“But why hope for gridlock? No one likes to see it in traffic.” “They’re hoping that if the government can’t do anything, then history will stop happening and things will always stay just like they are right now.” “What’s so great about right now!” “Not much, but they figure it can only get worse. It’s a damage-control strategy. They can see just as clearly as anyone that the globalized economy means they’re all headed for the sweatshop.” “True, that’s what I say all the time, but there are better ways to deal with it than gridlock in Washington!” “Are you sure?” “Sure I’m sure! There sure as hell should be anyway.” — 44: 662-670
And now in Antarctica, he said, he had begun to put together his reading and his life in a way that made sense; he was beginning to see patterns. In all the evenings he had with nothing else to do, he had begun to travel backward in the history of philosophy, trying to track his analysis to its source. Everything that impressed him turned out to be based on something that had come earlier. So that he had read The Götterdämmerung and become a devotee of Frank Bailey, like any number of grad students around the world; then he had sought out Bailey’s roots in prepostcapitalist theory, and so had read Deleuze and Speier, and become a neoleftist; then gone further back and read Jameson and Williams and then Sartre, and found it had all come from Sartre, and so become a Sartrean; then a Nietzschean, for really it all came from Nietzsche; and then he had read Marx and Engels, and become a Marxist. At that point he had recognized the retrograde pattern of his intellectual movement, and rather than go to the trouble of traveling further backward in the history of Western philosophy, which was soon going to lead him into the monstrosities of Kant and Hegel, he had simply skipped them all and gone right back to Heraclitus, becoming a confirmed student of that most Zenlike of the Greeks, a man whose extant body of work could be read in ten minutes, but then pondered over for the rest of one’s life. Yes, now he planned to meditate on fragments of Heraclitus and never read philosophy again, but start paying attention to the world instead! — 69: 1058-1068
Well, have you heard the three rules of mountain guiding?” “No.” “First rule is, the client is trying to kill you. Second rule, the client is trying to kill himself. Third rule, the client is trying to kill the rest of the clients.” — 177: 2705-2708
This had outraged Graham. A perversion of science! he cried. But his old professor had chided him. No no, he had said, it’s your own fault; you should have known better. Perhaps it’s even my fault; I should have taught you better than I did how science works, obviously. There was nothing particularly untoward in Martin’s response, Graham’s teacher explained to him, with no outrage or indignation whatsoever. Indeed, he said, if Graham had joined the program of one of the dynamicists, and begun to produce work indicating that the ice had lain heavy on Antarctica for millions and millions of years, he would not have prospered there either. It was not a matter of evil-doing either way; the simple truth was that science was a matter of making alliances to help you to show what you wanted to show, and to make clear also that what you were showing was important. And your own graduate students and post-docs were necessarily your closest allies in that struggle to pull together all the strings of an argument. All this became even more true when there was a controversy ongoing, when there were people on the other side publishing articles with titles like “Unstable Ice or Unstable Ideas?” and so on, so that the animus had grown a bit higher than normal. — 293: 4480-4489
In English it is called something like The Ethical, Political, and Utopian Elements Embodied in the Structure of Modern Science. And this book is really having an impact, it is quite a revolution in scientific circles. — 330: 5060-5062
Each expedition has a different character, you see, fulfilling different karmic fates. In fact many expeditions encompass entire karmic lifetimes all in themselves. For karmic lives are shorter than human lives, and each of us passes through many different karmic existences during the course of a single biological span. This is a fact that is not well known in the West, I have found, even though the demonstration of it is there for all to see in the history of their own lives. — 374: 5726-5729
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—” — 563: 8630-8631
We redrew all our county lines to match the watershed boundaries, a long time ago. — 596: 9131-9131
He found that unlike a lot of sports, mountaineering was mostly a matter of walking. One only had to walk without falling and one was a successful mountaineer. — 600: 9187-9188
X had replied to her messages carefully, and gone back to his Heraclitus. The same road goes both up and down. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars. All things come in seasons. Character is fate. — 602: 9224-9225