Vestiges Quotes

If you look at the practice of 'crisis management,' and maybe squint at it a little, you can make out in the corners of your vision the ghosts or the vestiges of a much older, but still thoroughly American, form of public life, one centered not on public opinion but on religion. ~ Jonathan Dee

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. ~ William James

The world I live in is composing a magnum opus to the heart-stopping, outrageously unbelievable unconditional love and acceptance of God that crushes and demolishes the vestiges of self-righteous "us and them." It's ~ Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

The point we desperately need to grasp is that forgiveness is not the same thing as tolerance. We are told again and again today that we must be "inclusive"; that Jesus welcomed all kinds of people just as they were; that the church believes in forgiveness and therefore we should remarry divorcees without question, reinstate employees who were sacked for dishonesty, allow convicted pedophiles back into children's work-actually, we don't normally say the last of these, which shows that we have retained at least some vestiges of common sense. But forgiveness is not the same as tolerance. It is not the same as inclusivity. It is not the same as indifference, whether personal or moral. Forgiveness doesn't mean that we don't take evil seriously after all; it means that we do. ~ N. T. Wright

The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition. ~ Mas'udi

If we turn now to such vestiges of cult as are associated otherwise than with time and season, we discover a definite recognition of the survival of these nearly a century ago. Keightley, the old fairy mythologist, who did such yeoman service in the collection of much valuable elfin lore, says, as long ago as 1850, when referring to the confused nature of his subject: 'Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings (the larger and greater fairies) once formed part of ancient and exploded systems of religion and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved. ~ Lewis Spence

Iago, on the other hand, seems to be malice personified, a manifestation of manifold vice with no discernible vestiges of grace. ~ Williiam Shakespeare

A planet without AIDS is possible, but to create that planet we must
do away with the vestiges of the old planet where testing positive to
the HIV virus effectively relegates an individual to the subclass of
Human society ~ Oche Otorkpa

The World Bank, anxious that the last vestiges of Zimbabwe's former inclination toward socialism be abandoned, successfully urged the imposition of a token tuition charge for all grade levels. Equivalent to one U. S. dollar per year per child, this fee constitutes a burden to the poorest families, who have responded by sending only boys to classes. Too many of the girls ... have resorted to prostitution in order to eat. ~ Michael Dorris

Like the Dove, the Lamb, and the Cock adorning our church towers. Yet all this does not alter the fact that in childhood we go through a phase when archaic thinking and feeling once more rise up in us, and that all through our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy-thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind. Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions and conditions in many of their organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown those archaic impulses, still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies. ~ C. G. Jung

pastors need themselves to have been mastered by the unconditional grace of God. From them the vestiges of a self-defensive pharisaism and conditionalism need to be torn. Like the Savior they need to handle bruised reeds without breaking them and dimly burning wicks without quenching them. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. Just as the human body connects us with the mammals and displays numerous vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages going back even to the reptilian age, so the human psyche is a product of evolution which, when followed back to its origins, shows countless archaic traits. ~ C. G. Jung

As if one killed by calculation! A person kills only from an impulse that springs from his blood and sinews, from the vestiges of ancient struggles, from the need to live and the joy of being strong. ~ Emile Zola

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison - to girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for extermination. Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation, education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do, alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Some people say that love itself is the most powerful magic," Caitlyn said.
"But would true love make a man go against every principle that had guided his life, and make him break vows he had made to God?" Raphael
shook his head. "Simon brought Eshael here, to the château, but she would not give up her goddess and so he could not marry her. The local men
were frightened of Eshael and her strange ways. There were stories of firelight in the caves that pierce the cliffs beneath the château, and the
dancing shadows of local women that Eshael had converted to worship of her goddess.
"Simon's love for Eshael began to fade; he started to see evil in all she did and all she was. The final straw came after Eshael bore him their first
child, a daughter. When Simon discovered Eshael consecrating their child to her goddess, the last vestiges of his love turned to hatred. In his rage,
he killed her. ~ Lisa Cach

If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts! ~ Adam Sedgwick

I don't think people have fully processed how deeply television has changed the political process in our own world. Political parties have become vestiges of what they were and individuals with large amounts of money can leapfrog over that process, which can have a positive mediating effect. And so I think there are things to worry about. ~ Alexander Stille

