The Art of Tetman Callis

“Law, without equity, though hard and disagreeable, is much more desirable for the public good, than equity without law: which would make every judge a legislator, and introduce most infinite confusion.” – William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Judges should not be allergic to acknowledging that any one of our legal conclusions might be wrong. Judges are just humans in robes. We try to have as high a batting average as possible, but no one can get it right all of the time. All a judge can do is try his or her […]

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“But if there be no great philosophic idea, if, for the time being, mankind, instead of going through a period of growth, is going through a corresponding process of decay and decomposition from some old, fulfilled, obsolete idea, then what is the good of educating? Decay and decomposition will take their own way. It is […]

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“Modernity has not turned out altogether well. To the pioneers of Enlightenment, it appeared that false certainties and artificial hierarchies were the chief obstacles to general happiness. To many the suspicion has by now occurred that there are no true certainties and no natural hierarchies, yet also that individual and social well-being require some certainties, […]

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“None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine.” – Stephen King, The Stand (emphasis in […]

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“The culture of professionalism and expertise, the bureaucratization of opinion and taste, are not merely mechanisms of social control or a failure of nerve. They are also in part a response to genuine intellectual progress. There’s more to know now than in the ‘30s, and more people have joined the conversation. Perhaps the disappearance of […]

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“The beginning of political decency and rationality is to recognize others’ similarity in important respects to oneself; that is, to identify imaginatively. Which is what one does when reading fiction. Literature is, in this sense, practice for civic life.” – George Scialabba, “The Sealed Envelope” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Time past was time past. You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old […]

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“In most times, places, and stages of development, people’s abilities in arithmetic consist of the exact quantities ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many,’ and an ability to estimate larger amounts approximately. Their intuitive physics corresponds to the medieval theory of impetus rather than to Newtonian mechanics (to say nothing of relativity or quantum theory). Their intuitive biology […]

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“Thought is the enemy of flow.” – Vinnie Colaiuta (quoted by Rick Beato in “Why Jeff Beck is Uncopyable”) Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.” – Stephen King, The Stand Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance . . . or change. Once such incantatory phrases as ‘we see now through a glass darkly’ and […]

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“Roads are not passive; they have instrumentality and agency because they direct us – they give us our limits – even when we stray from them.” – Mary Carruthers, “The concept of ductus” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Children are not invariably conservative, but show conservative tendencies.” – Jess Gropen, et al., “The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived […]

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“A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary […]

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“The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness” Share this… Facebook Pinterest […]

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“Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, […]

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“Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was […]

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“One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings […]

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“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men […]

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