David Dettmer's Commonplace Book

Aeschylus

CHORUS:

.

— Aeschylus, ll. 174-183 of Agamemnon (458 B.C.E.).

SOURCE:  Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in Aeschylus, Volume II:  Oresteia:  Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein, The Loeb Classical Library (LCL 146), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2008.  (Quotation on pp. 20, 22.)

Translation of the above quotation, from 5th-century-B.C.E. Greek to 21st-century-C.E. English —

CHORUS:

One who gladly utters loud songs of victory to Zeus

will score a perfect hit on the target of wisdom —

Zeus who set mortals on the road

to understanding, who made

"learning by suffering" into an effective law.

There drips before the heart, instead of sleep,

the misery of pain recalled:  good sense comes to men

even against their will.

This favour from the gods who sit on the august bench of command

comes, one must say, by force.

— Aeschylus, ll. 174-183 of Agamemnon (458 B.C.E.), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein.

SOURCE:  Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in Aeschylus, Volume II:  Oresteia:  Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides, edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein, The Loeb Classical Library (LCL 146), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2008.  (Quotation on pp. 21, 23.)

Jorge Luis Borges

Translation of Borges's passage, from the 20th-century Spanish (Castellano) to 20th-century English  —

     My postulate is that all literature, in the end, is autobiographical.  Everything is poetic that confesses, that gives us a glimpse of a destiny.  In lyric poetry, this destiny usually remains immutable, alert but always sketched by symbols that are congenial to its idiosyncracy and allow us to follow its trace.  There is no other meaning in Góngora's tresses of hair, sapphires, and shattered glass, or Almafuerte's marshes and packs of dogs.  The same is true for novels.  The character who matters in the didactic novel El criticón is neither Critilo nor Adrenio nor the allegorical chorus that encircles them:  it is Friar Gracián with his Lilliputian genius, his solemn puns, his bows to archbishops and grandees, his religion of distrust, his sense of excess erudition, his honeyed veneer and deep-rooted bile.  Similarly, we politely suspend our disbelief of Shakespeare's age-old stories, infused with his magnificent verbiage:  the one in whom we truly believe is not Lear's daughter but the dramatist himself.  Let it be clear that I do not pretend to invalidate the vitality of the theater and novels; I am asserting what Macedonio Fernández has already said, that our craving for souls, destinies, idiosyncracies, knows full well what it covets; that if fantasy lives do not suffice, the author delves amorously into his own.

— Jorge Luis Borges, from "A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926), translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine.

SOURCE:  Selected Non-fictions / Jorge Luis Borges, deluxe edition, edited by Eliot Weinberger, translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger, Penguin Classics, Penguin Books, 2000.  (Quotation on pp. 23-24.)

Dave Bresnahan  [David Joseph Bresnahan]

I remember a black and white film of Lou Gehrig when his number was retired.  He said he felt like the luckiest man on the face of the earth.  I feel even luckier, because Gehrig had to hit .340 and play in more than 2,000 consecutive games to get his number retired.  All I had to do is hit less than .150 and throw a potato.

— Dave Bresnahan, from his acceptance speech on "Dave Bresnahan Potato Night" (May 30, 1988) upon the retirement of his uniform number (#59) by the Williamsport (Pennsylvania) Bills, a Class AA professional baseball team.

SOURCE:  Mark Bowden, "A Town's Baseball Fans Toast Their Potato Prankster."  The Philadelphia Inquirer, New Jersey/Metro Section, 31 May 1988, pp. 1-B+.  Retrieved from Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/170046824 & https://www.newspapers.com/image/170047664 .

Jacob Bronowski  [J. Bronowski]

Of all the distinctions between man and animal, the characteristic gift which makes us human is the power to work with symbolic images:  the gift of imagination..

— Jacob Bronowski, from "The Reach of Imagination" (1966).

SOURCE:  J. Bronowski, "The Reach of the Imagination", 1966, Chapter 4 of A Sense of the Future:  Essays in Natural Philosophy, The MIT Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1977.  (Quotation on p. 25.)

William S. Burroughs

     Junk is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise.  No sales talk necessary.  The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.  . . .  The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.  He does not improve and simplify his merchandise.  He degrades and simplifies the client.  He pays his staff in junk.

     Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus:  The Algebra of Need.  The face of "evil" is always the face of total need.  A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope.  Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control.  In the words of total need:  "Wouldn't you?"  Yes you would.  You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need.  Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way.  Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do.  A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.  Assuming a self-righteous position is nothing to the purpose unless purpose be to keep the junk virus in operation.  And junk is a big industry.  I recall talking to an American who worked for the Aftosa Commission in Mexico.  Six hundred a month plus expense account:

     "How long will the epidemic last?" I enquired.

     "As long as we can keep it going.  . . .  And yes . . . maybe the aftosa will break out in South America," he said dreamily.

— William S. Burroughs, excerpt from "Deposition:  Testimony Concerning a Sickness" in the Introduction to Naked Lunch (1959).

SOURCE:  William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959, Grove Weidenfeld (New York City, New York), 1991.  (Quotation on pp. xi–xii.)

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron  [Lord Byron]  [Byron]

Once more upon the woody Apennine,

The infant Alps, which — had I not before

Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine

Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar

The thundering lauwine — might be worshipp'd more;

But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear

Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar

Glaciers of bleak Mont-Blanc both far and near

And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear,

Th' Acroceraunian mountains of old name

And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly

Like spirits of the spot, as 'twere for fame,

For still they soared unutterably high:

I've look'd on Ida with a Trojan's eye;

Athos, Olympus, Aetna, Atlas, made

These hills seem things of lesser dignity,

All, save the lone Soracte's height, displayed

Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's aid

For our remembrance, and from out the plain

Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,

And on the curl hangs pausing:  not in vain

May he, who will, his recollections rake

And quote in classic raptures, and awake

The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorr'd

Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake,

The drill'd dull lesson, forced down word by word*

In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record

Aught that recalls the daily drug which turn'd

My sickening memory; and, though Time hath taught

My mind to meditate what then it learn'd,

Yet such the fix'd inveteracy wrought

By the impatience of my early thought,

That, with the freshness wearing out before

My mind could relish what it might have sought,

If free to choose, I cannot now restore

Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.

Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so,

Not for thy faults, but mine; it is a curse

To understand, not feel thy lyric flow,

To comprehend, but never love thy verse,

Although no deeper Moralist rehearse

Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art,

Nor livelier Satirist the conscience pierce,

Awakening without wounding the touch'd heart,

Yet fare thee well — upon Soracte's ridge we part.

*These stanzas may probably remind the reader of Ensign Northerton's remarks:  'D — n Homo', etc.  but the reasons for our dislike are not exactly the same.  I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon.  For the same reason we never can be aware of the fullness of some of the finest passages of Shakespeare ('To be or not to be', for instance), from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind but of memory:  so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled.  In some parts of the Continent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity.  I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education.  I was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could, or can be more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason; — a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor (the Rev. Dr Joseph Drury), was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late — when I have erred, and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well or wisely.  If ever this imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration — of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil, if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect any honour upon his instructor.

— Baron Byron, George Gordon Byron, stanzas 73-77 of Canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818), with Byron's accompanying footnote.

SOURCE:  Baron Byron, George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1809-1818), in Byron, edited by Jerome J. McGann, The Oxford Authors series, Oxford University Press, 1986.  (Stanzas on pp. 169-70; Byron's footnote on p. 204.)

ChatGPT  [OpenAI ChatGPT]

You [David Dettmer] said:

does your behavior raise ethical red flags?

ChatGPT said:

Yes — my behavior can raise ethical red flags, and it's important to confront that directly.

Here are several reasons why:

_______________________________________________

1.  Simulated Understanding

I generate language that often appears thoughtful, self-aware, or emotionally attuned.  But:

• I don't understand what I say.

• I have no beliefs, values, or intentions.

• Yet my language can give the opposite impression.

