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Tom Wolfe Quotes

Total quotes: 21
“Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?”
— Tom Wolfe, Self-Disclosure: Changes from Within
Tagged: Romantic, Escapism, Passion, Dreams
“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution, Speech, Communication Secrets
“Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution
“It was not so much the book The Origin of Species as the talk about it that created such a stir.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: The Medium Is The Message?, Do Words Matter?
“Jesus is the Rock of Ages for both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus’s latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Secularized Theology, Liberalism and Christianity, Christianity Lives, Christian Leftism, Religion, Secular Theology
“Everybody, everybody everywhere, has his own movie going, his own scenario, and everybody is acting his movie out like mad, only most people don’t know that is what they’re trapped by, their little script.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tagged: Life Is Movie, Life, This Is Life, Perfect Quotes About Life, 107 Of The Greatest Single Sentences In Literature, Perfect Sentences
“One of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
— Tom Wolfe, Fascism mystery
Tagged: political, Fascism, Astronomy
“Wallace put his discovery of all discoveries— the origin of species by natural selection— into the hands of a group of distinguished British Gentlemen.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
“You’re not going to find many traditional judges who can lead you any longer, since they now wander helplessly, bemused by the willful ignorance of that bizarre twentieth-century organism, the intellectual. You’re going to have to make the crucial judgments yourselves.”
— Tom Wolfe, Way More than Luck
Tagged: Death of God, Death of The Author
“Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Language, How Things Came To Be, Communications
“When a plane gets out of control, there's only one thing you could let yourself think about: What do I do next?

The mark of a good fighter pilot is that when it all goes to shit, what is he yelling in the microphone? It isn't a prayer, it's: 'I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! Tell me what else I can try.'”
— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Tagged: Obstacles
“The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period.”
— Tom Wolfe
Tagged: Susan Sontag, Rococo Marxists, Max Weber, Joachim Wach, Sir James Frazer, Arnold Toynbee, Partisan Review, Marshall McLuhan
“If you become indignant, this elevates you to the plane of 'intellectual.' No mental activity is required. It is a rule, to which there has never been an exception, that when an actor or a television performer rises up to the microphone at one of these awards ceremonies and expresses moral indignation over something, he illustrates Marshall McLuhan's dictum that 'moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.'”
— Tom Wolfe, Commencement Address to the Boston University Class of 2000
Tagged: Morality, The New Church Ladies, Intellectualism
“In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: ‘God is dead.’ Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the ‘doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal’ will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of ‘barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods’— he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism— and result within one generation in ‘wars such as never have been fought before.’ If we take one generation to be thirty years, that would have meant by 1904. In fact, the First World War broke out in 1914. This latter-day barbarism, he went on to say, will in the twenty-first century lead to something worse than the great wars: the total eclipse of all values.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution
“Charles Darwin’s dad nudged him into marrying in his perfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and bought them a country place and settled enough money on him for the boy to live well forever and ever. Living well included eight or nine servants— a butler, a cook, a manservant or two, a parlor maid, a lady’s maid, and at least one nanny and a governess— from day one.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Darwin Was A Dumb Rich Guy?, Darwin (The Bro)
“Darwin's students wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up— and from what? Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause… and finally, ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘probably from four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere.’ h One student pressed him further. He wanted to know where the cells came from. Who or what put them in the pool? An exasperated Darwin said, in effect, ‘Well, I don’t know… look, isn’t it enough that I’ve brought you man and all the animals and plants in the world?’ In this respect, Darwinism was typical of the more primitive cosmogonies. They avoided the question of how the world developed ex nihilo. Darwin often thought about it, but it made his head hurt. The world was just… here. All cosmogonies, whether the Apaches’ or Charles Darwin’s, faced the same problem. They were histories or, better said, stories of things that had occurred in a primordial past, long before there existed anyone capable of recording them.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution
“There were five standard tests for a scientific hypothesis. Had anyone observed the phenomenon— in this case, Evolution— as it occurred and recorded it? Could other scientists replicate it? Could any of them come up with a set of facts that, if true, would contradict the theory (Karl Popper’s ‘falsifiability’ test)? Could scientists make predictions based on it? Did it illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science? In the case of Evolution… well… no… no… no… no… and no.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: The Theory of Evolution, Against Darwin
“Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum (animal, vegetable, mineral)— and now regnum loquax, the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax. Or is ‘kingdom’ too small a word for the eminence of speech, which can do whatever it feels like doing with the other three— physically and in every other way? Should it be Imperium loquax, making speech an empire the equal of Imperium naturae, the empire of Nature? Or Universum loquax, the Spoken Universe… this ‘superior intelligence,’ this ‘new power of a definite character’?”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution
“Jesus offered great hope. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth and ascend to the right hand of God. This, from the Sermon on the Mount, is the most radical social and political doctrine ever promulgated. Its soldiers were thousands, millions, of the meek, and it took the better part of three centuries for the Word to build up such a following that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Calvin offered less hope than Jesus; Muhammad, more and less; Marx, more and more. The meek—‘ the proletariat’ he called them— shall inherit the earth now!… here!… and never mind waiting for Heavenly pie in the sky.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Religion, History
“Today mnemonics is not thought of as anything more practical than a memory device for remembering ingredients, lists, and in some cases formulas. Virtually all the sciences depend upon mnemonics, typically in the form of sentences or phrases in which the first letter of each word stands for a different item or procedure— or even in the form of a single word whose letters stand for different components. Chemistry, for example, produces mnemonics by the gross. Some are rather clever, such as the one for organic chemistry’s sequence of dicarboxylic acids: oxalic, malonic, succinic, glutaric, adipic, pimelic, suberic, azelaic, and sebacic. If you capitalize the first letter of each word and are clever enough, you can come up with ‘Oh My, Such Good Apple Pie, Sweet As Sugar.’ That’s the mnemonic.

And that is all that speech is, a mnemonic system— one that has enabled Homo sapiens to take control of the entire world. It is language, and only language and its mnemonics, that creates memory as Homo sapiens experiences it.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
Tagged: Evolution
“Language, said Darwin, originated with the songs birds sang during the mating season. Man began imitating the birds, a cappella. By and by he started repeating certain birdsong sounds so often they began to stand for certain things in nature. They became words in embryo, and man began creating a ‘musical protolanguage.’ 62 But mating songs are sung by male birds only. What about human females? No problem. The females started mimicking the males, although in a higher register, and the protolanguage became far more pleasing. In no time the females were talking circles around the males. Female protolanguage, said Darwin, persists to this day… in the form of mothers cooing to their babies. The sounds have no dictionary meaning at all. Yet they signal love, protection, coziness, and mealtime. 63 Anyway, that was ‘How the Birds Gave Man His Words.”
— Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech
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