The following is a quote as it appears in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct and in his 2002 book The Blank Slate:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Here is the original quote, as it appears in Watson’s 1924 book Behaviorism:
“I should like to go one step further now and say, ‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. Please note that when this experiment is made I am to be allowed to specify the way the children are to be brought up and the type of world they have to live in.”
“As the patient searchers discern more and more about early man and his predecessors, they also may gain an ever-widening insight about modern man, his nature, his failings and his future. Most major anthropologists reject the notion popularized by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and others that man is inherently aggressive and that his murderous instincts derive from his apelike origins. Indeed, they have found no evidence in their digs that man was anything but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It was farming, they believe, that created settlers with property to protect and fostered cultural differences that led to antagonisms between races and communities.
Richard Leakey…notes that racial differences, as they are commonly perceived, are a superficial and recent development, having arisen only about 15,000 years ago.”
–Time Magazine article “Puzzling Out Man’s Ascent,” Monday, Nov. 07, 1977
compiled by Abdullah Al-Mamun Al-Suhrawardy
Shall I not inform you of a better act than fasting, alms, and prayers? Making peace between one another: enmity and malice tear up heavenly rewards by the roots.
He who trieth to remove the want of his brother, whether he be successful or not, God will forgive his sins.
Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.
Say what is true, although it may be bitter and displeasing to people.
Do not exceed bounds in praising me, as the Christians do in praising Jesus, the son of Mary, by calling him God, and the Son of God; I am only the Lord’s servant; then call me the servant of God, and His messenger.
The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.
Mar. 31, 2010
“When police arrived, two children were found dead, Pubins said. One child was 5 and the other 15 months old….
The father, 39-year-old Andre Leteve, had a self-inflicted gunshot wound that police said was not life-threatening…. Police said he was distraught over a pending divorce from his estranged wife.”
[source]
Mar. 31, 2010
“An 18-year-old man died after being shot at a Phoenix apartment complex Wednesday afternoon.
… The men apparently met to engage in some sort of transaction.”
[source]
Mar. 28, 2010
“A Phoenix woman and her boyfriend were arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault, after the woman’s husband was found with a gunshot wound Saturday night, Phoenix police said.
‘Moreno and the victim are husband and wife, and Qhihuis is her boyfriend. Moreno and her husband are going through a problematic divorce/custody battle,’ Thompson said in the press release.”
[source]
Mar. 21, 2010
“He was clearing the weapon inside the home to pack it into luggage for a trip,” Crump said in an e-mail. “When the weapon discharged, the round struck his wife who was in the backyard at the time. The shooting appears to have been unintentional.”
[source]
Mar. 18, 2010
“Man shot to death in driveway of Phoenix home”
[source]
Mar. 6, 2010
“A 19-year-old Chandler man was shot dead Saturday after a gun he was looking at fired as it was being put away, police said.”
[source] Read the rest of this entry »
Below is a poem/military chant that is a composite of one that appears in an issue of a comic book called Slow Death (#4, 1972) and one I found at the Digital Tradition Folk Music Database.
The poem/chant is preceded in Slow Death by the following:
Thanks very much for all the letters, no room for a do loop letter page or a Slow Death Quiz this time. The cartoon was sent to us by Eric Kimball. The poem was the work of a group of AF and Army GIs assigned to the First Air Cav who sat down one night in a hootch in Nam and wrote a poem. It expressed their bitterness about the things they had done and toward the military that had made them murderers. The poem was first published in the June 71 issue of helping hand; POB 729, Mountain Home, Idaho 83647. Each verse depicts an actual event that at least one of the men participated in. Read the rest of this entry »
“You’ve got to understand there are some in this world that simply do not adhere to the ideals we believe in. In Iraq, they don’t put their hand over their heart and say, “Liberty and justice for all.” They don’t believe in liberty. The dictator who runs Iraq doesn’t believe in justice. He only believes in liberty and justice for those who he decides get liberty and justice.
There’s a lot of talk about Iraq on our TV screens, and there should be, because we’re trying to figure out how best to make the world a peaceful place. There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again. You’ve got to understand the nature of the regime we’re dealing with. This is a man who has delayed, denied, deceived the world. For the sake of liberty and justice for all, the United Nations Security Council must act, must act in way to hold this regime to account, must not be fooled, must be relevant to keep the peace.”
[source]
September 3, 2008
Bill O’Reilly: Certainly the public has a right to know about Governor Palin’s life, and there are legitimate questions about her family’s situation, but Americans are very protective of families in general. So the questions have to be fair and balanced. So does the analysis.
…as long as society doesn’t have to support the mother, father or baby, it is a personal matter. Once the taxpayers do have to support the young family, it becomes a public policy matter.
[source]
December 20, 2007
Bill O’Reilly: On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. The sister of Britney says she is shocked. I bet.
Now most teens are pinheads in some ways. But here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her or even over Britney Spears. Look at the way she behaves.
[source]
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I met Arlene’s father at the hospital. He had been there for a few days. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “I have to go home.” He was so unhappy, he just left.
When I finally saw Arlene, she was very weak, and a bit fogged out. She didn’t seem to know what was happening. She stared straight ahead most of the time, looking around a little bit from time to time, and was trying to breathe. Every once in a while her breathing would stop—and she would sort of swallow— and then it would start again. It kept going like this for a few hours.
I took a little walk outside for a while. I was surprised that I wasn’t feeling what I thought people were supposed to feel under the circumstances. Maybe I was fooling myself. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because we had known for a long time that it was going to happen.
It’s hard to explain. If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures—these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come—it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.
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“Sagan desperately wants to find life someplace, anyplace—on Mars, on Titan, in the solar system or outside it,” one of his Viking colleagues said recently. “In all the divergent things he does, that is the unifying thread. I don’t know why, but if you read his papers or listen to his speeches, even though they are on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated topics, there is always the question ‘Is this or that phenomenon related to life?’ People say, ‘What a varied career he has had,’ but everything he has done has had this one underlying purpose.”
Sagan was asked the other day why he thought it was that he, and others, are so interested in trying to find life beyond the earth. “I think it’s because human beings love to be alive, and we have an emotional resonance with something else alive, rather than with a molybdenum atom,” he said. “Why are people interested in other animals? Why are we interested in the life history of the armadillo? Why do we go to Antarctica to find out what the emperor penguins have been doing lately? It’s fun, because we are primarily drawn to things that are alive.”
From a June 28, 1976 profile in The New Yorker by Henry S. F. Cooper titled “A Resonance With Something Alive”
From the mouth of Jim Jarmusch comes this quote (slightly edited) from the 2005 DVD release of Broken Blossoms from the bonus feature entitled “Farmhouse”:
I like to make scenes that—where you have no idea what’s gonna happen next. It’s not a formula, you know? The most beautiful, deep things in our lives are not rational. They’re usually emotional or they’re connections with other people, and those things are very mysterious. Things don’t happen in a rational way. They happen in more of an emotional way or a random way or by molecules in the universe moving in a way we don’t control, you know?
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