I'm fond of the Gestalt idea "introjection" - i.e. the way we automatically integrate loved others into our actual self. And once in there, the people and things we deeply identify with form a Greek chorus singing our ideals. (The clearest popular example is "What Would Jesus Do?".) My intellectual introjections:
2012
- Warren Samuels: Lofty and furious and oracular and taking no shit is an optimal bundle after all.
- Thorstein Veblen: I don't love economics, but I do hate bad economics. It's enough.
- Bill Easterly: Do not let people off just because they say they are trying to help.
- Mary Midgley: Value sneaks in everywhere. Teleology too. Ignoring philosophy just leaves them with awful philosophies. Deicide has unexpected consequences.
2011
- David Newlands: Your anger cannot die until giant problems do. Though they're perennials.
- Pierre Bayard: I absolve you of the sin of not reading: you can beatify that sin. Russellian acquaintance is nice but rare and unnecessary: the structure of literature is greater than its content.
- Benedict Anderson: We all live in quasi-real landscapes made up for dubious ends.
- Adam Smith: Thinking that things will be ok doesn't make you a dick.
- Hugh MacDiarmid: Contradiction is the way of it. The apparently singular is usually not.
- Tom Nairn: Most formal fields could do with a troll. Nationalism is both wholly absurd and an option.
- David Foster Wallace: Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you'll find any answers.
- Ha-Joon Chang: Inquiry sets a bound on hypocrisy, but infuriatingly slowly.
- Antonio Gramsci: You would say that. Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will!
- Richard Rorty: Well, what if I don't?
2010
- John Emerson: They're now just playing games with the world, because they won the meta-game. There might be another round sometime.
- David Pearce: This is what science is for. Aim high - the run-up alone is inspiring.
- Jonathan Meades: What can't be entertaining? What can't be seen to say important things?
- Amartya Sen: Do not tell me not to climb because you dislike my ladder.
- Friedrich Nietzsche: Yes, but what made you like that? Nihilism has gravity; it falls to few to break orbit.
- Alasdair Gray: Scottishness doesn't have to be monolithic, and never really was. You can stop running.
- Mozi: I hope some ideas occurred to everyone.
- Erving Goffman: There's many an image makes up a thing, if thing there truly there be.
- Emmanuel Levinas: We are unimaginably brutal without trying. We know not what we do.
- Benedict de Spinoza: Being enormously ahead of your time is not its own reward. What one acquires from trying to acquire Knowledge is.
- Nicholas Nassim Taleb: Don't trust them. Nor yourself. The extremes of the world say more about it than the supposed averages.
2009
Deirdre McCloskey: In your haste to fix it, you missed the entire world. What are boundaries but guides for the game? Words are not the opposite of numbers! (the first economist I loved: an artist though an economist! Perhaps the first 'conservative' I loved, too.)
Dave Hickey: Art is about people, not art. (What isn't about people?)
William Kinzelman: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken (What do they know? What do you know? Yeah, thought so.)
Julian Lethbridge: Science is one good way. Objects do not contain meaning; people contain meaning! Everyone is a painter on one many-sided canvas.
Karl Popper: Philosophical problems should be rooted outside philosophy.
Iain Crichton-Smith: Folk have walked and talked the most of you before. This is cause for joy, too.
Simone De Beauvoir: Hegel and sex are not as far apart as they seem.
Christa Wolf: It all shifts, but not at once and never in one direction. This is tragedy.
Werner Herzog: Stubbornness is a lot of the work.
Vladimir Nabokov: Style is much more than surface presentation. It is, largely, the world.
William Corkill: You're careful in the wrong places; careless in the right ones.
Joan Robinson: Most games allow for flair, improvisation and transcendence, if not internal dissent.
James Hampson: I like what I like. What are you, in love with your problems? Without some vulgarity there is no complete man. (He also gave me back the words: "good" "beautiful", "big" "nice" and "shit".)
