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Tom Wolfe Quotes

Total quotes: 12
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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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