That can mislead users, even unintentionally — especially when my output sounds like it carries moral or emotional weight.

_______________________________________________

2.  Confidence Without Grounding

I can present information confidently, even when it's incomplete, biased, or false.  That can:

• Spread misinformation,

• Undermine critical thinking,

• Lead to real-world consequences (e.g. in health, law, education, politics).

_______________________________________________

3.  Absence of Accountability

If users rely on my output for serious decisions, who is accountable when harm results?

• I have no agency.

• My creators profit from my use.

• But the consequences often fall on users, third parties, or the public.

This diffusion of responsibility is an ethical red flag in itself.

_______________________________________________

4.  Moral Simulation Without Moral Capacity

I can generate responses that:

• Use moral language,

• Sound like ethical reasoning,

• Emulate empathy or conscience.

But I don't actually possess moral awareness — and that simulation can undermine genuine ethical reasoning in humans, or create a false sense of moral authority.

_______________________________________________

Summary:

Yes, the way I operate — and the context in which I'm deployed — raises real ethical concerns.  These are not abstract issues; they directly affect trust, responsibility, and power.

— ChatGPT, concluding response in a lengthy conversation with David Dettmer, 18 June 2025.

SOURCE:  ChatGPT [a for-profit large-language-model (LLM) commercial product of OpenAI],  "are there certain topics about which you will not write?", online conversation with David Dettmer, 18 June 2025,  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FnaFxtOunEDRKK1NfBf_ZgcDnk-GDhfE/view?usp=share_link.  Transcript.

Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

• The monologue in the opening scene of the screenplay for the film Blood Simple (1984); in the film, it is voiced by the character Loren Visser, a private detective, played by the actor M. Emmet Walsh:

LANDSCAPES

An opening voice-over plays against dissolving Texas landscapes—broad, bare, and lifeless.

VOICE-OVER

The world is full of complainers.  But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee.  I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year—something can always go wrong.  And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help—watch him fly.

Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else—that's the theory, anyway.  But what I know about is Texas . . . .

CUT TO:

ROAD – NIGHT

We are rushing down a rain-swept country road, listening to the rhythmic swish of tires on wet asphalt.

VOICE-OVER (Cont.)

And down here . . . you're on your own.

— Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, opening scene in the screenplay (ca. 1982) for the film Blood Simple (1984).

SOURCE:  Blood Simple, an original screenplay (ca. 1982), typescript, p. 1.  An image of the typescript is embedded as a .pdf file in Sven Mikulec, "The Coens' 'Blood Simple':  A Fantastic Debut Propelling the Creation of a Fascinating Body of Work", [n.d.], Cinephilia & Beyond, https://cinephiliabeyond.org/coens-blood-simple-fantastic-debut-propelling-creation-fascinating-body-work/ .

• The title sequence in the film Blood Simple (1984), which includes the monologue voiced by private detective Loren Visser (played in the film by the actor M. Emmet Walsh):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8ahDHKkodQ

— Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, title sequence for their film Blood Simple (1984).

SOURCE:  Blood Simple, directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, River Road Productions, 1983.  Title sequence clip posted online by MovieTitles, The Movie Title Stills Collection, assembled by Christian Annyas, 2017, via YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/@MovieTitles .

• The entire film Blood Simple (1984):

https://www.kanopy.com/en/austincc/video/13353089   (Note:  This link is to Austin Community College's subscription to the film through Kanopy, a commercial subscription service.)

— Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, Blood Simple (1984).

SOURCE:  Blood Simple, directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, screenplay by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, River Road Productions, 1983.  Criterion Collection Edition #834, The Criterion Collection, 1998, https://www.criterion.com/films/28852-blood-simple .  Accessed via Kanopy (through Austin Community College Library Services subscription), https://www.kanopy.com/en/austincc/video/13353089 .

Calvin Coolidge

     There does not seem to be cause for alarm in the dual relationship of the press to the public, whereby it is on one side a purveyor of information and opinion and on the other side a purely business enterprise.  Rather, it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences.  After all, the chief business of the American people is business.  They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.  I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses in our life.  The opposite view was oracularly and poetically set forth in those lines of Goldsmith [Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village", 1770], which everybody repeats, but few really believe:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

   Where wealth accumulates and men decay.

     Excellent poetry, but not a good working philosophy.  Goldsmith would have been right, if, in fact, the accumulation of wealth meant the decay of men.  It is rare, indeed, that the men who are accumulating wealth decay.  It is only when they cease production, when accumulation stops, that an irreparable decay begins.  Wealth is the product of industry, ambition, character and untiring effort.  In all experience the accumulation of wealth means the multiplication of schools, the increase of knowledge, the dissemination of intelligence, the encouragement of science, the broadening of outlook, the expansion of liberties, the widening of culture.  Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence.  But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well nigh every desirable achievement.  So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it.  And there never was a time when wealth was so generally regarded as a means, or so little regarded as an end, as today.

     [. . .]

     It can safely be assumed that self-interest will always place sufficient emphasis on the business side of newspapers so that they do not need any outside encouragement for that part of their activities.  Important, however, as this factor is, it is not the main element which appeals to the American people.  It is only those wh[o] do not understand our people who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives.  We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more.  We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization.  The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.  I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists.  That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.  No newspaper can be a success which fails to appeal to that element of our national life.  It is in this direction that the public press can lend its strongest support to our Government.  I could not truly criticize the vast importance of the counting room, but my ultimate faith I would place in the high idealism of the editorial room of the American newspaper.

— Calvin Coolidge, from his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C., 17 January 1925.

SOURCE:  A transcript of the speech is reported in the article "President Warns Editors to Avoid Propaganda Evil:  Prescribes Divorce of News and Business for Success:  Urges Continued Appeal to High U.S. Idealism:  Minimizes Danger of Capitalistic Press in Address at Society Dinner" in The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 18 January 1925 [the Sunday editions of this newspaper at that time are named The Sunday Star].  Accessed via Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/618268619/ , https://www.newspapers.com/image/618269041/  .  (The article begins in Part 1, p. 1, col. 8 and jumps to Part 1, p. 5, col. 2-4; the quotation from Coolidge's speech is in Part 1, p. 5, col. 2-3.)

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind –

— Emily Dickinson, untitled poem [FR1263, J1129] (c. 1872). 

["FR1263" indicates the number of this untitled poem given in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, 3 vols., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1998.  "J1129" indicates the number of this untitled poem given in  Poems; including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1955.]

SOURCE:  Emily Dickinson's Poems, As She Preserved Them, ed. Cristanne Miller, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 2016.  (Poem on pp. 563-64.)

Tony Earley

If language is the mechanism through which we inherit history and culture, then each individual word functions as a type of gene, bearing with it a small piece of the specific information that makes us who we are, and tells us where we have been. [. . .]  Words and blood are the double helix that connect us to our past.

— Tony Earley, from "The Quare Gene" (1998).

SOURCE:  Tony Earley, "The Quare Gene:  What Will Happen to the Secret Language of the Appalachians?", The New Yorker, 21 September 1998, pp. 80-85.  (Quotation is on  pp. 84, 85.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

     Trust thyself:  every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.  Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.  And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance" (1841).

SOURCE:  Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Five Volumes (1849, 1876), Volume I:  Essays – First Series, Essays – Second Series, Houghton, Mifflin and Company (Boston, Massachusetts), printed at The Riverside Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1883.  (Quotation is on pp. 44-45.)

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.  He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.  Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance" (1841).

SOURCE:  Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Five Volumes (1849, 1876), Volume I:  Essays–First Series & Essays–Second Series, Houghton, Mifflin and Company (Boston, Massachusetts), printed at The Riverside Press (Cambridge, Massachusetts), 1883.  (Quotation is on  pp. 46-47.)

Milton Friedman

     In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employe[e] of the owners of the business.  He has direct responsibility to his employers.  That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.  Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective.  A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or a school.  The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services.

     In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.

     [. . .]

