and the result seems to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds. They themselves apparently no longer looked upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course.”
HOME	Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking Press, NY, 1963, p. 157	INDEX

 

Hannah Arendt
“If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
HOME	Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1958, p. 3	INDEX

 

Richard Hill (Jose Barreiro, ed.)
“As other Indians rushed to accept American citizenship as a way of gaining status and equal recognition, the Six Nations saw such a move as an almost traitorous act that would result in actual loss of independence. To accept American or Canadian citizenship would also nullify the international treaties. In 1944 House hearings the Six Nations Confederacy presented the following position on United States citizenship: “1) That said confederacy has vital existing treaties. The character or construction of them cannot be changed by legislation by Congress. 2) That they are not citizens of the United States. The act of Congress of June 2, 1924, did not provide for Indians to apply for citizenship ... as required by the constitution.””
HOME	Richard Hill in, Jose Barreiro, ed., Indian Roots of American Democracy, Akwe:kon Press, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1992, p. 169	INDEX

 

Jacques Barzun
“No scheme of inequality can be defended as corresponding to natural fact.... Superior and inferior can be determined only with respect to a single quality for a single purpose. Nor can a man's qualities be added together and averaged to give a final score or merit. In short, men are incommensurable and must be deemed equal."
HOME	Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, Harper, NY, 1959, p. 260	INDEX

 

Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes
“Ashamed, abandoned, rejected, fearful, and sick, the homeless give up, not “because they choose to live this way” nor because they are “lazy, shiftless bums” but because alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental illness are conditions that, if left untreated, propel people into a downward spiral.”
HOME	Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes, A Nation in Denial, The Truth About Homelessness, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1993, p. 155	INDEX

 

Peter Bergmann
"Cowardice and resentment, Nietzsche discerned, were the motivating factors of the new anti-Semitism in Germany. Cowardice because for all the temporary ascendancy of Jews in business and journalism – Nietzsche went far in accepting contemporary stereotypes of 'Jewish influence' – the fact remained that the new chosen 'enemy' was the archtypal non-warrior, allowing for cheap victories for heroic, 'Aryan' virtues and a fatal under-estimation of the real dangers facing Germany. The cry for Jewish exclusion was insofar justified, Nietzsche would later write, in that the 'weak,' uncertain German character could ill digest foreign or different elements."
HOME	Peter Bergmann, Nietzsche, the Last Antipolitical German, Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1987, p. 144	INDEX

 

Ambrose Bierce
"Corporation: n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
HOME	Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911	INDEX

 

Allan Bloom
"Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality....     "All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal – certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England. There the greatest events and the greatest men speak for monarchy and aristocracy as well as for democracy, for established religion as well as for tolerance, for patriotism that takes primacy over liberty, for privilege that takes primacy over equality of right."
HOME	Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students, Penguin, London, 1987, p. 55	INDEX

 

Alain de Botton
"It is perhaps only normal if we remain ignorant when things are blissful. When a car is working well, what incentive is there to learn of its complex internal functioning? When a beloved pledges loyalty, why should we dwell on the dynamics of human treachery? What could encourage us to investigate the humiliations of social life when all we encounter is respect? Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind."
HOME	Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, Not A Novel, Pantheon Books, NY, 1997, p. 68	INDEX

 

Marion Bradley
"The difference is deeper than I thought. Even those who till the earth, when they are Christians, come to a way of life which is far from the earth; they say that their God has given them dominion over all growing things and every beast of the field. Whereas we dwellers in hillside and swamp, forest and far field, we know that it is not we who have the dominion over nature, but she who has dominion over us, from the moment lust stirs in the loins of our fathers and desire in the womb of our mothers to bring us forth, under her dominion, to when we quicken in the womb and are brought forth in her time, to the lives of plant and animal which must be sacrificed to feed and swaddle and clothe us and give us strength to live ... all, all of these things are under the domain of the Goddess and without her beneficent mercy none of us could draw a living breath, but all things would be barren and die."
HOME	Marion Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, p. 459	INDEX

 

Louis D. Brandeis
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
HOME	Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v United States, 277 U.S. 438, 479. In Jackson, L.D. (editor) 1962, p. 169	INDEX

 

