Orts #733

. . . our epistemological predicament has not changed since the time of Plato— we see the shadows cast by reality, not reality itself— but in our time even the shadows cannot be trusted.
     — Patrick Ophuls, Buddha Takes No Prisoners

. . . with the burial of myth, the barn in which the mysterious animals of the human unconscious were housed over thousands of years has been abandoned and the animals turned loose—on the tragically mistaken assumption that they were phantoms—and . . . now they are devastating the countryside. They devastate it, and at the same time they make themselves at home where we least expect them to—in the secretariats of modern political parties, for example. These sanctuaries of modern reason lend them their tools and their authority so that ultimately the plunder is sanctioned by the most scientific of world views.      
     — Václav Havel, in an essay, Thriller, 1984, 
full text here: http://www.101bananas.com/library2/havel.html

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
     — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye