A Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed! — © Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Frenchmen are like gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed!
Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is "mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself good or ill based on specific grounds, but which feels itself "just like everybody," and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else.
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
One reason I chose gunpowder is that I had the good luck in my environment to be exposed to gunpowder. The other reason is I was always looking for a visual language that goes beyond the boundary of nations, and so I found gunpowder.
Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.
We didn't invent gunpowder. What we did was take things that were there and put them together in a way that works.
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
A multitude is strong while it holds together, but so soon as each of those who compose it begins ro think of his own private danger, it becomes weak and contemptible.
On their own, each [character] is a victim of no importance. But when you bring them together, they become a dangerous weapon. Jeanne is the vowel and Sophie the consonant. Psychologists know this phenomenon well. Each individual is harmless, but together they create an explosive chemical reaction. It's like Bonnie and Clyde, like Thelma and Louise.
War is a terrible trade. But when the cause is just, the smell of gunpowder is sweet.
Mass, time , magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.
If two stones were placed... near each other, and beyond the sphere of influence of a third cognate body, these stones, like two magnetic needles, would come together in the intermediate point, each approaching the other by a space proportional to the comparative mass of the other.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
We’ve got to stick together, that’s all I know. We all drive each other crazy at times, but I don’t want to end up here alone, like the Hermit. Then this really would be Hell. Humans do such terrible things to each other that sometimes my brain tells me they must be evil. But my heart still isn’t convinced. I just hope we can survive.
The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.
Indeed, in Russia there is a terrible poverty of facts, and a terrible abundance of reflections of all sorts.
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