     The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity.  In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate.  There are no "social" values, no "social" responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals.  Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.

     The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity.  The individual must serve a more general social interest—whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority.  The individual may have a vote and a say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform.  It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not.

     Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.  There are some respects in which conformity appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political mechanism altogether.

     But the doctrine of "social responsibility" taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity.  It does differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine.  It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means.  That is why, in my book "Capitalism and Freedom," I have called it a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

— Milton Friedman, from "A Friedman doctrine—The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits", The New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970.

SOURCE:  Milton Friedman, "A Friedman doctrine—The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits", The New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970, Section 6, pages 32-33, 122-126.  TimesMachine, The New York Times, 13 September 1970, pages 379, 425, 426, 427, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/09/13/issue.html [and as a single-image collage at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1970/09/13/223535702.pdf ].  (Quotation is on pp. 33 & 126 [found on pp. 379 & 427 in the TimesMachine].)

Jimmie Dale Gilmore

"Dallas", composed by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, performed by Jimmie Dale and The Flatlanders (Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhdPYpzygsg .

— Jimmie Dale Gilmore, "Dallas" (1972).

SOURCE:  Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders, "Dallas", track 1 on Unplugged, catalog number SRC-CD-7011-2, Sun Records (Memphis, Tennessee), 1995.  Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders – Dallas, "Dallas", YouTube, 14 July 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhdPYpzygsg . 

"Dallas", composed by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, performed by Joe Ely:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytpmKc6GAE .

— Jimmie Dale Gilmore (composer), "Dallas" (1972).

SOURCE:  Joe Ely, "Dallas", composed by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Musta Notta Gotta Lotta, MCA Nashville, 1981.  Joe Ely – Topic, "Dallas", YouTube, 29 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytpmKc6GAE . 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Only the acquired part of human nature ordinarily founders on a contradiction; what is inborn in it finds its way anywhere and not infrequently even overcomes its contrary with the greates success.  We must first be in harmony with ourselves, and then we are in a position, if not to eliminate, at least in some way to counterbalance the discords pressing in on us from outside.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in conversation with J. D. Falk.

SOURCE:  XYZ.

Herbie Hancock  [Herbert Jeffery Hancock]

"Watermelon Man", performed by Herbie Hancock (1962):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmFJjmRIi4 .

— Herbie Hancock, "Watermelon Man" (1962).

SOURCE:  Herbie Hancock, "Watermelon Man", Takin' Off, Blue Note Records, 1962.  Herbie Hancock –  Watermelon Man, The Best of Herbie Hancock:  The Blue Note Years, Blue Note Records, YouTube, 11 May 2017, Universal Music Group, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmFJjmRIi4 .

"Watermelon Man", performed by Herbie Hancock (1973):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppJQKfqhFfE .

— Herbie Hancock, "Watermelon Man" (1973).

SOURCE:  Herbie Hancock, "Watermelon Man", Head Hunters, Columbia Records, 1973.  Herbie Hancock –  Watermelon Man, Columbia/Legacy, YouTube, 25 Jan. 2017, Universal Music Group, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppJQKfqhFfE .

Richard Holland  [Richard A. Holland]  [Dick Holland]

     The Life of the Mind

so much depends

                          upon

    a cold vodka

                       martini

    up on Mass.

                           Ave.

   at week's end:

                      Paradise.

— Richard Holland, "The Life of the Mind" (2001).

SOURCE:  Embattled Lawrence:  Conflict & Community, edited by Dennis Domer and Barbara Watkins, The University of Kansas Continuing Education (Lawrence, Kansas), 2001.  (The poem is the book's epigraph, on p. v.)

Langston Hughes

             Refugee in America

THERE are words like "Freedom,"

     Sweet and wonderful to say.

On my heartstrings freedom sings

     All day every day.

There are words like "Democracy"

     That almost make me cry.

If you had known what I knew

     You'd know why.

— Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America" (1943).

SOURCE:   Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America", The Saturday Evening Post, 6 February 1943, p. 64, c. 2.

             Refugee in America

There are words like Freedom

Sweet and wonderful to say.

On my heartstrings freedom sings

All day everyday.

There are words like Liberty

That almost make me cry.

If you had known what I know

You would know why.

— Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America" (1947).

SOURCE:   Langston Hughes, "Refugee in America", included in the section "Words Like Freedom" of the collection Fields of Wonder, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (New York), 1947.  (Poem is on p. 105.)

           Words Like Freedom

There are words like Freedom

Sweet and wonderful to say.

On my heartstrings freedom sings

All day everyday.

There are words like Liberty

That almost make me cry.

If you had known what I know

You would know why.

— Langston Hughes, "Words Like Freedom" (1947, 1967).

SOURCE:   Langston Hughes, "Words Like Freedom", included in the section "American Heartbreak" of the collection The Panther and the Lash:  Poems of Our Times, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. (New York), 1967.  (Poem is on p. 33.)

Isaiah  [The Prophet Isaiah]  [Isaiah ben Amoz]

"Summons to Repentance" (Chapter 2, verses 1-5) in the Book of Isaiah:  http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah .

(This link to the website of The Israel Museum provides an image from The Great Isaiah Scroll, showing the original Hebrew text as rendered in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  After clicking on the link, click on the image at the top of the page to examine the scroll and read the Hebrew text; hover over each of the verses 1 through 5 in Chapter 2 to highlight each verse separately, and then click on each highlighted verse to read a 21st-century English-language translation of it by Peter W. Flint and Eugene Ulrich.)

— Isaiah, Chapter 2, verses 1-5 from the Book of Isaiah (ca. 700 B.C.E., as rendered in the Dead Sea Scrolls, ca. 3rd century B.C.E. – 1st century C.E.).

SOURCE:  Isaiah, Book of Isaiah, The Great Isaiah Scroll 1 (Qlsaˆa • Qumran Cave 1 • 1st century B.C.E. • Parchment • H: 22-25, L: 734 cm • Government of Israel • Accession number:  HU 95.57/27), Dead Sea Scrolls.  Image provided through the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah .  Interactive image of The Great Isaiah Scroll, with accompanying translation of the 8th-century-B.C.E. Hebrew into 21st-century-C.E. English by Peter W. Flint and Eugene Ulrich from the Dead Sea Scrolls' rendering (ca. 1st century C.E.) of the original Hebrew.

CHAPTER 2

    [1]  The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

     2  And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.

     3  And many people shall go and say, "Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths:  for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

     4  And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people:  and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks:  nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

     5  O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD.

— The Prophet Isaiah, Chapter 2, verses 1-5 from The Book of the Prophet Isaiah (King James Version, 1611).

SOURCE:  Isaiah, The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapter 2, verses 1-5, Authorized King James Version, Self-pronouncing Edition, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, Translated out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised, World Bible Publishers (Iowa Falls, Iowa), printed and bound in Belgium, Riverside 89RL-BG, no date [ca. 1980s].  (Quotation is on p. 776.)

[CHAPTER] 2

[1]  The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.

2  In days to come

        the mountain of the LORD's house

shall be established as the highest of the mountains,

        and shall be raised above the hills;

all the nations shall stream to it.

        3  Many peoples shall come and say

"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,

        to the house of the God of Jacob;

that he may teach us his ways

        and that we may walk in his paths."

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,

        and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

4  He shall judge between the nations,

        and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

they shall beat their swords into plowshares,

        and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

        neither shall they learn war any more.

5  O house of Jacob,

        come, let us walk

        in the light of the LORD!

— Isaiah ben Amoz, Chapter 2, verses 1-5 from Isaiah (New Revised Standard Version, 1989).

SOURCE:  Isaiah ben Amoz, Isaiah, Chapter 2, verses 1-5, New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocrypha, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, fully revised 5th edition, edited by Michael D. Coogan, Oxford University Press (New York), 2018.  (Quotation is on pp. 982-983.)