Communism in America
In the early 1920's, fascism was undermining all vestiges of democracy in Europe and dictatorships were prevalent in most Latin American countries. Therefore, communism was considered by many as the best alternative for the working masses, and was embraced by many scholars, artists and authors, as a viable alternative form of political thinking. Many people in the Hollywood film industry became members of the "Communist Party of America," or at least they agreed with the communistic views and became what was called "fellow travelers." The Communist Party meetings were where people of like mind could gather and share ideas, as well as help each other with their budding careers.
The United States Government had other ideas and some of the most serious attacks on personal rights took place during these early years. Constitutional rights were thrown out of the window as some government officials took unlawful actions against foreign immigrants and labor leaders.
Being more tolerant politically, Mexico attracted many Americans who felt persecuted in the United States. Heading south of the border was a geographic cure that many of them embraced. ~ Hank Bracker

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. ~ H.G.Wells

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In beautiful things St. Francis saw Beauty itself, and through His vestiges imprinted on creation he followed his Beloved everywhere, making from all things a ladder by which he could climb up and embrace Him who is utterly desirable. ~ Bonaventure

AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations. ~ Sarah Polley

As a nation we should commit ourselves not only to the fight against terrorism, but to economic justice, defeat of the AIDS epidemic and vestiges of discriminatory policies of all kinds. ~ Charles B. Rangel

A late arrival had the impression of lots of loud people unnecessarily grouped within a smoke-blue space between two mirrors gorged with reflections. Because, I suppose, Cynthia wished to be the youngest in the room, the women she used to invite, married or single, were, at the best, in their precarious forties; some of them would bring from their homes, in dark taxis, intact vestiges of good looks, which, however, they lost as the party progressed. It has always amazed me - the capacity sociable weekend revelers have of finding almost at once, by a purely empiric but very precise method, a common denominator of drunkenness, to which everybody loyally sticks before descending, all together, to the next level. The rich friendliness of the matrons was marked by tomboyish overtones, while the fixed inward look of amiably tight men was like a sacrilegious parody of pregnancy. Although some of the guests were connected in one way or another with the arts, there was no inspired talk, no wreathed, elbow-propped heads, and of course no flute girls. From some vantage point where she had been sitting in a stranded mermaid pose on the pale carpet with one or two younger fellows, Cynthia, her face varnished with a film of beaming sweat, would creep up on her knees, a proffered plate of nuts in one hand, and crisply tap with the other the athletic leg of Cochran or Corcoran, an art dealer, ensconced, on a pearl-grey sofa, between two flushed, happily disintegrating ladies.

At a ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Down through the years certain fads of slang had come and gone, and their vestiges could be found in Janie's and Mabel's conversation, like mastodon bones in a swamp. ~ Dolores Hitchens

Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.

This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit. ~ Guy Davenport

The vestiges of the bicameral mind do not exist in any empty psychological space. ~ Julian Jaynes

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared. ~ Keith Miller

Life is a fragile thing. You hold it in your hand for but a moment. Each heartbeat is a victory over death's questing fingers and an escape from his skeletal grip. I'd felt him a time or two run a frozen finger down my back or across my cheek, a seductive caresses promising surcease from the pain of life. I'd welcomed him with open arms on occasion over the past few years, but he always teased me, toyed with me, moving on with the promise to return another day. Other times I'd fought him off, clinging onto the last vestiges of life with ripped fingernails. ~ G.R. Matthews

The church has contributed nothing to civilization. It has progressed somewhat, and it has become a little more decent, in reflection of the movements of civilization that have taken place outside of the church and usually in the face of the strong opposition of the church. But the church has always resisted the process of civilization. It has struggled to the last ditch, by fair means and foul, to preserve as long as it could the vestiges of ancient and medieval theology, with all the puerile moralities and harsh customs and medieval styles of belief. ~ E. Haldeman-Julius

[Vestiges begins] from principles which are at variance with all sober inductive truth. The sober facts of geology shuffled, so as to play a rogue's game; phrenology (that sinkhole of human folly and prating coxcombry); spontaneous generation; transmutation of species; and I know not what; all to be swallowed, without tasting and trying, like so much horse-physic!! Gross credulity and rank infidelity joined in unlawful marriage, and breeding a deformed progeny of unnatural conclusions! ~ Adam Sedgwick

The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. ~ Terry Hayes

I began writing this story by subverting the dominant discourse, but that did not last long. My story decided to assert its independence. I tried to rupture all vestiges of received form, but my story fought back. It wanted to go live with its Aristotelian parents. "I'm sick of being experimented on," it said. "What's so lame about catharsis?" Then it stormed out of the barber shop, mid trim, and fumbled down the sidewalk, weak from surgery, thin in description, gaping with holes, and absolutely riddled with bruised sentences. I watched it with binoculars, but decided not to chase after it. I never liked that story anyway. ~ Christopher Higgs

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. 'Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.'24 ~ Richard J. Evans

The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers. ~ Herman Melville

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. ~ Steven Pinker

I actually took them all on quite handily, although I learned when I came to study the issue that I was completely wrong. I also came to believe that the war on drugs is one of the last vestiges of institutionalized racism in our society. ~ Harvey Pekar

We say that what seems to "us" irrational in the life of "savages", and may be unpractical, since it unfits them to compete with our material force, represents the vestiges of a primordial state of metaphysical understanding, and tl'1at if the savage himself is, generally speaking, no longer a comprehensor of his own "divine inheritance", this ignorance on his part is no more shameful than ours who do not recognize the intrinsic nature of his "lore", and understand it no better than he does. ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The beauty of modern cities consists in a sense of their power, cruelty, impersonality, massiveness, + variety (as in New York or London) seen against the architectural vestiges of a beautiful past. ~ Susan Sontag

Next morning, his nose still in the dreambag of a deep pillow contributed to his otherwise austere bed by sweet Blanche (with whom, by the parlour-game rules of sleep, he had been holding hands in a heart-breaking nightmare– or perhaps it was just her cheap perfume), the boy was at once aware of the happiness knocking to be let in. He deliberately endeavored to prolong the glow of its incognito by dwelling on the last vestiges of jasmine and tears in a silly dream... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies. ~ H.G.Wells

These were "fossil behaviors," Darwinian vestiges of earlier times brought out of physiological limbo by the stimulation of primitive brain-stem systems, damaged and sensitized by the encephalitis in the first place, and now "awakened" by L-dopa.1 I ~ Oliver Sacks

We want to feel the pain of her loss, because at least it is something of her to feel. However, the result is that we don't sleep. The nearest thing to sleep that I experience is blacking out, from which I emerge instantly awake, twitchy and unrefreshed. And always, I wake with the knowledge that she is dead. There are no vestiges of dreams where she is alive. I don't seem to dream at all. ~ Linda Collins

Each man carries the vestiges of his birth; the slime and eggshells of his primeval past with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. ~ Hermann Hesse

The secular progressive movement in America has been successful in removing all vestiges of faith in God from the public square. The very fact that people hesitate to say "Merry Christmas" to strangers lets you know just how successful they have been. Why are they so determined to remove God from our lives? They recognize that if we have no higher authority to answer to than man, we become gods unto ourselves and get to determine our own behavior. In their world, "If it feels good, do it." They can justify anything based on their ideology because in their opinion, there is no higher authority other than themselves to overrule them. They have a visceral reaction to the mention of God's word, because it tears at the fabric of their justification system. ~ Ben Carson

Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats. ~ Douglas Adams

But he was not her Gabriel. Her Gabriel was dead. Gone. Leaving behind only vestiges of him in the body of a harsh and tortured clone. Gabriel had almost broken Julia's heart once. She was determined she would not let him break her heart for the second time. ~ Sylvain Reynard

Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism. ~ Andre Malraux

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself. ~ Jean Baudrillard

As a rule it offended her to be rescued, but this one time she would have welcomed it, been gracious even. And grateful. With staggering suddenness she felt lost, defeated, small and middle-aged, and hurt. This time she would die.

To counteract this frailty of spirit, she picked up the ax and held it in her two hands, the handle across her chest. The blade, evil-looking and running red with the light from the fire, comforted her. The wooden handle felt warm and strong, the ax head heavy and sharp.

Courage returned - or the last vestiges of reality departed. A dreamlike quality took over; a nightmare, but one experienced from the point of view of the monster. Anna was not afraid. She felt very little either internally or externally. ~ Nevada Barr

Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such "ordainers of the universe" (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries. ~ Alberto Manguel

Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in the cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot woudl infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves. ~ John Edward Williams

Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner. ~ Nick Land

His desire re-created her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love - an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer - not to perish till he could say, 'I never really loved her. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country. So tonight I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every working man, every housewife - I urge every American - to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people, and to bring peace to our land. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes ... lifeless echoes of their former majesty. ~ Jake Vander Ark

Either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality ... A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Transmogrification," Langdon said. "The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of "God-eating" - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions. ~ Dan Brown

I recognize the vestiges of an old flame ~ Virgil

In less than seven years the vestiges of the Gothic invasion were almost obliterated, and the city appeared to resume its former splendour and tranquillity. The venerable matron replaced her crown of laurel, which had been ruffled by the storms of war, and was still amused in the last moment of her decay with the prophecies of revenge, of victory, and of eternal dominion. ~ Edward Gibbon

Honesty is an undervalued commodity. Keeping secrets is the cancer that is slowly killing Matrus and Patrus. Given enough time, and lies, both places would fail, and the last vestiges of humanity would disappear from this earth. I don't have time for it. And also, I have found that honesty can inspire people. I won't let my people go into any situation against their will, and I won't lie to spare them uncomfortable truths about what they are getting into. It builds trust, and separates me from Matrus and Patrus. I don't have time to be anything but honest. ~ Bella Forrest

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in th ~ David Foster Wallace

I think I realized intellectually at that point, watching the city slowly give way to the last vestiges of parkland and then the black spruce forests of the North, that I could come back to the land deeply fearful, or I could choose to see it as a place of healing. Pain colours us; we carry it behind our eyes for a long time after it's passed. At some point, we have to decide whether we're willing to let it take over our lives and change them permanently, or whether we're going to wrench ourselves open again to the world. I couldn't make that choice in the city. ~ Jenna Butler

It isn't that nothing is left. It is that what remains is such an old sad ghost of the thing that used to be, and he can't bear lying down with the vestiges. ~ Josephine Humphreys

What we have to do is to definitively remove the last vestiges of power from those who treat terms such as 'liberal democracy,' 'free markets' and 'Europe' with suspicion. ~ Donald Tusk

What a bore, someone who doesn't deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don't want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Cooking professionally is a dominant act, at all times about control. Eating well, on the other hand, is about submission. It's about giving up all vestiges of control, about entrusting
your fate entirely to someone else. It's about turning off the mean, manipulative, calculating, and shrewd person inside you, and slipping heedlessly into a new experience as if it were a
warm bath. It's about shutting down the radar and letting good things happen. Let it happen to you. ~ Anthony Bourdain

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. ~ George Meredith

One cure for the pain of desecration is the move towards total PROFANATION: in other words, to wipe out all vestiges of sanctity from the once worshipped object, to make it merely a thing OF the world, and not just a thing IN the world, something that is nothing over and above the substitutes that can at any time replace it. That is what we see in the spreading addiction to pornography - a profanation that removes the sexual bond entirely from the realm of intrinsic values. It involves wiping out one area in which the idea of the beautiful had taken root, so as to protect ourselves from the possibility of love it and therefore losing it. ~ Roger Scruton

What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder,viciously,tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? ~ Thomas Pynchon

Our major claims in this book are radical but true: Nearly all important thinking takes place outside of consciousness and is not available on introspection; the mental feats we think of as the most impressive are trivial compared to everyday capacities; the imagination is always at work in ways that consciousness does not apprehend; consciousness can glimpse only a few vestiges of what the mind is doing; the scientist, the engineer, the mathematician, and the economist, impressive as their knowledge and techniques may be, are also unaware of how they are thinking and, even though they are experts, will not find out just by asking themselves. ~ Gilles Fauconnier

What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs? ~ Francis Crick