Nathaniel Branden
"So, about any tenet one must ask: Does this support or constrict the active use of my mind? Is this teaching addressed to my understanding or to my fears? Am I being offered awareness or escape from the responsibility of awareness?"
HOME	Nathaniel Branden, The Art of Living Consciously, The Power of Awareness to Transform Everday Life, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1997, p. 182	INDEX

 

Paul Brodeur
“The attempt of the utilities to play down the hazards of exposure to electric and magnetic fields from power lines has been abetted by a reluctance on the part of many people to acknowledge that their health could possibly be threatened by invisible emanations from something they regard as both pervasive and indispensable. Indeed, so dependent are we upon the benefits of electricity, and so accustomed have we become to the vast spider web of the electrical distribution system surrounding us, that we have accepted without question the necessity and ubiquity of its presence.”
HOME	Paul Brodeur, Currents of Death, Power Lines, Computer Terminals, and the Attempt to Cover Up Their Threat to Your Health, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1989, p. 229	INDEX

 

Paul Brodeur
“What these officials were suggesting, of course, was that du Pont's chemicals should be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Not surprisingly, no one in Congress had the temerity to tell them that the chemicals had not been granted constitutional rights and were thus not entitled to the presumption of innocence.”
HOME	Paul Brodeur, Secrets, A Writer in the Cold War, Faber & Faber, Boston, 1997, p. 166	INDEX

 

Suzanne Brogger
“Femininity is wearing shoes that make it difficult to run, skirts that inhibit movement, and underclothes that interfere with blood circulation. It can hardly be coincidental that the clothes men find most flattering on a woman are precisely those that make it most difficult for her to defend herself against aggression.”
HOME	Suzanne Brogger, Deliver Us From Love, Quartet (U.K./Ireland), 1976	INDEX

 

Andrew Buckoke
"People may say it is paternalist to advocate the determined use of aid, humanitarian and otherwise, to encourage political and economic freedoms in Africa. Yet aid is never neutral. We are not afraid of using our influence elsewhere. Why this exaggerated respect for the most absurd and unpleasant regimes? One wonders if the West wants any more in Africa than the maintenance of dictatorships just sufficiently powerful to guarantee a fairly constant supply of cheap agricultural and mineral commodities that cannot be found elsewhere."
HOME	Andrew Buckoke, Fishing in Africa, A Guide to War and Corruption, Picador, London, 1991, p. 221	INDEX

 

Julie Burchill
“What feminism did, as its name suggests, was not to masculinize women but to ultra-feminize them.... Post-feminism, women were born again as seething volcanoes of cancers, complexes and complaints. And a good deal of these are about sex; every American sex book published, from Kinsey to Hite, stresses women's need to be “cuddled” and their distress at being “used” by over-enthusiastic men."
HOME	Julie Burchill, Sex and Sensibility, Grafton, London, 1992, p. 49	INDEX

 

Lynnette Burrows
“The underlying philosophy of this book is principally that children are born into the adult world of their parents and fit naturally into it; and not the other way round. This accommodation with their parents' world is for all children a necessary prelude to fitting into the wider adult world.”
HOME	Lynette Burrows, Good Children, Corgi Books, London, 1986, p. 12	INDEX

 

Fritjof Capra
"In nature there is no 'above' or 'below,' and there are no hierarchies. There are only networks nesting within other networks."
HOME	Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, Anchor Books, NY, 1996, p. 35	INDEX

 

Ernst Cassirer
"Freedom is not a natural inheritance of man. In order to possess it we have to create it. If man were simply to follow his natural instincts he would not strive for freedom; he would rather choose dependence. Obviously it is much easier to depend upon others than to think, to judge, and to decide for himself. That accounts for the fact that both in individual and in political life freedom is so often regarded much more as a burden than a privilege. Under extremely difficult conditions man tries to cast off this burden. Here the totalitarian state and the political myths step in. The new political parties promise, at least, an escape from the dilemma. They suppress and destroy the very sense of freedom; but, at the same time, they relieve men from all personal responsibility."
HOME	Ernst Cassirer, Myth of the State, Yale University Press, 1961, p. 288	INDEX

 

