Einstein's view on Morality

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously.  I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.  My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly.  I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem - the most important of all human problems."

- Albert Einstein (1947)

Satan's vision to Theodor

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.  Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction!  Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prive their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angles painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crime, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

The Mysterious Stranger - Mark Twain (1916).

A great illustration of Nietzsche's philosophy of absolute freedom

Cello Concertos

The cello has been described as the closest sounding instrument to the human voice.

Here are a few of my favorite cello concertos:

Dvorak's Cello Concerto
Elgar's Cello Concerto
Bach's Cello Suites
Shostacovich's Cello Concerto

The Warshaw Concerto

The best insult in all of literature.

Oswald.  "What dost thou know me for?"

Kent.  "A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats;
    a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
    hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave;
    a lily-livered, action-talking, whoreson, glass-gazing,
    superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave;
    one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and
    art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward.
    pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom
    I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least
    syllable of thy addition."

- King Lear

The American Dream Begins . . .

"Let's remember the energy.  Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan.  The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all.  Atomic power was ours alone.  Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, steel workers - laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it.  And playing Sunday morning softball on Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war.  Our class started high school six-months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.  And the upsurge of energy was contagious.  Around usus nothing was lifeless.  Sacrifice and constraint were over.  The Depression had disappeared  Everything was in motion.  The lid was off.  Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together."

American Pastoral