Conferences

I told him a story I heard from a German professor, about a scholar who wrote scathing reviews of his colleagues’ work, then started going to conferences and met the people he was reviewing and discovered he really liked them—so he stopped going to conferences.

Turkey

The patriarch’s alma mater, the Halki Seminary, has been closed by Turkey’s Constitutional Court since 1971.

Lusseyran. Jacques

The luminous autobiography of Jacques Lus­seyran, a teenage leader in the French Resistance. In 1941, Lusseyran recruited dozens, and eventually hundreds, to the Resistance. His group provided false papers, helped repatriate downed British airmen, and published and distributed the underground newsletter Défense de la France. In 1943, Lusseyran was caught and sent to Buchenwald. There he led a different sort of resistance movement—one against despair. Attending carefully to the official German newscasts, he listened between the lines to deduce the Allies’ progress and then walked from block to block in the concentration camp, delivering his version of the news. “It was not facts, names, or figures that all these men wanted. It was certainties, the kind of realities that went straight to the heart. Only a man standing before them could give them that. They needed his calm and his voice, and it was I who had become the voice.” What is most astonishing about his story is that, since the age of seven, Lusseyran had been completely blind.

Lacan

A philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one [Lacan]

Heraclitus

Doctors cut, burn, and torture the sick, and then demand of them an undeserved fee for such services.

Planck

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning.

Max Planck (1858-1947), Scientific Autobiography

Abortion

Flavius Josephus, a well-known Jewish historian who described the destruction of Jerusalem, wrote: "The law, moreover enjoins us to bring up all our offspring, and forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward; and if any woman appears to have so done, she will be a murderer of her child, by destroying a living creature, and diminishing humankind."

Basil discards this distinction that has been supported by some church fathers as "subtle". The foetus is regarded as "a child that should have been born".

Gore Vidal

The New York Times, which refused to review his next five novels. He retains a special contempt for the paper, "which never found a well it could not poison".

Obama

Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?" [Thomas Sowell]

Noel Coward

What Noel Coward once called Nescafe Society.

Alan Dershowitz

When even Harvard law professor and one-time member of O.J. Simpson’s so-called dream team Alan Dershowitz claims that over 90% of all criminal defendants are guilty.