William J. Chambliss
"It is, as Harry says in Chapter Six, the police, the prosecuting attorneys, the fix and the judges who benefit most directly from professional theft. The thieves end up impoverished and in prison. It is only when that situation changes that we will see the death of professional theft. American society and American criminal law being what they are, we are not likely to see any profound changes in the near future. The professional thief is an indispensable part of the legal system as it is constituted in America."
HOME	William J. Chambliss, Harry King, A Professional Thief's Journey, John Wiley & Sons, 1984, p. 143	INDEX

 

Iris Chang
“The final death count was almost incredible, between 1,578,000 and 6,325,000 people. R.J. Rummel gives a prudent estimate of 3,949,000 killed, of which all but 400,000 were civilians. But he points out that millions more perished from starvation and disease caused in large part by Japanese looting, bombing, and medical experimentation. If those deaths are added to the final count, then one can say that the Japanese killed more than 19 million Chinese people in its war against China.”
HOME	Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Basic Books, NY, 1997, p. 216	INDEX

 

Jung Chang
"For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of 'class hatred,' respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence.... As I sometimes wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West?"
HOME	Jung Chang, Wild Swans, Three Daughters of China, London, Flamingo, 1991, p. 628	INDEX

 

Agatha Christie
"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas in holiday time."
HOME	Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, p. 43-4	INDEX

 

Bernard Connolly
"Even that would not be enough: the whole 'economic culture' would have had to become totally uniform across countries, to rule out the possibility of future divergence. The relative sizes of the public and private sectors, the degree of government regulation and subsidy, the role of corporatist institutions versus free markets, the scope and direction of social security systems, the cast of education – all these would first have had to be 'harmonized.' What is more, there would have to be complete certainty that no country in the monetary union could ever move away from this state of conformity in the future. That list of conditions amounts, in effect, to the prior existence of a single government – complete political union."
HOME	Bernard Connolly, The Rotten Heart of Europe, The Dirty War for Europe's Money, Faber and Faber, London, 1995, p. 59	INDEX

 

Michael Crichton
"What makes you think human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told – and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
HOME	Michael Crichton, The Lost World, Ballantine, NY, 1995, p. 7	INDEX

 

Robert X. Cringely
"Fitting in is the root of culture. Staying here and having fun with everyone else is what allows societies to function, but it's not a source of progress. Progress comes from discord – from doing new things in new ways, from running away to something new, even when it means giving up that chance to have fun with the old gang."
HOME	Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires, Penguin, London, 1992, p. 160	INDEX

 

Joan Delfattore
"Textbooks would, the spokespersons stated, include more information about the positive contributions religion has made to history. They would not, however, include any fact suggesting that the role of religion has ever been anything but benign. Conference participants protested that militant religion has been the motivating force behind persecutions, inquisitions, and wars, but the publishers' representatives remained firm. Associating religion with violence, they explained, does not sell textbooks."
HOME	Joan Delfattore, What Johnny Shouldn't Read, Textbook Censorship in America, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992, p. 88	INDEX

 

Karl W. Deutsch
"If somebody enjoys a value he usually likes to have it in security, so that he can count on continuing to enjoy it. Ever since the rise of the state, people have used political organizations to protect social arrangements, persons, and property. The more unequal or unjust the society was, the heavier the machinery necessary for protection."
HOME	Karl W. Deutsch, Politics and Government, How People Decide Their Fate, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1974, p. 45	INDEX

 

Albert V. Dicey
"Collectivism curtails as surely as individualism extends the area of contractual freedom. The reason of this difference is obvious. The extension of contractual capacity enlarges the sphere of individual liberty. According as legislators do or do not believe in the wisdom of leaving each man to settle his own affairs for himself, they will try to extend or limit the sphere of contractual freedom."
HOME	Albert V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relations Between the Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century, Second Edition, Macmillan, London, 1920, p. 264	INDEX

 

Peter F. Drucker
"Salvation by society failed the most where it promised the most, in the communist countries. But it also failed in the West. Practically no government program enacted since the 1950's in the western world – or in the communist countries – has been successful."
HOME	Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities, Heinemann Professional Publishing Ltd., Oxford, 1989, p. 11	INDEX

 

