Thoughts & Quotes of Blupete:

Click
the letter and you will be brought to the beginning of the thoughts beginning with that letter.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

HOME

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

MADNESS:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- September 24th, 2000.
MAN, THE NATURE OF ...:

¶ "[We are] part of a stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions, moving according to laws that may be formulated positively but not interpreted morally." (John Morley.)

¶ "Man is not the creature of sense and selfishness, even in those pursuits which grow out of that origin, so much as of imagination, custom, passion, whim, and humour." (William Hazlitt, "On Will Making.")

¶ "You, like me and every other human being, were once a microscopic spherical ovum, then in turn a double sheet of undifferentiated cells, an embryo with enormous outgrowths enabling you to obtain food and oxygen parasitically from your mother, a creature with an unjointed rod -- what biologists call the notochord -- in place of a jointed backbone; you once had gill clefts like a fish, you once had a tail, and once were covered with dense hair like a monkey; you were once a helpless infant which had to learn to distinguish objects and to talk; you underwent the transformation of your body and mind that we call puberty; you learnt a job. You are in fact a self-transforming process." (Julian Huxley.)

§ See blupete's essay -- "On The Nature Of Man."
MANDAMUS:

§ See Prerogative Writs.
MARKET:

¶ Consumers are victims of the market place. Fast foods; quack medicines and quack treatments; tabloids, books and movies that appeal to the prurient -- all are pitched to the gullible public with the result that billions of dollars are made. Our population mainly consists of the illiterate and more with wobbly or defective minds. The lot have been named by Mencken as the "boobocracy."

§ See blupete's commentary of -- February 21st, 1999.
MARRIAGE & DIVORCE:

¶ "Marriage is nothing but a Civil Contract." [John Seldon (1584-1654), as quoted by Alan Harding, A Social History of English Law (Pelican, 1966).]

¶ Trelawny recollects of Byron: "As to the oft-vexed question of the Poet's separation from his wife ... he treated women as things devoid of soul or sense; he would not eat, pray, walk, nor talk, with them. ... who would have marvelled that a lady tenderly reared and richly endowed, pious, learned, and prudent, deluded into marrying such a man, should have thought him mad or worse, and sought safety by flight? Within certain degrees of affinity marriages are forbidden; so they should be where there is no natural affinity of feelings, habits tastes, or sympathies." [Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, (1858) (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 2nd ed., 1859), at p. 70.]

§ See blupete's essay -- "Marriage & Divorce."
MATHEMATICS:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- June 21st, 1998.
MIDDLE CLASS:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- February 27th, 2000.
MIND:

¶ "The impulses which travel up to the brain along the nerves are of an electrical nature and differ only in their time relations, such as their frequency, and in their intensity. But in the brain, these purely quantitative differences in electrical pattern are translated into wholly different qualities of sensation. The miracle of mind is that it can transmute quantity into quality." (Julian Huxley.)
MISDEMEANOUR:

¶ One of a class of indictable offences which were formerly regarded as less heinous than those called felonies. In 1967, in England, distinctions between a felony and a misdemeanour were abolished. Here in Canada, serious crimes (felonies) are called "indictable offences" while "less than serious" crimes (misdemeanours) are called "summary conviction offences."
MOB:

¶ "The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is -- a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness." (Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884.)

¶ "The most instructive and universal lesson which history teaches is that mob violence, by an inevitable and natural reaction, increases the prestige of arbitrary authority ..." (George Otto Trevelyan.)

§ See blupete's commentary of -- October 31st, 1999.
MONEY:

¶ "Money ... this convenient but dangerous convention." (H. G. Wells.)

¶ "In 1830, when there was much apprehension of invasion, and when great complaints were made of the scarcity of change, I began to read some books upon he subject; and, after reading several without coming to any thing like a clear notion of the real state of our currency, I took up the little essay of Paine. Here I saw to the bottom at once. Here was no bubble, no mud to obstruct my view: the stream was clear and strong: I saw the whole matter in its true light, and neither pamphleteers nor speech-makers were, after that, able to raise even a momentary puzzle in my mind. Paine not only told me what would come to pass, but showed me, gave me convincing reasons, why it must come to pass; and he convinced me also, that it was my duty to endeavour to open eyes of my countrymen to the truths which I myself had learnt from him: because his reasoning taught me, that, the longer those truths remained hidden from their view, the more fatal must be the consequences." (Cobbett as quoted by Spater, in William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
MONOPOLY AND COMPETITION:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- March 4th, 2001.
MORALS:

¶ Of Taste, or of Science: "The Aztecs considered it their painful duty to eat human flesh for fear the light of the sun should grow dim. They erred in their science; and perhaps they would have perceived the scientific error if they had any love for the sacrificial victims. Some tribes immerse girls in the dark from the age of ten to the age of seventeen, for fear the sun's rays should render them pregnant. But surely our modern codes of morals contain nothing analogous to these savage practices? Surely we only forbid things which really are harmful, or at any rate so abominable that no decent person could defend them? I am not so sure." (Bertrand Russell,What I Believe.)

¶ "... morality of the vast mass of mankind is simply to do what they please up to the point at which custom puts a restraint upon them, arising from the fear of disapprobation. The custom of looking upon certain courses of conduct with aversion may be felt by the very person whose conduct occasions it ..."[Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873); (University of Chicago Press, 1991).] MOTIVATION:

§ See blupete's commentary of -- May 30th, 1999.

GO TO INDEX >>>>