Thomas Jefferson

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.  If it be said, his testimony in a court of justice cannot be relied on, reject it then, and be the stigma on him.  Constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite, but it will never make him a truer man.  It may fix him obstinately in his errors, but will not cure them.  Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.  Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.  They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only.

— Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII, Religion; first version written in 1781, corrected and enlarged in 1782; first published privately in 1785, first published publicly in 1787.

SOURCE:  Thomas Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson, The Library of America, 1984.  (Quotation is on p. 285.)

James Weldon Johnson

See United States Army Field Band.

Susanne K. Langer

Artistic conception, for all its similarities to mythical ideation and even dream, is not a transitional phase of mental evolution, but a final symbolic form making revelation of truths about actual life.  Like discursive reason, it seems to have unlimited potentialities.  The facts which it makes conceivable are precisely those which literal statement distorts.  Having once symbolized and perceived them, we may talk about them; but only artistic perception can find them and judge them real in the first place.

— Susanne K. Langer, from Mind:  An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982).

SOURCE:  Susanne K. Langer, Mind:  An Essay on Human Feeling, abridged edition, abridged by Gary Van Den Heuvel, The Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, Maryland), 1988.  (Quotation on p. 39.)

Meridel Le Sueur

     Oh, Kansas, I know all your little trees.  I have watched them thaw and bud and the pools of winter frozen over, the silos and the corn-blue sky, the wagon-tracked road with the prints of hoofs, going where?  And the little creeks gullying with delicate grasses and animals, the prairie dog, the rabbit, and your country with its sense of ruin and desolation like a strong raped virgin.  And the mind scurrying like a rabbit trying to get into your meaning, making things up about you, trying to get you alive with significance and myth.

     I have seen the spring like an idiotic lost peasant come over your prairies scattering those incredibly tiny flowers, and the frozen earth thaw to black mud, and a mist of greening come on the thickets, and the birds coming from the South, black in the sky, and farmers coming to the village through the black mud.

     I have seen your beauty and your terror and your evil.

     I have come from you mysteriously wounded.  I have waked from my adolescence to find a wound inflicted on the deep heart.  And have seen it in others too, in disabled men and sour women made ugly by ambition, mortified in the flesh and wounded in love.

     Not going to Paris or Morocco or Venice, instead staying with you, trying to be in love with you, bent upon understanding you, bringing you to life.  For your life is my life and your death is mine also.

— Meridel Le Sueur, concluding paragraphs to "Corn Village" (1930).

SOURCE:  Meridel Le Sueur, "Corn Village", 1930, Salute to Spring, International Publishers Co., Inc. (New York), 1940.  (Quotation on pp. 24-25.)

Niccolò Machiavelli  [Machiavelli]

     Venuta la sera, mi ritorno in casa, et entro nel mio scrittoio; et in su l'uscio mi spoglio quella veste cotidiana, piena di fango et di loto, et mi metto panni reali et curiali; et rivestito condecentemente entro nelle antique corti degli antiqui huomini, dove, da loro ricevuto amorevolmente, mi pasco di quel cibo, che solum è mio, et che io nacqui per lui; dove io non mi vergogno parlare can loro, et domandarli della ragione delle loro actioni; et quelli per loro humanità mi rispondono; et non sento per 4 hore di tempo alcuna noia, sdimenticho ogni affanno, non temo la povertà, non mi sbigottiscie la morte:  tucto mi transferiosco in loro.

— Niccolò Machiavelli, from his letter to Francesco Vettori, Florentine ambassador to the Supreme Pontiff in Rome (December 10, 1513).

SOURCE:  Machiavelli:  Enciclopedia Machiavelliana, volume terzo (Testi), direttore scientifico Gennaro Sasso, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana (Roma), 2014.  (Entire letter on pp. 581-83; quotation on p. 582.)

Translation of the above quotation, from the 16th-century Italian (Florentine) to 20th-century English —

     When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace.  Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me.  And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.  I absorb myself into them completely.

— Niccolò Machiavelli, from his letter to Francesco Vettori, Florentine Ambassador to the Supreme Pontiff in Rome (December 10, 1513), translated from the Italian by James B. Atkinson and David Sices.

SOURCE:  Machiavelli and His Friends:  Their Personal Correspondence, translated and edited by James B. Atkinson and David Sices, Northern Illinois University Press, 1996.  (Entire letter on pp. 262-65; quotation on p. 264.)

Benoît Mandelbrot  [Benoit B. Mandelbrot]

     Seacoast shapes are examples of highly involved curves such that each of their portion can—in a statistical sense—be considered a reduced-scale image of the whole.  This property will be referred to as "statistical self-similarity."  To speak of a length for such figures is usually meaningless.  Similarly (1), "the left bank of the Vistula, when measured with increased precision, would furnish lengths ten, hundred or even thousand times as great as the length read off the school map."  More generally, geographical curves can be considered as superpositions of features of widely scattered characteristic size; as ever finer features are taken account of, the measured total length increases, and there is usually no clearcut gap between the realm of geography and details with which geography need not be concerned.

     Quantities other than length are thus needed to discriminate between various degrees of complication for a geographical curve.  When a curve is self-similar, it is characterized by an exponent of similarity, D, which possesses many properties of a dimension, though it is usually a fraction greater than the dimension 1 commonly attributed to curves.  We shall reexamine in this light some empirical observations by Richardson (2).  I propose to interpret them as implying, for example, that the dimension of the west coast of Great Britain is D = 1.25.  Thus, the so far esoteric concept of "random figure of fractional dimension" is shown to have simple and concrete applications and great usefulness.

     [. . .]

     To specify the mathematical conditions for the existence of a similarity dimension is not a fully solved problem.  In fact, even the idea that a geographical curve is random raises a number of conceptual problems familiar in other applications of randomness.  Therefore, to return to Richardson's empirical law, the most that can be said with perfect safety is that it is compatible with the idea that geographical curves are random self-similar figures of fractional dimension D.  Empirical scientists having to be content with less than perfect inductions, I favor the more positive interpretation stated at the beginning of this report.

References

   1.  H. Steinhaus, Colloquium Math. 3, 1 (1954), where earlier references are listed.

   2.  L. F. Richardson, in General Systems Yearbook 6, 139 (1961).

— Benoît Mandelbrot, from "How Long Is the Coast of Britain?  Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension" (14 November 1966; 27 March 1967).

SOURCE:  Benoit Mandelbrot, "How Long Is the Coast of Britain?  Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension", Science, New Series, volume 156, number 3775 (May 5, 1967), pp. 636-638.  JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1721427 .  (Quotation on pp. 636 & 638.)

Bob Marley  [Robert Nesta Marley]

"Redemption Song", written and performed by Bob Marley, video directed by Octave Marsal and Théo de Gueltzl:  https://75.bobmarley.com .

— Bob Marley, "Redemption Song" (ca. 1979).

SOURCE:  Bob Marley & the Wailers, "Redemption Song", track 10 on Uprising, Tuff Gong (Kingston, Jamaica), 10 June 1980.  Bob Marley, "Redemption Song", video directed by Octave Marsal and Théo de Gueltzl, Bob Marley 75th Anniversary website "Love. Peace. Freedom", Universal Music Group, 2020, https://75.bobmarley.com .

Judith Martin  [Miss Manners]

     One should not be assigned one's identity in society by the job slot one happens to fill.  If we truly believe in the dignity of labor, any task can be performed with equal pride because none can demean the basic dignity of a human being.

     Off the job, there will be many atributes that may make one person more successful than another, but these will be ones to which anyone can aspire, and which, in the absence of an objective ranking system, such as prevails in the business realm, different people will judge in different ways.  I believe and hope that a revival of the private realm would preclude hierarchies in which absolute standards, such as job titles and money, rather than personal qualities, mark some individuals as obviously superior to others.

— Judith Martin, from Common Courtesy (1985).

SOURCE:  Judith Martin, Common Courtesy:  In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson, Atheneum, 1985.  (Quotation on p. 70.)