Peter H. Duesberg
“With drugs, the dose is the poison. Toxicity of drugs is first a function of how much is taken at any given time. But the untold price of frequent drug use is the cumulative toxicity that builds up over a life time, causing irreversible damage. The more drugs are consumed over time, the more toxicity is accumulated. Therefore, it takes twenty years of smoking to acquire irreversible lung cancer or emphysema, and twenty years of drinking to acquire irreversible liver cirrhosis. Therefore, it takes about ten years of nitrites, heroin, amphetamines, or cocaine to develop AIDS. And therefore it takes less than a year of the much more toxic drug AZT to cause AIDS by prescription.”
HOME	Peter H. Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery Publishing, Washington D.C., 1996, p. 411-2	INDEX

 

Umberto Eco
"A garment that squeezes the testicles makes a man think differently.... But the same can be said (perhaps to a lesser degree) of the neck, the back, the head, the feet. A human race that has learned to move about in shoes has oriented its thought differently from the way it would have done if the race had gone barefoot. It is sad, especially for philosophers in the idealistic tradition, to think that the Spirit originates from these conditions."
HOME	Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, Picador, 1987, p. 193	INDEX

 

Joel Feinberg
“The “reasonable person” in a democracy must be presumed to have enough self-control to refrain from violent response to odious words and doctrines."
HOME	Joel Feinberg, Offense to Others, Oxford University Press, NY, 1985, p. 91	INDEX

 

Alain Finkielkraut
“God is dead, but the Volksgeist lives on, even though the idea of the rights of man came into existence precisely to challenge the authority of traditions deeply entrenched in the soil of the Old Continent. It was at the expense of culture that European individuals gained, one by one, all their rights. In the end it is the critique of tradition that constitutes the spiritual foundation of Europe, a fact the philosophy of decolonization has let us forget by persuading us that the individual is nothing more than a cultural phenomenon.”
HOME	Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind, trans. Judith Friedlander, Columbia University Press, NY, 1995, p. 106	INDEX

 

Stephen Fry
"Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."
HOME	Stephen Fry, Paperweight, Mandarin, 1993, p. 188	INDEX

 

R. Buckminster Fuller
“Each new year's foreign-aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money had to be spent through those American companies.... Foreign aid paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America.... But the main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. In 1933 the American people had saved the corporations by subsidizing them; then, twenty years later, the Wall Street lawyers moved them out of America, getting the American people to pay for the move.”
HOME	R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Adjuvant, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1981, p. 105-6	INDEX

 

Mel and Norma Gabler
“Too many parents, when a child is ready for kindergarten or first grade, say to the school, “You educate him.” Parents attend a couple of PTA meetings, patronize the school fair, and occasionally help their child with homework – and think they've done their duty. Then when the kid starts bad-mouthing them and develops other bad habits, they blame everybody but themselves.”
HOME	Mel and Norma Gabler, What Are They Teaching Our Children? (What You Can Do About Humanism and Textbooks in Today's Public Schools), Victor Books, Wheaton, IL, 1985, p. 177	INDEX

 

John Kenneth Galbraith
"The person who undertakes to make difficult matters clear is infringing on the sovereign right of numerous economists, sociologists, and political scientists to make bad writing the disguise for sloppy, imprecise, or incomplete thought."
HOME	John Kenneth Galbraith, "Writing, Typing and Economics," Atlantic Monthly, March 1978, p. 105	INDEX

 

Mike Godwin
"But we're less often inclined to remember that the First Amendment was crafted specifically to stop the majority of us from using the government to regulate speech we find offensive. Governments never try to ban any other kind." ----------------------     "Open societies, and societies that allow individual privacy, are less safe. But we have been taught to value liberty more highly than safety – we became an independent nation because of that very sentiment."
HOME	Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights, Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, Times Books, NY, 1998, p. 111 & 153	INDEX

 

Nadine Gordimer
"The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is." ------------------     "The sad old paradox arises of those who will fight for the freedom to write what they want to write, but are not sure it really ought to be extended to other people who may want to write something different. Perhaps, like the Afrikaans writers, who thought censorship wouldn't touch them, people who keep silent on the subject of gagged writers will wake up, too late, to find that freedom is indivisible and that when professional freedom was withheld from one or two little known leftist writers, it was lost to them, too."
HOME	Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture, Stephen Clingman, ed., London, Penguin, 1989, p. 28 and p.66	INDEX

 

