Parkinson's Law of Social Work

It's well known that social problems increase to occupy the total number of social workers available to deal with them.
Jim Hacker remarks.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Press 'release'

If in doubt, always issue an absolute denial. And if you're going to lie, then lie with one hundred per cent conviction.
Jim Hacker's strategy of handling politically tricky questions from the media.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Decision: not(e) approved

…I was sure a way could be found to alter any adverse decision.
He thought a decision was a decision. I explained that a decision is a decision only if it is the decision you wanted. Otherwise, of course, it is merely a temporary setback.
Sir Humphrey Appleby elucidating a bureaucrat's point of view on 'firm' ministerial decisions.
The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

The Banker Debunked

I remarked that he had not read the Financial Times this morning.
'Never do,' he told me. I was surprised. He was a banker after all.
'Can't understand it,' he explained. 'It's too full of economic theory.'
I asked him why he bought it and carried it about under his arm. He explained that it was part of the uniform. He said it took him thirty years to understand Keynes's economics and just when he'd finally got the hang of it everyone started getting hooked on those new-fangled monetarist ideas.
Jim Hacker discovers the truth about bankers.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Strength of self-conviction

'You were convinced, and therefore convincing.'
Sir Humphrey Appleby's comment on Jim Hacker, MP, answering a parliament question without knowing the full truth.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Law of Inverse Relevance

'The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.'
- Jim Hacker, MP confesses about politicians' tactics.

The Complete Yes Minister by Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

Cerebral claustrophobia

The fight for free space – for wilderness and for public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises.

- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The importance of exploring mindscapes

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…Time spent here is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated…
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Treadmills get you nowhere

The body that used to have the status of a work animal now has the status of a pet: it does not provide real transport, as a horse might have; instead, the body is exercised as one might walk a dog. Thus the body, a recreational rather than utilitarian entity doesn't work, but works out.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Walking is an indicator species

Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedoms and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Why revolutions are shortlived

It is the nature of revolutions to subside, which is not the same thing as to fail. A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illumination the darkness of out old arrangements so that we will never see them the same way again.

- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Walking the talk…and talking the walk

…if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language…
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Traversing the mind

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back…Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The mind at three miles an hour

I like walking because it's slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster that the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

The deficiency of efficiency

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free…the rhetoric of technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Life out of the box

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors – home, car, gym, office, shops – disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built against it.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

On walking

…Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing is a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.
- Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust

Why don't we wonder?

"Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Technological terror

"And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence of life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the starts of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his meaninglessness, for no amount of "progress" can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys and now we are full of dread."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Perfect picture

"So often, in the places that have moved me…the sun has been obscured, or rain has made photography impossible, as if the mystery of these places was better preserved in one's mind and heart than on the flat face of celluloid."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Prelude to the plunge

"Fear is very much like pain, in the sense that, in the intervals that one is free of it, one forgets how very disagreeable it is…its worst agony comes well beforehand, in the period of suspense; by the time the crucial moment arrives, a certain detachment – a fatalistic longing to finish the suspense, and finally a dull resignation – has replaced the quaking."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Barrier between beauty and the beholder

"…I dislike carrying the camera: it seems to me that one misses a great deal of seeing and feeling through thinking of one's experience in terms of light and angle."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

The Third World "System"

"One becomes stolid and resigned as any dray horse, aware that an infusion of logic, honesty, and efficiency into this world would create a chaos impossible to imagine."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Boring bigness

"…large cities,…despite the homage paid to them by travel companies,… are probably the least interesting"
- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

The Andean high-way

"The mountain roads of these countries are famous…for the breathtaking views which lie just beneath the unfenced, unbanked shoulders; both roads and vehicles are always in poor repair, and to the helms of the vehicles cling driven men, innocent of fear and commonsense."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Team quirk

"…why is it, of recent years, that Americans are always said to operate in "teams," as if an individual American, without his insipid "togetherness," would be helpless?"
- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Rainforest reverberations

"And it is true that the jungle seems strangely silent, even when the air is full of sound; the sounds are like sounds from another sphere of consciousness, from a dream, and then suddenly they burst singly on the ear"
- Peter Matthiessen in The Cloud Forest

Descend slowly from a high

"…how careful one must be not one must be not to talk too much, or move abruptly, and also the precarious coming down from highs…: it is crucial to emerge gradually from such a chrysalis, drying new wings in the sun's quiet, like a butterfly, to avoid a sudden tearing of the spirit."
- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Tru(dg)e path

"Someone once said that God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Why worry?

"In worrying about the future, I despoil my present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Accept whatever comes

"That happy-go-lucky spirit, that acceptance which is not fatalism but a deep trust in life…"

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Precocial paradise

"Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained. It is just at the moment of seeming fulfilment that we sense irrevocable betrayal…surely this is the paradise of children, that they are at rest in the present…"

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Clear air, clear thought

"In the clearness of this Himalayan air…my head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions – mail, telephones, people and their needs – and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

High Ways

"In this land, the subsistence economies have always depended upon travel and in its decades – centuries, perhaps – as a trade route for all the hill peoples, broad steps have been worn into the mountain path."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

High up, where you can hear

"In the clean air and absence of all sound, of even the simplest machinery…in the warmth and harmony and seeming plenty, come whispers of a paradisal age."

- Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard

Walking the dark rainforest

"Memory supplies some ecological detail, and imagination adds a few beasts of its own."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

The rewards of optimism

"But the unsatisfactory thing about despair, in my view, is that besides being fruitless it's far less exciting than hope, however slim."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Found in translation

"The mental solitude that comes with my total incomprehension of table talk compensates some for the lack of physical solitude."
- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Lost, and profound

"As we extinguish a large portion of the planet's biological diversity, we will lose also a large portion of out world's beauty, complexity, intellectual interest, spiritual depth, and ecological health."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Crunch those numbers...but with caution

"Modeling is fun, sometimes it produces elegant structures, but there is a tendency to reify models. To take them as nature, when really all they are is proposed abstractions of nature. I'm concerned when a literature begins to develop on the models themselves, rather than on nature."

- Dan Simberloff, quoted in David Quammen's Song of the Dodo

Do take note...

"Memory knows things that notes could never remember."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

The 'stamp' of civilization

"All over the planet, humanity is at war against other species, against the wildness of wild landscape, against the redness of nature's tooth and claw. Humanity will win. The only point at issue is the final severity of the peace."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

No-return of the native

"Dreamy invocation of conciliatory measures was popular among the British colonists. "Conciliation" would become the standard euphemism covering a multitude of oppressions. What it meant was, We take your land, we give you out religion and our language and our diseases, and then you and your culture melt away like snow on a griddle."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Shadows of limelight

"For every neat legend told and retold, a bit of messy but significant reality is ignored…Furthermore, while some legends have their uses, they all have their costs."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Havoc of exotic invasives

"Biologists would have to destroy a place in order to save it and that didn't even work in Vietnam."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Conviction vs proof

"Faith comforts, but data persuade."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Swing mood

"Like good resolutions, frustrations and despair soon fade, at least in a certain kind of person."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Animals are 'people' too

"We all recognize that Homo sapiens encompasses variation among individuals, but it is easy to forget that…other species routinely encompass variation too."

- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

The National Geographic effect

"Anyone who has ever stepped into a rainforest, head full of images from glossy nature photography, has had…disappointment, which derives from confusing diversity with abundance."
- David Quammen in Song of the Dodo

Better half of the landscape

"To my mind birds are half the scenery everywhere, and more than half on an Indian plain. The view addresses the eye, and the birds address the ear, and the two should work together. The man whose ear is untaught to enjoy the harmonious discord of the birds, walks alone when he might have company, and loses half the joys of travel and change of scene."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Blissful being a bird

"It is always busy, hopping from bush to bush, from morning to night seeking the means of its livelihood, with just enough motion to banish thought! It would be difficult to conceive and healthier of happier life, where the power of thought is small."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Credibility of brevity

"Half the art of telling a story, as of preaching a sermon, lies in knowing when to stop."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Need for a diversion

"Every hobby is good, a sign of good and an influence for good. Any hobby will draw out the mind; but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life."
- EHA in The Tribes On My Frontier

Prescription for tedium: shift gears!

"The creative output and openness to others' novelty…isn't predicted by the person's age as much as by how long the person has worked in one discipline. Scholars who switch disciplines seem to get their openness rejuvenated. It's not chronological age but "disciplinary" age."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

The window diminishes

"As we age, most of us…become less likely to be open to someone else's novelty."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Malleable minds

"Youngsters are the most exploratory, both most likely to make a discovery and most open to changing their behaviour when observing someone else who has."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Familiar tunes

"If you are more than thirty-five years old when some new popular music is introduced, there's a greater than 95 percent chance that you will never choose to listen to that stuff. The window has closed."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Standpoint reversal

"Once, we were kids who believed enough in out immortality that we'd hitch rides with strangers. Now, instead, we flaunt the same irrationality by cheating on our low-fat diets. Once, we had not yet learned that life brings tragedies beyond control. Now, we wonder how we can spare our own children from that knowledge."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Intellect: a function of society

"We are shaped by the sort of society in which we live, and we would not be the same person if we had grown up elsewhere."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Re(a)lationship

"A relationship is the price you pay for the anticipation of it."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

The pleasure of 'maybe'

"The pleasure is in the anticipation of a reward…the reward is an afterthought."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Postponement of gratification

"Here's all of us forgoing immediate pleasure to get good grades to get into a good college to get a good job in order to get into the nursing home of our choice."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Body over behaviour

"Relationships can be contentious enough without your glands suckering you into inventing problems that don't exist."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Brain over body

"Sometimes, all you need to do is think a thought and you change the functioning of virtually every cell in your body."
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Instant science education

"Now, people tend to crave – and consequently overvalue – virtually anything new. The result is a pretty widespread impression among the lay public, who (for no fault of their own) learn their science in ten-second sound bites…"
- Robert M. Sapolsky in Monkeyluv

Victual vitality

"Perhaps the ancients were right after all. Delicious food, like beautiful form and melodious sound, is certainly one of the five attributes of the realm of desire."
- Mamang Dai in Legends of Pensam