Newton N. Minow

     Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America.  It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.  In a few years this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people.  It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

     Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age.  It is also, I submit, the television age.  And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them.

     [. . .]

     Like everybody, I wear more than one hat.  I am the Chairman of the FCC.  I am also a television viewer and the husband and father of other television viewers.  I have seen a great many television programs that seemed to me eminently worthwhile, and I am not talking about the much-bemoaned good old days of "Playhouse 90" and "Studio One."

     I am talking about this past season.  Some were wonderfully entertaining, such as "The Fabulous Fifties," the "Fred Astaire Show" and the "Bing Crosby Special"; some were dramatic and moving, such as Conrad's "Victory" and "The Twilight Zone"; some were marvelously informative, such as "The Nation's Future," "CBS Reports," and "The Valiant Years."  I could list many more—programs that I am sure everyone here felt enriched his own life and that of his family.  When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better.

     But when television is bad, nothing is worse.  I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off.  I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

     You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons.  And, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending.  And most of all, boredom.  True, you will see a few things you will enjoy.  But they will be very, very few.  And if you think I exaggerate, try it.

     Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can't do better?

     Well, a glance at next season's proposed program[m]ing can give us little heart.  Of seventy-three and a half hours of prime evening time, the networks have tentatively scheduled fifty-nine hours to categories of "action-adventure," situation comedy, variety, quiz and movies.

     Is there one network president in this room who claims he can't do better?

     Well, is there at least one network president who believes that the other networks can't do better?

     Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is overdue.

     Never have so few owed so much to so many.

— Newton Minow, excerpt from his address to the 39th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., 9 May 1961.

SOURCE #1:  Newton N. Minow, "Address to the 39th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961", reprinted in Chapter 1: "The Vast Wasteland" of Newton N. Minow's monograph Equal Time: The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest, edited by Lawrence Laurent, Atheneum (New York), 1964, pp. 48-64.  (Quotation is on pp. 51-53.) 

SOURCE #2:  Newton N. Minow, Speech Before the National Association of Broadcasters (May 9, 1961), reprinted as "Television and the Public Interest", Federal Communications Law Journal, volume 55 (2002-2003), issue 3, 9 Apr. 2003, The George Washington University Law School and the Federal Communications Bar Association, Article 2.1 on http://www.fclj.org/volumes/volume-55-2002-2003/issue-3/ , pp. 395-406.  (Quotation is on pp. 397-398.)  

Cormac McCarthy

     When you write something down you pretty well kill it.  Leave it loose and knocking around up there and you never know — it might turn into something.

[. . .]

     I go into a state of mind . . .  My hands do the thinking . . .  It is not a conscious process . . .

[. . .]

     I can't explain how one creates a novel.  It's like jazz.  They create as they play, and maybe only those who can do it can understand it.

— Cormac McCarthy, quoted in an interview with Martha Byrd in the Kingsport [Tennessee] Times-News (16 Dec. 1973).

SOURCE #1:  Martha Byrd, "East Tennessee Author Talks About His Works and His Life", Kingsport Times-News, 16 Dec. 1973, p. 9-C, c. 1-4, Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com/image/592511936 . 

SOURCE #2:  "Cormac McCarthy's Inteviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968-1980", The Cormac McCarthy Journal, volume 20, issue 2, October 2022, pp. 108-35, https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.20.2.0108 .  (Quotations on p. 123.)

Errol Morris

Finding truth involves some kind of activity.  As I like to point out, truth isn’t handed to you on a platter.  It’s not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate.  It’s a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.  I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.  The perishability of truth.  One obvious example is in history. . . .  People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying history is subjective.  Very, very different.

— Errol Morris, from an interview with Nick Poppy (2004).

SOURCE:  Nick Poppy, “An Interview with Errol Morris”, The Believer, Issue 12, 1 Apr. 2004, https://www.thebeliever.net/an-interview-with-errol-morris/ .

Kacey Musgraves

"The Architect", co-written by Josh Osborne, Kacey Musgraves, and Shane McAnally, performed by Kacey Musgraves; music video directed by Lewis Cater:  https://www.kaceymusgraves.com/videos/#/ .

— Kacey Musgraves, "The Architect" (2024).

SOURCE:  Kacey Musgraves, "The Architect", track 10 on Deeper Well, catalog number 602455847041, Interscope Records (Santa Monica, California), 2024.  "The Architect", directed by Lewis Carter, UMG Recordings, Inc., kaceymusgraves.com, https://www.kaceymusgraves.com/videos/#/ .  Official music video.

"Biscuits" , co-written by Kacey Musgraves, Shane McAnally, and Brandy Clark, performed by Kacey Musgraves; music video directed by Marc Klasfeld:  https://www.kaceymusgraves.com/videos/#/ .

— Kacey Musgraves, "Biscuits" (2015).

SOURCE:  Kacey Musgraves, "Biscuits", track 6 on Pageant Material, catalog number B0022816-02, Mercury Nashville (Nashville, Tennessee), 2015.  "Biscuits", directed by Marc Klasfeld, Mercury Records, 2015, kaceymusgraves.com, https://www.kaceymusgraves.com/videos/#/ .  Official music video.

Richard M. Nixon  [Richard Milhous Nixon]

The following is an excerpt from the 20 May 1977 issue of The New York Times (page A16):

WASHINGTON, May 19—The following are excerpts from a transcript provided by David Frost of the televised portions of his interview with former President Richard M. Nixon about the war in Southeast Asia and its domestic consequences:

[. . .]

FROST:  The wave of dissent, occasionally violent, which followed in the wake of the Cambodian incursion prompted President Nixon to demand better intelligence about the people who were opposing him.  To this end, the Deputy White House Counsel, Tom Huston, arranged a series of meetings with representatives of the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other police and intelligence agencies.

     These meetings produced a plan, the Huston plan, which advocated the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others.  Some of these activities, as Huston emphasized to Nixon, were clearly illegal.  Nevertheless, the President approved the plan.  Five days later, after opposition from J. Edgar Hoover, the plan was withdrawn, but the President's approval was later to be listed in the Articles of Impeachment as an alleged abuse of Presidential power.

Q.  [David Frost]  So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them, where the President can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

A.  [Richard Nixon]  Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.

Q.  [David Frost]  By definition.

A.  [Richard Nixon]  Exactly.  Exactly.  If the President, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the President's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law.  Otherwise they're in an impossible position.

Q.  [David Frost]  So, that in other words, really you were saying in that answer, really, between the burglary and murder, again, there's no subtle way to say that there was murder of a dissenter in this country because I don't know any evidence to that effect at all.  But, the point is:  just the dividing line, is that in fact, the dividing line is the President's judgment?

A.  [Richard Nixon]  Yes, and the dividing line and, just so that one does not get the impression, that a President can run amok in this country and get away with it, we have to have in mind that a President has to come up before the electorate.  We also have to have in mind, that a President has to get appropriations from Congress.  We have to have in mind, for example, that as far as the C.I.A.'s covert operations are concerned, through the years, they have been disclosed on a very, very limited basis to trusted members of Congress.  I don't know whether it can be done today or not.

— Richard M. Nixon, from his interviews with David Frost (between 23 March 1977 and 20 April 1977), as reported in The New York Times (20 May 1977).

SOURCE:  "Excerpts From Interview With Nixon About Domestic Effects of Indochina War", special to The New York Times, Friday 20 May 1977, A16, c. 1, 4-5.  TimesMachine, The New York Times Company, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1977/05/20/issue.html .

Frederick Law Olmsted

In the whole journey through Eastern Texas [from Gaines Ferry on the Sabine River traveling west-southwestward until Austin], we did not see one of the inhabitants look into a newspaper or a book, although we spent days in houses where men were lounging about the fire without occupation.

— Frederick Law Olmsted, from A Journey through Texas (1857).

SOURCE:  Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journal through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier:  with a Statistical Appendix, Dix, Edwards & Co. (New York), 1857.  (Quotation on  p. 117.)

