Stephen Jay Gould

on writing a fan letter to harlan ellison

March 16, 2020July 4, 2018 by Neal Umphred

WE SPENT A WEEK IN JUNE at Ocean Shores on the west coast of Washington. It was our first time there, and the first time I had been near an ocean in almost thirty years! While I intended to spend a lot of time in the water—whose temperature was in the mid-50s—and be involved in sundry social activities, I also planned on doing some reading. [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"Turn on, tune in, drop out." – Timothy Leary

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be," – Kurt Vonnegut

"Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” ― Stokely Carmichael

"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong." – Carl Gustav Jung

"Were the sixties that way for everybody—music and sex and politics and love all inextricably part of each other—or is it just me?'' – Ray Shackleford

“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.” – Harlan Ellison

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." — Galileo Galilei

"Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye: it constricts." – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

"I was appalled that the San Francisco ethic didn't mushroom and envelope the whole world into this loving community of acid freaks. I was very naive." – Grace Slick

"There is no more neutrality in the world: you either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem." – Eldridge Cleaver

“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.” – Alan Watts

"The Sixties are gone. Dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock & roll never as great." – Abbie Hoffman