Richard B. Gregg
“The conduct of the nonviolent resister is not one of mere passive waiting or endurance. Toward his opponent he is not aggressive physically, but his mind and emotions are active. He wrestles constantly with the problem of persuading the latter that he is mistaken, seeking proposals for a better way out and examining his own cause and organization to see what may be its mistakes or short-sightedness. He is thinking constantly of all possible ways of winning the truth for both sides.”
HOME	Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence, Schocken Books, NY, 1959 (first edition, 1935), p. 75	INDEX

 

John Grisham
"They still know. They know that three thousand kids start smoking every day, and they can give you an accurate breakdown of the brands they're buying. They know that virtually all adult smokers began as teenagers. Again, they have to hook the next generation. They know that one third of the three thousand who start smoking today will eventually die from their addiction.... Because the issue is addiction, and the addict cannot make choices. And kids become addicted much quicker than adults."
HOME	John Grisham, The Runaway Jury, Doubleday, NY, 1996, 232	INDEX

 

Joshua Halberstam
"The object of lust is fungible, but the object of love is not. An object is fungible when you can replace it without any change in value.... The object of your arousal is fungible – there are lots of people out there who can satisfy your sexual cravings. Love, on the other hand, allows no substitutions. You aren't in love with Harry's qualities, you're in love with Harry. You won't fall in love with just anyone who has his wonderful qualities. It isn't Harry's smile that you love, it's the smile on Harry; because you love Harry, you love that smile. Harry is not fungible."
HOME	Joshua Halberstam, Everyday Ethics, Penguin, 1993, p. 31	INDEX

 

Paul Hawken
"The ultimate purpose of business is not, or should not be, simply to make money. Nor is it merely a system of making and selling things. The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy. Making money is, on its own terms, totally meaningless, an insufficient pursuit for the complex and decaying world we live in."
HOME	Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce, A Declaration of Sustainability, HarperBusiness, NY, 1993, p. 1	INDEX

 

Friedrich A. Hayek
"The 'law' that is a specific command, an order that is called a 'law' merely because it emanates from the legislative authority, is the chief instrument of oppression. The confusion of these two conceptions of law and the loss of the belief that laws can rule, that men in laying down and enforcing laws in the former sense are not enforcing their will, are among the chief causes of the decline of liberty, to which legal theory has contributed as much as political doctrine .... The classical view is expressed in Chief Justice John Marshall's famous statement: 'Judicial power, as contradistinguished from the power of laws, has no existence. Courts are mere instruments of law, and can will nothing.'"
HOME	Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1978	INDEX

 

Jane M. Healy
“These scientists already understand that experience – what children do every day, the ways in which they think and respond to the world, what they learn, and the stimuli to which they decide to pay attention – shapes their brains. Not only does it change the ways in which the brain is used (functional change), but it also causes physical alterations (structural change) in neural wiring systems.”
HOME	Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., Endangered Minds, Why Our Children Don't Think, Simon and Schuster, 1990, p. 51	INDEX

 

James Hillman
"The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of answers to the wrong questions. We little realize to what feverish extent all psychologies promote anxiety – in parents, in children, in therapists, in researchers, and in the field itself as it extends its searchings into ever more 'problem areas.'"
HOME	James Hillman, The Soul's Code, In Search of Character and Calling, Warner Books, NY, 1996, p. 38	INDEX

 

Peter Hoeg
"Every day, from the glacier above the cliffs, I had collected kangirluarhuq, big blocks of freshwater ice, and carried them home in sacks and melted them over the stove. At the boarding school you turned on a faucet. When summer vacation arrived, all the students and teachers went out to Herbert Island and visited the hunters, and for the first time in a long while we had boiled seal meat and tea. That's when I noticed the paralysis. Not just in me but in everybody. We could not pull ourselves together anymore; it was no longer a natural thing to reach out for some water and brown soap and the package of Neogene and start rinsing the skins. We weren't used to washing clothes, we couldn't pull ourselves together to cook. At every break we would slip into a daydreaming state of waiting. Hoping that someone would take over, would relieve us, free us from our duties, and do what we ourselves ought to have done."
HOME	Peter Hoeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Dell Publishing, NY, 1992, p. 293	INDEX

 

Philip K. Howard
“Like printing money, handing out rights to special interest groups for thirty years has diminished not only the civil rights movement but the values on which it was founded. Rights, intended to bring an excluded group into society, have become the means of getting ahead of society. But everyone is losing. It is in the nature of continued conflict, as well as law's inadequacy as a vehicle to happiness, that the ostensible winners have found, not justice and fulfillment, but isolation and recrimination.”
HOME	Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense, How Law is Suffocating America, Random House, NY, 1994, p. 133	INDEX

 

William Hubben
“The morality it wants is nothing more than to reduce everyone to its own level; man as a Christian occupies proudly the judgment seat. But Jesus, for whom Nietzsche always preserves a high regard, was not a judge. Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that Jesus opposed those who judged others, and wanted to destroy the morality existing in his age. Christ's rebellion attacked the Jewish hierarchy, the “just” and supreme rulers, and Nietzsche calls him an anarchist who had to die for this sin, not for the sins of others. Jesus abolished the idea of guilt and sin. How could he have died for the sins of others?”
HOME	William Hubben, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka (originally published as Four Prophets of Our Destiny, Macmillan, 1952), Collier, NY, 1967, p. 105	INDEX

 

Robert Hughes
“The image promulgated by pop-history fictions like Roots – white slavers bursting with cutlass and musket into the settled lives of peaceful African villages – is very far from the historical truth. A marketing system had been in place for centuries, and its supply was controlled by Africans.”
HOME	Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint, The Fraying of America, Oxford University Press, NY, 1993, p. 144	INDEX

 

Stevi Jackson
“In attempting to protect children from sex we expose them to danger, in trying to preserve their innocence we expose them to guilt. In keeping both sexes asexual, and then training them to become sexual in different ways, we perpetuate sexual inequality, exploitation and oppression.”
HOME	Stevi Jackson, Childhood and Sexuality, Basil Blackwell Limited, Oxford, 1982, p. 180	INDEX

 

Paul Jacobs & Saul Landau
"But for a while things went well for the Indians. The Cherokees, for example, gave up fighting in 1788; they also gave up their old hunting ways, and took up farming. Impressed by the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, they formed their own republic with a written constitution, a chief, bicameral legislature, codified laws, a system of courts, and a police force. A Cherokee named Sequoia invented a syllabary so that their language could be written, and they established a printing press and newspaper....     "Then gold was discovered in 1830 and by the spring a bill for the removal of the Indians of the Southeast to the West was passed by Congress. The Cherokees, who still had faith in the word of the United States as given in its treaties, took their case to the Supreme Court, convinced that they were in the right. In a landmark decision spelling out endless future misery for Indians, the Court ruled that it had no jurisdiction in the case since the tribe were "domestic dependent nations." With this failure of the Supreme Court to hold the nation to its word, all treaties with Indians became meaningless."
HOME	Paul Jacobs & Saul Landau with Eve Pell, To Serve the Devil, Volume 1: Natives and Slaves, Vintage, NY, 1971, p. 30	INDEX

 

Wendy Kaminer
“My own notion of intimacy does not include prurience – the exchange of secrets between strangers. My vision of community is shaped by an ideal of mutual respect between citizens and neighbors and a shared sense of courtesy and justice, but not love.”
HOME	Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 2	INDEX

 

Ursula K. LeGuin
“In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful – another piston in the great machine?” ---------------------      “Children were going towards sexual potency. Adolescents, as they attained it, turned from it. At the time they became able to “work” as sexual beings they ceased to do so – consciously, by choice. All the outgoing energies were now to reverse, to come back in to the center, to work in the service of personhood, at its most vulnerable and crucial stage.”
HOME	Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home, Harper and Row, NY, 1985, p. 316 & 490	INDEX

 

Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker
“For almost twenty years, American culture has been saturated with ideas and images that mutually reinforce the notion of the organization as an individual naturally pursuing its own best interests. Corporate apologetics, a resurgence of neoclassical economic thought, popularizations of organization theory, and media images of business have all done their part to create the egoistic pole of this generation's organizationalism. First, in time-honored fashion, many of these images and ideas confuse organizations with individuals. Second, in recent fashion, they psychologize them. And third, in even more recent fashion, they reduce psychology to egoism.”
HOME	Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, The New Individualists, The Generation After the Organization Man, HarperCollins, NY, 1991, p. 214	INDEX