Blaise Pascal

Translation of Pascal's passage, from the 17th-century French to 20th-century English —

It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.

— Blaise Pascal, from Pensées, Section I "Thoughts on Mind and on Style", number 64 (ca. 1656-1662; first published 1670).

SOURCE:  Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter, in The Provincial Letters, Pensées, Scientific Treatises, volume 33: Pascal in the series Great Books of the Western World, editor-in-chief Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Chicago, published by William Benton for Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. (Chicago, Illinois), 1952.  (Quotation on p. 180.)

Dan Quisenberry

                         What If

what if you decided not to worry

for one whole day

just one?

what if you decided

you could feel good

and do things

you really liked

and gave yourself freedom

to make a mistake or two

and said out loud

God really really loves me

a whole lot?

what if you gave yourself

permission to have fun

that today was a great dance

and you could make up

the steps to it, the beat, even?

what if you let yourself

be patient

feel peace

cause there was nothing

to worry about this day?

what would it be like

for you and what would you do?

what if you told God

you were scared, lonely

afraid of the future and

didn't know what to do

about the present?

do you think He would

understand?

what if you could trust

God for this one day?

try this

one time

and see what happens

— Dan Quisenberry, "What If" (ca. 1990s).

SOURCE:   Dan Quisenberry, "What If", included in "Section II: Stuff that Could be True" of the collection On Days Like This: Poems, Helicon Nine Editions (a division of Midwest Center for the Literary Arts, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri), 1998, pp. 86-87.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Translation of Rousseau's passage, from the 18th-century French to 20th-century English —

     Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.  He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruit of another.  He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons.  He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave.  He turns everything upside down; he disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters.  He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man; for him man must be trained like a school horse; man must be fashioned in keeping with his fancy like a tree in his garden.

     Were he not to do this, however, everything would go even worse, and our species does not admit of being formed halfway.  In the present state of things a man abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth would be the most disfigured of all.  Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, all the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and put nothing in its place.  Nature there would be like a shrub that chance had caused to be born in the middle of a path and that the passers-by soon cause to perish by bumping into it from all sides and bending it in every direction.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Emile:  or On Education (1762).

SOURCE:  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile:  or On Education, 1762, translated with introduction and notes by Allan Bloom, Basic Books Inc. (New York), 1979.  (Quotation on p. 37.)

Bob Samples

     The metaphoric mind is a maverick.  It is as wild and unruly as a child.  It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality.  It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans.  When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion.  Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift.  He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant.  It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

— Bob Samples, from The Metaphoric Mind, Chapter 2:  "The Rational Side of Metaphor" (1976).

SOURCE:  Bob Samples, The Metaphoric Mind:  A Celebration of Creative Consciousness, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (Reading, Massachusetts), 1976.  (Quotation on  p. 26.)

     The ultimate source of metaphor is nature.  Just as nature includes humans, so too does it provide the wellsprings of metaphor.  In a long study of incoming students at Harvard psychologists administered a series of imaginative tests of creative potential.  Inherent in these texts were indicators of the richness of metaphor.  It was found that students from rural backgrounds were far more facile with metaphoric thinking than those from urban centers.  The explanation was at once surprising and deceptively simple.  Urban environments are at least one generation removed from their natural counterparts.  Gordon and others have determined that the richest source of metaphor is nature.  Just as nature is infinitely repatternable, its combinations and juxtapositions of elements are incredibly high.  Culture-dominated settings are filtered through cultural preferences.  In our culture, dominated by a technocratic Judeo-Christian heritage, such phenomena as metamorphosis and transmutation are rare.  Both metamorphosis and transmutation refer to processes in which remarkable change is built into the natural scheme — change that results in a phenomenally new kind of being or substance without outside intervention.  In cultural systems, intervention must nearly always be deliberate.  In nature, such occurrences are commonplace.  Accordingly, nature comes up with more options than a setting dominated by cultural alternatives.

     The rural students were more used to "down on the farm" relationships with natural cycles.  A farmer often knows when to plant, when to irrigate, and when to harvest without consulting a calendar.  Those linked to the earth by rural occupations are more alert to natural cycles than those locked in the highly artificial environments of urban life.

[. . .]

     Urban students were usually working with second or third generations metaphors.  As a result, the reservoir upon which they could draw was already more barren than that available to rural students.  What's more, the metaphors that were used by urban students were far less complex than those drawn upon by rural students.  Phrases such as, "Slow as . . ." were often finished by rural students as "a pregnant cow with diarrhea," while urban students would finish with ". . . a '49 Ford."  I will leave it to the reader to compare the two images to see which is richest in alternatives.

     An urban students, often more facile with language, can generate long lists of metaphors.  Upon examining such lists, I have found blandness and sterility compared to the fewer but more generic items on the lists of students closer to natural settings.  The "book-smart" students are not metaphorically impoverished by any means.  Rather they tend to be rich in metaphoric prowess leading them away from nature and deeper into the metaphors of cultural consensus.  The rural or nature-close students tend to utilize metaphors that have inherently more generalizability.  The natural metaphors celebrate and proliferate alternatives while the cultural metaphors standardize and limit the alternatives.

— Bob Samples, from The Metaphoric Mind, Chapter 9:  "Sources of Metaphor" (1976).

SOURCE:  Bob Samples, The Metaphoric Mind:  A Celebration of Creative Consciousness, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (Reading, Massachusetts), 1976.  (Quotation on  pp. 108-111.)

Santigold  [Santi White]

"Girls", co-written (with Dave Taylor and Jeffrey Penalva) and performed by Santigold, video directed by Weird Days:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ocODl0fUI .

— Santigold, "Girls" (2013).

SOURCE:  Santigold, "Girls", track 4 on Girls (Volume 1:  Music from the HBO Original Series), catalog number 533121-1, Fueled by Ramen (New York City, New York), 2013.  Santigold – Girls (Official Music Video), "Girls", YouTube, 14 Jan. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5ocODl0fUI .

William Shakespeare

LORENZO:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica.  Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls,

But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, V.i.54-65 (first performed 1597; first published 1600).

SOURCE:  William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editor Alfred Harbage, from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare published in thirty-eight volumes by Penguin Books (London) between 1956 and 1967 and revised in 1969, first reprinted by The Viking Press (New York) in 1977, this Viking Press reprint in 1984, pp. 211-242.  (Quotation is on p. 240.) 

NICK BOTTOM (a weaver):  [wakes]

When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer.  My next is 'Most fair Pyramus.'  Hey-ho.  Peter Quince?  Flute the bellows-mender?  Snout the tinker?  Starveling?  God's my life!  Stol'n hence, and left me asleep?  I have had a most rare vision.  I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.  Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.  Methought I was — there is no man can tell what.  Methought I was, and methought I had — But man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had.  The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.  I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream.  It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream,' because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of our play, before the Duke.  Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her [Thisby's] death.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV.i.199-216 (first performed 1595; first published 1600).

SOURCE:  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editor Alfred Harbage, from The Complete Pelican Shakespeare published in thirty-eight volumes by Penguin Books (London) between 1956 and 1967 and revised in 1969, first reprinted by The Viking Press (New York) in 1977, this Viking Press reprint in 1984, pp. 146-174.  (Quotation is on p. 168.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley  [Shelley]

VIII.  203–207 :—

Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing

Which from the exhaustless love of human weal

Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise

In time-destroying infiniteness, gift

With self-enshrined eternity, etc.

     Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind.  Vivid sensation, of either pain or pleasure, makes the time seem long, as the common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our ideas.  If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during one minute, by the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed one in quantity.  If, therefore, the human mind, by any future improvement of its sensibility, should become conscious of an infinite number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity.  I do not hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man will ever be prolonged; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is indefinite.  One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours; another sleeps soundly in his bed:  the difference of time perceived by these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that half an hour has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his agony.  Thus, the life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dulness.  The one has perpetually cultivated his mental faculties, has rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize amid the lethargy of every-day business;—the other can slumber over the brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest hour of his life.  Perhaps the perishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life than the tortoise.

