Who has sent this new serpent into our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence - unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference - something that Kekulé's Serpent had come to - not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of... we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others... we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps - but the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given.... ' Can anyone tell me what else he whispered to us? Come - who knows?
Thomas PynchonRelated topics
anyone certain debris define found garden given locus loss nature passing perhaps sent serpent silent something tell othersRelated quotes
There is one living spirit prevalent over this world, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms each having acting principle according to subordinate laws. - There is one thinking sensible principle, intimately allied to one kind of organic matter-have & which thinking principle seems to be given a assumed according to a more extended relations of the individuals, whereby choice with memory or reason? is necessary-which is modified into endless forms bearing a close relation in degree & kind to the endless forms of the living beings.
Charles Darwin
I am sometimes asked 'How are your people getting along at the South?' I am at a loss sometimes to know to whom they refer. Who are my people at the South? I am in a position to speak more impartially, perhaps, than any man in this room as regards the merits of the two races, for I occupy a middle position... It would be as appropriate to ask, 'How are the white people of the South getting along?' as to ask how the colored people are getting along. The two should go together: one cannot get along without the other... Men ask me if I don't think that the condition of the freedmen is hopeless. I tell them 'Never!' I have seen too much progress.
Frederick Douglass
Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.
Heinrich Heine
I agreed with the prevailing opinion in the Labour Party about nuclear weapons; I went on ban-the-bomb marches in the 1960s and I have not changed my mind about nuclear deterrence since. But I found it hard to accept the Labour Party's policy that required the exclusion of nuclear-powered ships. Given that nuclear energy exists it is the intention behind its use that matters. The weapons are made to destroy and we have to learn to live without them. The rest may be useful if properly managed. The management is an environmental issue and the inevitable exclusion of nuclear-powered vessels was not an appropriate basis for our foreign policy.
David Lange
Unfortunately, pragmatism is not always good politics. The greatest asset of mid-20th century social democracy-its willingness to compromise its own core beliefs in the name of balance, tolerance, fairness and freedom-now looks more like weakness: a loss of nerve in the face of changed circumstances. We find it hard to look past those compromises to recall the qualities that informed progressive thought in the first place: what the early 20th century syndicalist Edouard Berth termed "a revolt of the spirit against... a world in which man was threatened by a monstrous moral and metaphysical materialism.”.
Tony Judt