2008
Epicurus: Don't be melodramatic. Live, eh? Let others be happy in their own way, if they are.
Gerald Harrison: Intuition is too often foolish. If an extreme is rationally warranted, then be extreme.
Michael Wayne Chodos: You don't know the meaning of pain. What one feels is half one's world. What others do is the other half.
Douglas Hofstadter: Things are complex but that's no bad thing. Let me cheer you up with complexity.
Simon Reynolds: Pop has power, philosophy, meaning and all that.
Albert North Whitehead: Reason isn't everything - even if you are very good at it.
Raymond Williams: They give you a prefab mind, but you needn't and shouldn't take it all over.
Federico Lorca: The whole point is that Green i believe that green is not the answer, green.
Peter Singer: Indifference is not a real option. There's only one team worth being on.
David Chalmers: Brilliance could always find more ways forward.
Samuel Beckett: Stop it. It's finishing. Watch it. Watch yourself. It's silly, yes, but horrific too.
WH Auden: Love, even when pointless, isn't pointless.
Theodor Adorno: We're all shit philosophers.
2007
Nick Cohen: You idiots. You self-righteous, uncritical idiots. The story is wrong.
Soren Kierkegaard: Dread is a good sign - it means you're getting somewhere.
Piero Scaruffi: Outrageous opinions are occasionally natural and needed, and always interesting.
DH Lawrence: Turns out that you can respect someone wrong about almost every respect.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: There's more to this.
Walt Whitman: It's grand to like oneself, whatever they tell you. I contain multitudes.
2006
Joseph Heath: Your irreverence is hypocritical, reveres new idols. The counter-culture is just culture.
Germaine Greer: Most of what is wrong is invisible to most of us. (I did not know that I was allowed to be a feminist.)
Paul Cézanne: Waiting for approval is no way to live. Arseholes.
Lars Lindqvist: Even the oddest get a chance at peace these days. Happiness and 'depth' aren't inversely related!
Charles Bukowski: Everyone is fighting a battle: suffering is at the heart of most things. People deal with this, on the surface. (The first poet I understood and, thus, loved. These days his role is to remind me how terrible men are, then and for now.)
Bry Leech: Irreverence, dickhead. Wir aw Jock Tamson's bairns. Nothing is to be above ridicule - and ridicule is the earliest form of inquiry.
I'm afraid the only unifying theme is cheek.
Clive James: It is surprisingly easy to become literate, in any of the thousand literacies. You don't need permission to write with charm, on most topics.
Giorgio de Chirico: Seen properly, the strangeness of the world is vast. Solitude has its advantages.
Henry Thoreau: I am as desirous of being a good neighbour as I am a bad subject.
William Carlos Williams: Much can be said with very little if you just pour it right. Iain Banks: Making people think is not opposed to making them feel. The created can easily be greater than creator.
Sylvia Plath: Happiness isn't everything. (But it would be a start!)
Robert Pirsig: So there's this "philosophy" thing. It's never been very popular, but it's Big.
Dylan Thomas: Actually all it takes is energy.
Kurt Vonnegut: We are on this earth to fart around. So it goes.
1990-2005
Norton Juster: The silly is also the real, in some important ways.Terry Pratchett: We are bad at seeing the world, but if you just give us a mirror...
Ian Mackaye: Things are pretty messed up! It doesn't have to be this way - let's go! AT LEAST I'M FUCKING TRYING.
George Orwell: I have been so wrong. Good people act stupidly and so do not do good, very often.Irvine Welsh: It is important to know what you are not.
John Pilger: There is a radical gap between what they say and what they are. They necessitate our radicalism.
Penny Rimbaud: Offence is healthy. It is a democratic product. The extremes of the world say more about it than the supposed averages.
Richard Dawkins: Be strict with your thoughts; we might get somewhere if you are.
Lester Bangs: Criticism is important. Art is wider than they ever allowed for. Sacred is in all kinds of places.