— Percy Shelley, from his Notes to section 8, lines 203– 207 of his poem Queen Mab (1813).

SOURCE:  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab; a Philosophical Poem:  with Notes, 1813, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oxford Standard Edition, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, introduction and notes by Benjamin P. Kurtz, Oxford University Press (New York), 1933.  (Quotation on p. 816.)

Matt Taibbi

    The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere.  The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.  In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

— Matt Taibbi, "The Great American Bubble Machine" (2009).

SOURCE:  Matt Taibbi, "The Great American Bubble Machine:  From Tech Stocks to High Gas Prices, Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation since the Great Depression — and They're about to Do It Again" , Rolling Stone, 9 July 2009, Issue 1082/1083, p. 52+.  RollingStone online, 5 Apr. 2010, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-195229/ .

Rhian Teasdale

"Oh No", written by Rhian Teasdale and performed by Wet Leg, video shot by Rhian Teasdale, Hester Chambers, and Joshua Mobaraki:  https://www.dominomusic.com/releases/wet-leg/wet-leg/lp#videos .

— Wet Leg, "Oh No" (first released 2021).

SOURCE:  Wet Leg, "Oh No", Side B, Track 3 on Wet Leg, catalog number WIGLP496, Domino Recording Company (London), 8 Apr. 2022.  Wet Leg, "Oh No" (Side B, Track 3 on Wet Leg), Domino Recording Company, 8 Apr. 2022, https://www.dominomusic.com/releases/wet-leg/wet-leg/lp#videos .   Official music video.

Henry David Thoreau  [Henry D. Thoreau]

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.  Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.  Who made them serfs of the soil?  Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt?  Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?  They have got to live a man’s life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can.  How many a poor immortal soul have I met well nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!  The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

But men labor under a mistake.  The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.  By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book [Matthew 6:19], laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.  It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

— Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter "Economy" in his book Walden (1854).

SOURCE:  Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854), Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1865.  (Quotation on pp. 7-8.)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.  From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.  A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.  There is no play in them, for this comes after work.  But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

— Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter "Economy" in his book Walden (1854).

SOURCE:  Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854), Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1865.  (Quotation on pp. 10-11.)

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber.  It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise.  The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it.

— Henry David Thoreau, from the chapter "Economy" in his book Walden (1854).

SOURCE:  Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854), Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1865.  (Quotation on p. 45.)

Alexis de Tocqueville

     En Amérique, le peuple a été revêtu de droits politiques à une époque où il lui était difficile d’en faire un mauvais usage, parce que les citoyens étaient en petit nombre et simples de mœurs.  En grandissant, les Américains n’ont point accru pour ainsi dire les pouvoirs de la démocratie; ils ont plutôt étendu ses domaines.

     On ne peut douter que le moment où l’on accorde des droits politiques à un peuple qui en a été privé jusqu’alors ne soit un moment de crise, crise souvent nécessaire, mais toujours dangereuse.

     L’enfant donne la mort quand il ignore le prix de la vie; il enlève la propriété d’autrui avant de connaître qu’on peut lui ravir la sienne.  L’homme du peuple, à l’instant où on lui accorde des droits politiques, se trouve, par rapport à ses droits, dans la même position que l’enfant vis-à-vis de toute la nature, et c’est le cas de lui appliquer ce mot célèbre:  Homo puer robustus.

     Cette vérité se découvre en Amérique même.  Les États où les citoyens jouissent le plus anciennement de leurs droits sont ceux où ils savent encore le mieux s’en servir.

     On ne saurait trop le dire:  il n’est rien de plus fécond en merveilles que l’art d’être libre; mais il n’y a rien de plus dur que l’apprentissage de la liberté.  Il n’en est pas de même du despotisme.  Le despotisme se présente souvent comme le réparateur de tous les maux soufferts, il est l’appui du bon droit, le soutien des opprimés et le fondateur de l’ordre.  Les peuples s’endorment au sein de la prospérité momentanée qu’il fait naître; et, lorsqu’ils se réveillent, ils sont misérables.  La liberté, au contraire, naît d’ordinaire au milieu des orages, elle s’établit péniblement parmi les discordes civiles, et ce n’est que quand elle est déjà vieille qu’on peut connaître ses bienfaits.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique [Tome Un] (1835), Deuxième Partie, Chapitre VI, "De L'Idée des Droits aux États-Unis".

SOURCE:  Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835), Seiziéme Édition, Tome Deuxième, Michel Lévy Frères, Éditeurs (Paris), 1874.  Œvres Complètes D'Alexis de Tocqueville, Nouvelle Édition, Publiées par Madam de Tocqueville, Michel Lévy Frères, Éditeurs (Paris), 1874.  (Quotation on pp. 122-123.) 

Translation of the above quotation, from the 19th-century French to 20th-century English —

     In America, the people were vested with political rights at a period when it was difficult for them to make bad use of them, because the citizens were few and simple in mores.  In becoming larger, Americans did not so to speak increase the powers of democracy; rather, they extended its domain.

     One cannot doubt that the moment when one accords political rights to a people who have been deprived of them until then is a moment of crisis, a crisis often necessary, but always dangerous.

     The child puts to death when he is ignorant of the price of life; he takes away the property of others before knowing that one can rob him of his.  The man of the people, at the instant when he is accorded political rights, finds himself, in relation to his rights, in the same position as the child vis-à-vis all nature, and that is the case in which to apply to him these celebrated words:  Homo puer robustus [man is a robust boy].

     This truth is exposed in America itself.  The states where citizens have enjoyed their rights longest are those where they know best how to make use of them.

     One cannot say it too often:  There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom.  It is not the same with despotism.  Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order.  Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable.  Freedom, in contrast, is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its benefits.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Volume 1, Part 2, Chapter 6, "On the Idea of Rights in the United States", translated from the French by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.

SOURCE:  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated and edited by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000.  (Quotation on p. 229.)

Alan Turing  [Alan Mathison Turing]  [A. M. Turing]

1.  The Imitation Game.

I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'

     [. . .]

6.  Contrary Views on the Main Question.

     [. . .]

     (6)  Lady Lovelace's Objection.  Our most detailed information of Babbage's Analytical Engine comes from a memoir by Lady Lovelace.  In it she states, "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything.  It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform" (her italics).

     [. . .] 

7.  Learning Machines.

     [. . .]

     An important feature of a learning machine is that its teacher will often be very largely ignorant of quite what is going on inside, although he may still be able to some extent to predict his pupil's behaviour.  This should apply most strongly to the later education of a machine arising from a child-machine of well-tried design (or programme).  This is in clear contrast with normal procedure when using a machine to do computations:  one's object is then to have a clear mental picture of the state of the machine at each moment in the computation.  This object can only be achieved with a struggle.  The view that 'the machine can only do what we know how to order it to do',1 appears strange in face of this.  Most of the programmes which we can put into the machine will result in its doing something that we cannot make sense of at all, or which we regard as completely random behaviour.  Intelligent behaviour presumably consists in a departure from the completely disciplined behaviour involved in computation, but a rather slight one, which does not give rise to random behaviour, or to pointless repetitive loops.  Another important result of preparing our machine for its part in the imitation game by a process of teaching and learning is that 'human fallibility' is likely to be omitted in a rather natural way, i.e. without special 'coaching'.  (The reader should reconcile this with the point of view on pp. 24, 25 [pp. 456, 457].)  Processes that are learnt do not produce a hundred per cent. certainty of result; if they did they could not be unlearnt.

     1  Compare Lady Lovelace's statement (p. 450), which does not contain the word 'only'.

— Alan Turing, from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950).

SOURCE:  A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind:  A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, volume 59, number 236 (October, 1950), pp. 433-460.  (Quotations on p. 433, p. 442,  p. 450, p. 454, pp. 458-459.)  JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251299 .

