A Quote by Clarence John Laughlin
Everything that I see must become personal; otherwise, it is dead and mechanical. Our only chance to escape the blight of mechanization, of acting and thinking alike, of the huge machine which society is becoming, is to restore life to all things through the saving and beneficent power of the human imagination.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.
Evolution is the only thing that exists through time. That is true for computers, or people, or a business. We tend to see things in a static way, and so you see what is. Even in looking at ourselves, what we really are is essentially vessels for our DNA that keeps evolving through time. So seeing that and embracing that reality, and thinking of everything as kind of this perpetual motion machine in which you embrace reality - you don't wish it was different. You realize that it's your puzzle to interact with. You interact with it well, you evolve yourself.
Power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. And this unintelligence of its objectives sets its stamp on its supporters also and renders them stupid and brutal, even when they were originally endowed with the best of talents. One who is constantly striving to force everything into a mechanical order at last becomes a machine himself and loses all human feeling.
Thought is the creative power, or the impelling force which causes the creative power to act; thinking in a Certain Way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, paying no attention to personal action. That is the rock upon which many otherwise scientific metaphysical thinkers meet shipwreck–the failure to connect thought with personal action.
It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be; without it, ‘progress’ would become mechanical and trivial.
John Cassavetes' films have really altered the way I see film and acting and storytelling and emotion and love, so I see acting as this incredible revealing of human nature and this means of telling our story, sharing our voice with the world. That's what acting is for me. It allows for people to experience things through the character, through the story.
I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son "A Personal Matter," I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our "personal matter," and society.
In olden times when there was a war, it was a human-to-human confrontation. The victor in battle would directly see the blood and suffering of the defeated enemy. Nowadays, it is much more terrifying because a person in an office can push a button and kill millions of people and never see the human tragedy that he or she has created. The mechanization of war, the mechanization of human conflict, poses an increasing threat to peace.
Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.
Our personal past is only available to us now through black-and-white film, it's a medium for communication with the dead, including our dead selves, the way we used to be, which is why we're drawn to it.
We look at the human body as a biochemical machine controlled by genes and therefore we see a mechanical aspect to life and then try to understand the nature of mechanics by looking at how the physical parts interact with each other. If you want to understand life you just look at it as a whole series of interactive chemical reactions. What we are leaving out is the invisible elements, the contributions of the invisible world, which are emphasized in the nature of quantum mechanics. Matter is energy and is a primary factor that must be considered because everything is ultimately energy.
One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
One of the wonderful aspects of the human imagination is its power to break through the barriers of time and space. It can see things not as they are but as the can be.
Create or perish is the eternal mandate of nature. Be constructive or become frustrated is an equal demand. You cannot escape the conclusion that whatever this thing is which is seeking expression through everything, it can find satisfactory outlet only through constructive and life-giving creativeness.
Many things are mechanical and should remain mechanical. But mechanical thoughts, mechanical feelings—that is what has to be studied and can and should be changed. Mechanical thinking is not worth a penny. You can think about many things mechanically, but you will get nothing from it.
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