 

Flora Lewis
"Though he swears by his dogged individualism, the Frenchman maintains a great respect for authority, especially for the signs that mark the status of a dignitary, and he is transported at the thought of being entitled to a sash or a decoration. When anything goes wrong, even the weather, he blames the state and looks to it for compensation."
HOME	Flora Lewis, Europe, Road to Unity, Touchstone, NY, 1992, p. 112	INDEX

 

Jean Liedloff
"Again it is the intellect trying to 'decide' what a child can understand, when the continuum way simply permits the child to absorb what he can from the total verbal environment, which is undistorted and unedited. It is impossible to hurt the mind of a child with concepts it cannot understand as long as that mind is allowed to leave what it cannot digest. But taking a child by the shoulders and trying to force him to understand can create a sad conflict between what he can comprehend and what he feels is expected of him."
HOME	Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept, Arkana (Penguin), London, 1986, p. 111	INDEX

 

David Lodge
"I don't think people want to go on holiday, anymore than they really want to go to church. They've been brainwashed into thinking it will do them good, or make them happy. In fact surveys show that holidays cause incredible amounts of stress."
HOME	David Lodge, Paradise News, p. 76	INDEX

 

Robert K. Logan
“The Hebrews considered themselves created in the image of the Creator with license to subdue the earth for their own needs. A nonliterate people would never conceive of this role for themselves. Tribal people are unable to separate themselves from nature; they are nature, an integral part of the environment.... The separation of man and his artifacts from nature explains why the Greeks never studied the effects of their own tools or artifacts despite their avid interest in nature itself. Unfortunately, this tradition has become part of our Western heritage – to ignore the impacts of our technology.”
HOME	Robert K. Logan, Ph.D., The Alphabet Effect, The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization, William Morrow, NY, 1986, p. 123	INDEX

 

Jerry Mander
“Far from being “neutral,” television itself predetermines who shall use it, how they will use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge.” ---------------------      “There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it.”
HOME	Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, William Morrow & Company, NY, 1978, p. 45 & 118	INDEX

 

Jerry Mander
“Corporations exist beyond time and space. As we have seen, they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a natural death; they outlive their own creators. And they have no commitment to locale, employees, or neighbors. This makes the modern corporation entirely different from the baker or grocer of previous years who survived by cultivating intimacy with the neighbors. Having no morality, no commitment to place, and no physical nature (a factory someplace, while being a physical entity, is not the corporation), a corporation can relocate all of its operations to another place at the first sign of inconvenience: demanding employees, too high taxes, restrictive environmental laws. The traditional ideal of community engagement is antithetical to corporate behavior.” ---------------------      “”Market economy” is really only a public-relations term to conceal the larger global picture: the forced abandonment of local controls on development, trade, prices, or lifestyle in favor of the new centrally planned economy, supervised by banks and corporations and enforced by the U.S. military.”
HOME	Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1992, p. 133-4 & 379	INDEX

 

Michael Marin
“In a routine foreign aid situation there is local government, even a corrupt local government, to check the tendency of aid organizations toward control.... Aid organizations across the Third World have been lectured or deported in hundreds of instances where governments have perceived a challenge to their sovereignty. Aid organizations regularly complain that local governments are the main obstacle to development. If only they were allowed total control, they might be able to really do development work. Somalia was the perfect chance to test this. There were no controls on aid agencies or what they could not do. It was as if a tumor was set loose in a body without an immune system.”
HOME	Michael Marin, The Road To Hell, The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, The Free Press, NY, 1997, p. 218	INDEX

 

Gregory Mcdonald
"This is the first generation that is not necessary for anything; that is not needed. They have been replaced by technology. And I'm afraid today's young people know it. There's not a thing left for them to do except serve each other fast food, which they don't even cook. And the more they realize this, the more they self-destruct, by chemical drugs, overpowered cars, or some other technological means. I really fear that if you make loud noise at this generation – war, depression or natural disaster – they will swallow their young in terror like so many minks."
HOME	Gregory Mcdonald, A World Too Wide, Hill and Company, Boston, 1987, 44-5	INDEX

 

John Stuart Mill
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warranty."
HOME	John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859, p. 13	INDEX

