There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fash...ioned grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus. No, there's nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If that's how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what's left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a who...le bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as "the dogma of the Ghost in the ...Machine." I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher's myth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this ...theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, yo...u were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, to-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and ...in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which... it lives on as a limiting case.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »