Tolerance, good temper and sympathy
are no longer enough in a world where ignorance rules,
and Science, which ought to have ruled, plays the pimp.
Tolerance, good temper and sympathy —
they are what matter really,
and if the human race is not to collapse
they must come to the front before long.
E.M. Forster, What I Believe
If Marx were functioning today,
he would have been hard put to avoid saying
that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards
I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s
wife’s legs—they’re so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I’m no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he’s on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining
myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.
John Brehm
If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning,
He would have created a universe without change,
without organisms and evolution,
and without man and man's experience of change.
But he seems to have thought that a live universe
with events unexpected even by Himself
would be more interesting than a dead one.
Karl Popper, in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, by Charles Hartshorne
The only thing in life is language.
Not love.
Not anything else.
Richard Burton, in Richard Burton: A Life, Melvyn Bragg