Quotes from Leonard Shlain

I'm a synthesizer. We need to synthesize more the relationships between artists and scientists, and men and women.

Surgeons are not technicians; they're not mechanics. They're artists. I see patterns where not many other people see patterns. ...I think that's what made me a good surgeon, and now, that's what's making me a good writer.

The Talmud expresses subtle relationship in an apocryphal story of a dialogue between God and Abraham. God begins by chiding Abraham: "If it wasn´t for Me, you wouldn´t exist."Lord, and for that I am very appreciative and grateful. However, if it wasn´t for me, You wouldn´t be known.

Democrtitus, in the fifth century B.C. had declared that all the world was composed of only two elements: atomes and the void. This reduction of the myriad of forms to only two was the ultimate in dualistic reasoning. Christianity adopted dualism when it created the strict division between good and evil and heaven and hell.

He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness while everyone else was still asleep. —Dmitry Merezhkovsky

This dichotomy between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus suggests that the Greeks allegorically understood the different functions between the right and left brain.

Visionaries are those in the field of art and science who recognize novel patterns. They see beauty before the rest of us do.

The intense effort to develop artificial intelligence has increased our understanding of neural networks because at its core, AI is but an attempt to improve artificially what the brain already does effortlessly.

Leonardo is both an extraordinary left-brained academician obsessed with portraying perspective correctly and an impish right-brained trickster who takes delight in fooling the viewer with perspectivist sleights of hand.

How could a slight, five-foot-tall, two-legged animal create such sublimity and yet wreak so much havoc in so minuscule an interval of earth's history?

The hunter who consistently brought meat back displayed daring and courage, two qualities that females desired in a potential mate. Thus hunting possessed an erotic overtone: meat was an aphrodisiac.

If the skulls of the people who have been killed in the name of God, Jesus, and Allah in religious wars and persecutions could be piled in one place, they would form an immense mountain. If we tallied the cost in human suffering for the belief in monotheism, we might not think of the other religions of the world as primitive.

Writing was a gift eagerly accepted by the ancients. Unfortunately, hiding among the neat rows of carefully incised script was an unwelcome demon—misogyny. In trying to understand what went wrong between the sexes, these two cultures are at the pivot of history.

But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very far distant either in time or place? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozen little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man. —Galileo1

The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental…. The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing. —Robert Logan

On ignorance depends karma; on karma depends consciousness; on consciousness depend name and form; on name and form depend the five organs of sense; on the five organs of sense depends contact; on contact depends sensation; on sensation depends desire; on desire depends clutching; on clutching depends existence; on existence depends birth; on birth depend old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair. —The Buddha's twelvefold concatenation of cause and effect

There is one fact that can be established: the only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing … is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves, and where one part of the population is made to work for the other part.5

over me, I experienced the same thrill and amazement as when I had my first glimpse of the bright lights of Konakry. I shivered with the intensity of my desire to learn to do this wondrous thing myself.6

In the Old Testament, guilt enters the world by way of a bite from a fruit.

The right brain is better than the left in perceiving space and making judgments as to balance, harmony, and the composition of gestalts, from which we make aesthetic distinctions between ugly and beautiful.

The proposition that the alphabet has hindered women's aspirations and accomplishments seems, at first glance, to be antithetical to historical facts.

When the time comes to change a paradigm--to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another--the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront.

While their methods differ radically, artists and physicists share the desire to investigate the ways the interlocking pieces of reality fit together. This is the common ground upon which they meet.

I... had my mind blown by all the opportunities that were in California in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, everything was Freud... Out here, everything was Jung.