The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage.

I have therefore thought that it would be a worthy and very useful thing to reduce the whole of this great art to a complete and orderly form of presentation, and then in different books to lay down and explain the required characteristics of different departments.

A particularly strong assumption here has been scientists’ deep reliance on atomization; on finding the meaning of things by breaking them down to their smallest components. Atomizations illustrates the simplest, most literal meaning of the word “reduction”; it works by making things smaller. The illumination that follows does not, of course, flow simply from their being smaller but from the wider scientific picture into which they can now be fitted. That picture gives them a new kind of context, a wider whole within which they can be differently understood. And finding that kind of context is an essential part of what “understanding” means.

The play holds the season's record, thus far, with a run of four evening performances and one matinée. By an odd coincidence, it ran just five performances too many. <small>p. 121</small>

Let's say the docs present a simplified view of reality...

Good essays are condensed books. Good tweets are condensed essays.

Reading history is like binge-watching the highlight reels from past seasons of current affairs.

it is sufficient to say, that a chorus of work, the whole of my past life - but, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of it's incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for five shillings.

All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.

We are historical materialists. We are not indiscriminatingly opposed to staging historical plays. When we oppose putting on plays about people of the past, we are opposing those plays about people of the past which laud feudalism or capitalism, which prettify the exploiting classes. As for those historical plays which fortify the will of the people and destroy the arrogance of the exploiting classes, and which benefit the cause of the people, help social development and the revolution, and further socialism — historical plays which tell of the fine traditions of the Chinese people — of course these can be staged. But the emphasis must be on staging contemporary revolutionary plays about the living masses of the people fighting their struggles, about the living proletariat in the midst of its struggles.

All these books and all the less time.

I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140 character chunks of instant event and predigested gnomic wisdom. And swearing.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

[Perspectiva communis was written to] compress into concise summaries the teachings of perspective, which [in existing treatises] are presented with great obscurity.