To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they ...find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilise them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is get...ting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He winged away on a wildgoup's chase across the kathartic ocean and made synthetic ink and sensitive paper for his own end out of ...his wit's waste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How separate and unearthly love is, Or women are, or what they do,... Or in our young unreal wishes Seem to be: synthetic, new, And natureless in ecstasies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatr...y: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs--in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity--in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap ...and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it--and tries to live off philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic ...statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriat...e effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead, but lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eyes, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him, but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »