The Art of Tetman Callis

“In an overpopulated world being connected by global electronic communication and jet travel at a pace too rapid and violent for an organically sound person to assimilate without shock, people are also suffering from a revulsion at any further proliferation of speech and images. Such different factors as the unlimited ‘technological reproduction’ and near-universal diffusion […]

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“Once the Author is gone, the claim to ‘decipher’ a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the […]

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“Bureaucracy was not invented by anti-capitalists. It began with the ancient empires of Egypt, Persia, Rome and China, and it necessarily accompanies most large institutions, from churches to armies to corporations. ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”,’ Ronald Reagan famously said. He […]

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“Only in a vague way can we conceive the character of ant-society, and the nature of ant-morality; and to do even this we must try to imagine some yet impossible state of human society and human morals. Let us, then, imagine a world full of people incessantly and furiously working,—all of whom seem to be […]

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“Since we are humans and not trees, we are compelled to be anthropomorphic rather than dendromorphic. The god of a tree will share in the image of a tree; our God will share in the image of a human.” – Harold Bloom, The Book of J

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“Did feudalism and chattel slavery reside within the nascent globalizing frame? Did Kant drink coffee? The second question answers the first. Yes, and there’s no reason why we have to choose between these modes of production when thinking macrohistorically, as long as we are specific about what makes both so different. In this effort, it’s […]

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“When we were children, we were terribly punished for being children.” – Harold Bloom, The Book of J

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“Mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting.” – Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy

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“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” – Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

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“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” – Bertrand […]

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“God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature by permitting any consequence in its procession.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”

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“If all gender is on some level a performance (and it is), then it can be co-opted and perverted by the state. But if it’s also innate on some level (and it is), then we are powerless against whatever it is that enough people decide gender performance should look like. We are constantly trapped by […]

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“There are two types of men in this worldthose who know they are weakand those who think they are strong.”– Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

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“History is not something on the TV screens, or overseas, or in the Congress or the House of Commons, it is everywhere, and it penetrates the most intimate tissues of life.” – Amos Oz (interviewed by Shusha Guppy in Paris Review, 1996)

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“India was the most populous region of the world at the time of the Periplus, as it was the most cultivated, the most active industrially and commercially, the richest in natural resources and production, the most highly organized socially, the most wretched in the poverty of its teeming millions, and the least powerful politically. The […]

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“Chinese annals mention that in the year 165 B. C, a nomadic Turki tribe in northwestern China and owing allegiance to the Chinese emperors, known as the Yueh-chi, were driven out of their territory by the Hiongnu or Tartars, and migrated westward. This displaced numerous savage tribes in central Asia, who in turn moved westward; […]

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“A blind musician once claimed that he could detect a hundred different sounds made by cats. Scientists, studying many hours of tape recordings, also insist that the feline vocal repertoire is huge—the most complex of any animal except Homo sapiens.” – Desmond Morris, Catlore

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“No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims (trans. J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell)

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“Nothing is so infectious as example, and we never do great good or evil without producing the like.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims (trans. J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell)

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“A tax is not an assessment of benefits. It is a means of distributing the burden of the cost of government. The only benefit to which the taxpayer is constitutionally entitled is that derived from his enjoyment of the privileges of living in an organized society, established and safeguarded by the devotion of taxes to […]

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“When not prompted by vanity we say little.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims (trans. J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell)

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“Gallantry of mind is saying the most empty things in an agreeable manner.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims (trans. J. W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell)

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“Though there is nothing I would not do to comfort an afflicted person, and I really believe that one should do all one can to show great sympathy to him for his misfortune, for miserable people are so foolish that this does them the greatest good in the world; yet I also hold that we […]

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“Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups whousually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances. A number ofpsychological concepts explain why abusive behavior occurs. These concepts include: Deindividuation. Deindividuation is a process whereby the anonymity, suggestibility, and contagion provided in a crowd allows individuals to participate in behavior marked […]

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“People die every day and the majority of their belongings are of no value to anyone.” – Dmitry Samarov, “The Vivian Mire”

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“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.” – Alice Munro, “Spaceships Have Landed”

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“It is not the role of a federal court to provide comfort to litigants. Federal courts resolve concrete disputes between real adversaries.” – Judge Easterbrook, State Farm Life Ins. Co. v. Troy Jonas

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“There is no finer sight on green Earth than a defeated bully.” – Edward O. Wilson, “A Magic Kingdom”

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“A dominion whose well-being depends on any man’s good faith, and whose affairs cannot be properly administered, unless those who are engaged in them will act honestly, will be very unstable. On the contrary, to insure its permanence, its public affairs should be so ordered, that those who administer them, whether guided by reason or […]

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“The traditional philosophic treatment of politics has been based on an unreal conception of human psychology. As philosophical ethics are grounded not in reality but in the dreams of authors, the resultant politics are equally utopian and useless as guides for the practical challenges of policy making.” – Menachem Lorberbaum, “Spinoza’s Theological-Political Problem”

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