 

Henry Miller
"Prison of course is the school of crime par excellance. Until one has gone through that school, one is an amateur."
HOME	Henry Miller, The Air Conditioned Nightmare, 1945	INDEX

 

Kate Millett
“The term “citizen” – which historically followed the term “subject,” a new term once and full of a sense of “rights” and “prerogatives” – now often serves to reminds us how these entitlements have wilted under the state's greater and greater amassment of power in modern centralization of control, technically facilitated with computerlike speed: records, files, information itself becoming a hand closing over the arm of any one of these citizens. The feeling of subjection returns.”
HOME	Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty, An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment, W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 1994, p. 307	INDEX

 

Montesquieu
"In a free nation it is very often a matter of indifference whether individuals reason well or ill; it is sufficient that they do reason: hence springs that liberty which is a security from the effects of these reasonings.     "But in a despotic government, it is equally pernicious whether they reason well or ill; their reasoning is alone sufficient to shock the principle of that government."
HOME	Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, revised J.V. Prichard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, 1952 – first published in Geneva in 1748, Book XIX, Chapter 27	INDEX

 

Maria Montessori
"It is important for us to know the nature of a child's work. When a child works, he does not do so to attain some further goal. His objective in working is the work itself, and when he has repeated an exercise and brought his own activities to an end, this end is independent of external factors. As far as the child's personal reactions are concerned, his cessation from work is not connected with weariness since it is characteristic of a child to leave his work completely refreshed and full of energy. / This illustrates one of the fundamental differences between the natural laws of work for children and for adults. A child does not follow the law of minimum effort, but rather the very opposite. He consumes a great deal of energy in working for no ulterior end and employs all his potentialities in the execution of each detail. The external object and action are in every case of only accidental importance."
HOME	Maria Montessori, The Child In The Family, p. 240	INDEX

 

Thomas More
"They say the only purpose of a law is to remind people what they ought to do, so the more ingenious the interpretation, the less effective the law, since proportionately fewer people will understand it – whereas the simple and obvious meaning stares everyone in the face."
HOME	Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner, Penguin, London, 1965 (orig. 1516), p. 106	INDEX

 

Frederick Nietzsche
“Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as science “without any presuppositions”; this thought does not bear thinking through, it is paralogical: a philosophy, a “faith,” must always be there first of all, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. Whoever has the opposite notion, whoever tries, for example, to place philosophy “on a strictly scientific basis,” first needs to stand not only philosophy but truth itself on its head.”
HOME	Frederick Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Third essay, section 24 [1887], Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans. & Ed. Walter Kaufmann, The Modern Library, NY, 1968, p. 548-8	INDEX

 

Thomas Paine
"Commerce diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defense. And history sufficiently informs us, that the bravest achievements were always accomplished in the non-age of a nation.... The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture. The rich are in general slaves to fear, and submit to courtly power with the trembling duplicity of a spaniel."
HOME	Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776	INDEX

 

Thomas Paine
"These words, 'temperate and moderate,' are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice."
HOME	Thomas Paine, Letter Addressed to the Addressors, 1792	INDEX

 

Peace Pilgrim
“When an evil is attacked, the evil mobilizes, although it may have been weak and unorganized before, and therefore the attack gives it validity and strength. When there is no attack, but instead good influences are brought to bear upon the situation, not only does the evil tend to fade away, but the evildoer tends to be transformed. The positive approach inspires; the negative approach makes angry.”
HOME	Peace Pilgrim, Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, Ocean Tree Books, Santa Fe NM, 1994, p. 132	INDEX

 

Steven Pinker
“The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived.... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.”
HOME	Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, The New Science of Language and Mind, Allen Lane, London, 1994, p. 192-3	INDEX

 

Tom Peters and Nancy Austin
“As one small businessperson said, “We make people responsible for all that's important, then we treat them like children, and then we're utterly dismayed when they turn around and behave and respond like children.”
HOME	Tom Peters and Nancy Austin, A Passion for Excellence, The Leadership Difference, Fontana, NY, 1985, p. 244	INDEX

 

Neil Postman
“It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.”
HOME	Neil Postman, Technopoly, The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1992, p. 120	INDEX

 

Marcel Proust

"As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us