The single greatest influence on my work as a filmmaker has been the celebrated Interviews with Francis Bacon (1980) by David Sylvester. Sylvester is a master of the art of complicity: he knows how to manipulate and exploit it. Complicity requires being cautiously intellectual yet profoundly human in the sense that the interviewer must act as the concerned midwife, allowing the interviewee to express himself while at the same time guiding his thoughts to a satisfactory conclusion through sensitive provocation.
Damian Pettigrew
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Professor Sylvester's first high class at the new university Johns Hopkins consisted of only one student, G. B. Halsted, who had persisted in urging Sylvester to lecture on the modern algebra. The attempt to lecture on this subject led him into new investigations in quantics.
James Joseph Sylvester
...[O]ver the last fifteen years or so I've interviewed a number of people about these dimensional doorways and have culled from these interviews with people what I take to be the most reliable information. Now there is no one single standard of reliability when you get to a [...] matter like this. It's not like: 'well, uh, you run test A-B-C and if it tests out, then you know that the interviewee is telling you accurate information about this subject.' It's much more subtle than that and it takes in a great number of calculations, I guess you could say, but it's more than just that. To qualify an interviewee on this matter requires a lot of inference, requires a lot of questioning along other lines to sort of test out the person's sanity, so to speak, to begin with, and you get a lot of people that you just don't believe.
Jon Rappoport
Learning to control your thoughts, instead of allowing your thoughts to control you, is probably the single greatest key to successful living. p.89
Kris Vallotton
The act of greatest subversion … is the one of indifference. A man, or a group, finds it unbearable that someone can be simply uninterested in his, or its, convictions. … There is a degree of complicity, or mutual respect, between the believer and the man who attacks his beliefs (the revolutionary), for the latter takes them seriously.
John Carroll
Aristotle remarks in his Poetics that poetry is superior to history, because history presents only what has occurred, poetry what could and ought to have occurred, poetry has possibility at its disposal. Possibility, poetic and intellectual, is superior to actuality; the esthetic and the intellectual are disinterested. But there is only one interest, the interest in existing; disinterestedness is the expression for indifference to actuality. The indifference is forgotten in the Cartesian Cogito-ergo sum, which disturbs the disinterestedness of the intellectual and offends speculative thought, as if something else should follow from it. I think, ergo I think; whether I am or it is (in the sense of actuality, where I means a single existing human being and it means a single definite something) is infinitely unimportant. That what I am thinking is in the sense of thinking does not, of course, need any demonstration, nor does it need to be demonstrated by any conclusion, since it is indeed demonstrated. But as soon as I begin to want to make my thinking teleological in relation to something else, interest enters the game. As soon as it is there, the ethical is present and exempts me from further trouble with demonstrating my existence, and since it obliges me to exist, it prevents me from making an ethically deceptive and metaphysically unclear flourish of a conclusion.
Rene Descartes
Pettigrew, Damian
Petty, Tom
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