SCHOLAR ISLAND

" 'Nowadays the water main is my well, the trolley car is my carriage, the banker 's safe my old stocking, the policeman’s Billy my fist. My own eyes and nose and judgment defer to the inspector of food, or drugs, or gas , or Factories, or tenements, or insurance companies. I rely on others to look after my drains, invest my savings, nurse my sick, and teach my children, unfortunately, when all men are so interdependent and the web of connection is at once tight and far flung, the moral focus becomes blurred, and no one assumes responsibility for the evil he causes."

E.A. Ross

Sin & Society 1907

"Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out."

-Oscar Wilde

"Nowadays' is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonored. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as 'auxiliary State Personnel'. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth possessed poet."

Robert Graves

   "A serious factor in life nowadays is that many of our superstitions stand as directly in the way of our conquering troubles as they did centuries ago. What would you think of a man if he had himself stood on his head and let his eye be gouged out to cure the gout? That was a method in vogue at the time the customs were established that you have followed in handling your problems."

-David Seabury

The Art of Selfishness

"Nowadays, presumably, they (the people) suppose the serious things are for the sake of the playful things, for it is held that the affairs pertaining to war, being serious matters, should be run well for the sake of peace. But the fact is that in war there is not and will not be by nature either play or, again, an education that is at any time worthy of our discussion; yet this is what we assert is for us, at least, the most serious thing. Each person should spend the greatest and best part of his life in peace. What then is the correct way? One should live out one's days playing at certain games-sacrificing, singing, and dancing."

Plato

"Nowadays they brag of gigantic enterprises, but when you come down to it these really are dwarf-enterprises, a couple of million dwarfs joined, and the crux is precisely their great number."

Soren Kierkeqaard 1854

"Luther nailed up 95 theses on the church door that was a fight about doctrine. Nowadays one might publish one single thesis in the papers. "Christianity does not exist."

-Soren Kierkegaard

"Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation."

-James Thurber

"Nothing is said nowadays that has not been said before."

-Terence

   "Nowadays, Christians are being victimized by the Muslim community in Iraq, Pakistan, Gaza, Bethlehem, Lebanon, Nigeria and elsewhere...."

-Joseph Wahed

"When I want to hear really good sermons nowadays, we attend a weekly lunch of the ad club, and listen to a man who deals in ways and means and is intent upon brining about paradise, here and now."

-Elbert Hubbard

'Nowadays they talk about executions, hangings, murders, bombs the way they used to speak of the weather....It is impossible to live like this.'

Tolstoy

I Cannot be Silent

"We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be."

G.K. Chesterton

Whats Wrong with the World

   "Nowadays, "public opinion" is more smoothly and easily ventriloquised. I am sure you have had the experience of making up your own mind on a question and then discovering, on the evening news of the same day, that only 23.6 percent of people agree with you. Ought you to be depressed or disconcerted by this alarmingly exact dissection of the collective brain? Only if you believe that a squadron of under talented but overpaid pseudo-scientists have truly and verifiably arrived at this conclusion. And perhaps-indeed I would argue, in any case-not even then."

Christopher Hitchens

letters to a young contrarian

"Now, the world' s decisions were made by smaller men; by gray, faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; .committeemen who spoke committee speak and thought committee thought, men who knew more of dogma that destiny, men who understood production but were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable with a file full of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse.

Tom Robbins

Still Life With Woodpecker

"Nowadays we draw fine distinctions among the meanings of such words as craftsman, engineer, technician, and inventor. The United States Patent Office has elaborate rules for deciding whether an invention is original, or whether it is merely "an improvement obvious to one skilled in the art" such as change in size, strength, speed, proportions, or materials."

-L. Sprague De Camp

The Ancient Engineers

"Thus, his whole life long, the man of to-day is exposed to influences which are bent on robbing him of all confidence in his own thinking. The spirit of spiritual dependence to which he is called on to surrender is in everything that he hears or reads; it is in the people whom he meets every day; it is in the parties and associations which have claimed him as their own; it pervades all the circumstances of his life. From every side and in the most varied ways it is dinned into him that the truths and convictions which he needs for life must be taken by him from the associations which have rights over him. The spirit of the age never lets him come to himself. Over and over again conventions are forced upon him in the same way as, by means of the electric advertisements which flare in the streets of every large town, any company which has sufficient capital to get itself securely established, exercises pressure on him at every step he takes to induce him to buy their boot polish or their soup tablets. By the spirit of the age, then, the man of today is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority. To all this constant influence he cannot make the resistance that is desirable because he is an overworked and distracted being without power to concentrate. Moreover, the manifold material trammels which are his lot work upon his mentality in such a way that he comes at last to believe himself unqualified even to make any claim to thoughts of his own. His self-confidence is also diminished through the pressure exercised upon him by the huge daily increasing mass of Knowledge. He is no longer in a position to take in as something which he has grasped all the new discoveries that are constantly announced; he has to accept them as fact although he does not understand them. This being his relation to scientific truth he is tempted to acquiesce in the idea that in matters of thought also his judgment cannot be trusted. Thus do the circumstances of the age do their best to deliver us up to the spirit of the age. The seed of skepticism has germinated. In fact, the modern man has no longer any spiritual self-confidence at all. Behind a self-confident exterior he conceals a great inward lack of confidence. In spite of his great capacity in material matters he is an altogether stunted being, because he makes no use of his capacity for thinking. It will ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great by its achievements in discovery and invention, could fall so low spiritually as to give up thinking.

Albert Schweitzer

Out of my life and work

"Nowadays humans select each other mostly for possessions, or their potential for possessions; but animals are honest in their appreciation of strength and beauty, casting it before them as a carpet into the future, making the pheasant's feathers ever more and more shining, as lady pheasants time and time again fall for the dazzle. And now when I look at most humans, especially their possession- centered Ones, their bodies seem mere appendages to carry things on, and have lost their suppleness, usefulness, and grace."

Joan McIntyre

"Nowadays is, indeed, lit by lightning, a plague has stricken the

moths, and Blanche has been 'put away'.....

Tennessee Williams

Memoirs

 

"Nowadays, in an era when so many in America and across the globe are suffused with religious certainty-exhausted, as many are, with the pace of change and the challenge of mastering Kennan-like empiricism-I offer a very old text that underlies both Christianity and Islam.

   Deuteronomy 16:20 reads: "Justice, Justice, This you must pursue." Justice-an overused word these days-is not mentioned twice, however, for added emphasis. Here Hebrew scholars agree-and the don't agree on much-that it's once for the ends, and once for the means.

    Fight well. And God bless."

Ron Suskind

The One Percent Doctrine

 

 

   "Today, paralyzed by various cultural, political and social trends from any meaningful use of  critical thinking in the search for truth, we have largely turned to emotion-based "analysis" of any given situation or issue. For ours indeed has become the Age of Emotion. It is an age typified by strident, pointless, bombastic screaming "debates" seen on television journalism and talk shows, and increasingly between politicians, family, friends, and neighbors. Or, by contrast, it is an era of simmering spite and tight control, clamming up and staying "on message.' Needless to say these inarticulate, politically charged screeds and scrums have more to do with glands than the brain. They are the antithesis of rational inquiry, which is barred by the rules of this sport, or it might lead to a second thought, a concession of point, an admission of error, a boring nuance of agreement or (worse case) a gloating reproach. The defining idea and strategy in the Age of Emotion is to stake out a position, to arrive at a belief, even if it has to be pulled out of the air, and then to filter in only the type of information that would tend to confirm the position."

Michael R. LeGault

Think

 

"Nowadays when one wishes to acquire a company that doesn't wish to be acquired, one's counsel bring all kinds of nuisance suits to induce it to change its mind. We sue for mismanagement by the directors, for unpaid dividends, for violation of the bylaws, for improper issuance of stock. We allege criminal misconduct; we shout about antitrust; we sue for ancient and dubious liabilities. And our opponent's counsel will answer with inordinate demands for all our files and seek endless interrogatories in order to enmesh our client in a hopeless tangle of red tape....It is simply war, and you know the quality that applies to that and love."

-Louis Auchincloss

 

 

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.......To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically but practically."

-Henry David Thoreau

 

   "We see in these days that technology serves the unlimited egotism of a mighty nation, or of the ruling groups representing the will of this nation; and that those who might wish for the preservation of the old order, at least in its fundamentals, have for a long time lacked the judgment or the will-power or the spirit of sacrifice which would have been necessary to meet the danger."

-Robert Waelder

Freud

 

 

 

"Happiness makes people uneasy nowadays."

David Hepworth