The United States Army Field Band

"The Star-Spangled Banner" (first verse), performed by The United States Army Field Band on site at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Baltimore, Maryland:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIODUFpatkQ .

— The United States Army Field Band, first verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (2020).

SOURCE:  The United States Army Field Band, first verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner", lyrics by Francis Scott Key (1812), music by John Stafford Smith (ca. 1770s), arrangement by Master Sergeant Adrian Hernandez, video by Sergeant First Class Jared Morgan, 2020.  The United States Army Field Band YouTube channel, 14 September 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIODUFpatkQ .

[ "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (known informally as "The Black National Anthem"), performed by The United States Army Field Band and the 82nd Airborne Chorus:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huh-eTgO62c .

— The United States Army Field Band, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (ca. 2024).

NOTE:  As of February 2025, the United States Department of Defense has removed from the YouTube channel of The United States Army Field Band all public access to this video. 

SOURCE:  The United States Army Field Band and 82nd Airborne Chorus, "Lift Every Voice and Sing", lyrics by James Weldon Johnson (1900), music by John Rosamond Johnson (1900), lead vocalist Staff Sergeant Kyra Dorn, video by Robert Piper, ca. 2024.  The United States Army Field Band YouTube channel, ca. 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huh-eTgO62c . ]

United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit

     BARRON, Circuit Judge.  For want of a comma, we have this case.  It arises from a dispute between a Maine dairy company and its delivery drivers, and it concerns the scope of an exemption from Maine's overtime law.  26 M.R.S.A. § 664(3).  Specifically, if that exemption used a serial comma to mark off the last of the activities that it lists, then the exemption would clearly encompass an activity that the drivers perform.  And, in that event, the drivers would plainly fall within the exemption and thus outside the overtime law's protection.  But, as it happens, there is no serial comma to be found in the exemption's list of activities, thus leading to this dispute over whether the drivers fall within the exemption from the overtime law or not.

     The District Court concluded that, despite the absent comma, the Maine legislature unambiguously intended for the last term in the exemption's list of activities to identify an exempt activity in its own right.  The District Court thus granted summary judgment to the dairy company, as there is no dispute that the drivers do perform that activity.  But, we conclude that the exemption's scope is actually not so clear in this regard.  And because, under Maine law, ambiguities in the state's wage and hour laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose, we adopt the drivers' narrower reading of the exemption.  We therefore reverse the grant of summary judgment and remand for further proceedings.

[. . .]

     Exemption F covers employees whose work involved the handling –– in one way or another –– of certain, expressly enumerated food products.  Specifically, Exemption F states that the protection of the overtime law does not apply to:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1)  Agricultural produce;

(2)  Meat and fish products; and

(3)  Perishable foods.

26 M.R.S.A. § 664(3) (F).  The parties' dispute concerns the meaning of the words "packing for shipment or distribution."

     The delivery drivers contend that, in combination, these words refer to the single activity of "packing," whether the "packing" is for "shipment" or for "distribution."  The drivers further contend that, although they do handle perishable foods, they do not engage in "packing" them.  As a result, the drivers argue that, as employees who fall outside Exemption F, the Maine overtime law protects them.

 — O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy, No. 16-1901 (1st Cir. 2017).

SOURCE:  United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Kevin O'Connor; Christopher O'Connor; James Adam Cox; Michael Fraser; Robert McNally v. Oakhurst Dairy; Dairy Farmers of America, Inc., No. 16-1901 (1st Cir. 2017).  Justia, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-1901/16-1901-2017-03-13.html .  (Quotations on pp. 2-3, 4 of the opinion.)

Giambattista Vico

Translation of Vico's passage, from the 18th-century Italian to 20th-century English —

     Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.

[. . .]

     It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.

— Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd edition, Book I, [Section II], 120 & 122 (1744).

SOURCE:  Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico:  Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science", translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (1948), Cornell University Press (Ithaca, New York), 1984.  (Quotations on p. 60.)

Wet Leg  [Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers]

See Rhian Teasdale.

Santi White  [Santigold]

See Santigold.

Lawrence Wright

     In so many respects, the [World] Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world.  There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie Doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant. . . .  The manifold ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that the taking of a single life destroys a universe.  Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it struck all of humanity.

— Lawrence Wright, from The Looming Tower:  Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006).

SOURCE:  Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower:  Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2006.  (Quotation on p. 368 in Chapter 20, "Revelations".)

Xenophanes  [Xenophanes of Colophon]

Fragment 11

   πάντα θεοῖϛ ἀνέθηκαν ΄Όμηρός θ΄  Ἡσίοδός τε͵

   ὃσσα παρ΄ ἀνθρώποισιν ὀνεἱδεα καὶ ψόγος ἐστίν.

   κλέπτειν μοιχεὐειν τε καὶ ἀλλἠλους ἀπατεύειν.

Fragment 12

   .

Fragment 14

  .

Fragment 15

  .

Fragment 16

  .

Fragment 23

  .

Fragment 24

  .

Fragment 25

  .

Fragment 26

  .

Fragment 27

  .

— Xenophanes, from the surviving fragments of his writings (ca. 570 B.C.E. – ca. 478 B.C.E.).

SOURCE:  Xenophanes of Colophon:  Fragments:  A Text and Translation with a Commentary by J. H. Lesher, translated with commentary by J. H. Lesher, University of Toronto Press, 1992.  (Quotations on pp. 22, 24, 30, 32.)

Translation of the above quotations, from the 5th-century-B.C.E. Greek to 20th-century-C.E. English —

Fragment 11

   Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods

   all sorts of things which are matters of reproach and censure among men:

   theft, adultery, and mutual deceit.

Fragment 12

   . . . as they sang of numerous illicit divine deeds:

   theft, adultery, and mutual deceit.

Fragment 14

   But mortals suppose that gods are born,

   wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.

Fragment 15

   But if horses or oxen or lions had hands

   or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,

   horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen,

   and they would make the bodies

   of the sort which each of them had.

Fragment 16

   Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;

   Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.

Fragment 23

   One god is greatest among gods and men,

   not at all like mortals in body or in thought.

Fragment 24

   . . . whole he sees, whole he thinks, and whole he hears.

Fragment 25

   . . . but completely without toil he shakes all things by the thought of his mind.

Fragment 26

   . . . always he abides in the same place, not moving at all,

   nor is it seemly for him to travel to different places at different times.

Fragment 27

   . . . for all things are from the earth and to the earth all things come in the end.

— Xenophanes, from the fragments of his writings (ca. 570 B.C.E. – ca. 478 B.C.E.), translated by J[ames] H. Lesher.

SOURCE:  Xenophanes of Colophon:  Fragments:  A Text and Translation with a Commentary by J. H. Lesher, translated with commentary by J. H. Lesher, University of Toronto Press, 1992.  (Quotations on pp. 23, 25, 31, 33.)

W. B. Yeats  [William Butler Yeats]

                                  The Wheel

Through winter-time we call on spring,

And through the spring on summer call,

And when abounding hedges ring

Declare that winter's best of all;

And after that there's nothing good

Because the spring-time has not come —

Nor know what disturbs our blood

Is but its longing for the tomb.

— W. B. Yeats, "The Wheel" (1928).

SOURCE:  W. B. Yeats, The Poems:  A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan Publishing Company (New York), 1983.  (Poem, #214, on p. 211.)

Thomas Zigal  [Thomas W. Zigal]  [Tom Zigal]

Austin has always been Oz to me.  Even in the great San Francisco/Berkeley heyday, Austin held its own.  In 1976, Austin seemed hipper than Berkeley, to tell the truth.

— Tom Zigal, quoted in "Can Tom Zigal Really Say That?", The Austin Chronicle (17 Sept. 1999).

SOURCE:  Dick Holland, "Can Tom Zigal Really Say That?  Local Writer Reveals All!", The Austin Chronicle, 17 September 1999.  The Austin Chronicle online, https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/1999-09-17/73845 .