Out of Context Snippets
From
NORBERT THE DWARF
Many of you are aware that Chick invented a literary alter-ego, Norbert the Dwarf, through whose writings he expressed many of his own philosophical insights and musings. Norbert was rumored to have had some education in physics, mathematics and/or music, but over the years apparently taught and wrote in fields in which he was totally unqualified to contribute anything, such as psychology, philosophy, biology, music and philosophy of science. But, as Norbert himself once said: "I don't need to be an authority to write this."
Chick wrote that he discovered NTD during his college days in a Philosophy course taught by another of his literary constructions, one Professor Emmis Poot. Chick’s writings about Norbert over the years constituted more than 70 chapters as Chick’s electronic diary of sorts – presented in the form of some combination of Chick and Professor Poot talking about the stuff of life and Norbert’s take thereon – liberally sprinkled, of course, with delightful (often bizarre) quotations from Norbert himself.
To give you a flavor of the musings of Norbert the Dwarf (and to illustrate Chick’s intellectual and literary creativity), we have presented below a series of quotations excerpted totally out of context from this Poot-Norbert collection. Most of these quotations were selected by Chick back in 2004 for sharing with family at a reunion event.
1. “... one sees his full measure of detail regardless of the level of magnification
… and the amount of detail one sees is a measure of one’s measure."
2. “You can always find plenty of evidence to demonstrate that somebody else is a fool.”
3. “Synergy is what happens when you innocently place that last straw atop the camel.”
4. "Even a fool can understand what is cleverly and properly written, whereas it often takes a wise man to understand gibberish."
5. "You eat in order that you will make a good meal."
6. "Money motivates human activity - but only when that activity is uninspired.”
7. "Good sophistry may include algorithms which obfuscate themselves.”
8. "That which we value least we dispense most willingly."
9. “The human is a naturally occurring antibiotic.”
10. “Our theologians have reduced the earth from the status of a God to a source of stone for cathedrals - while abstracting the concept of God to the point of uselessness."
11. "... seems tantamount to studying things by comparing them to what one wants them to be and then judging the accuracy of the study by the resulting degree of correlation.”
12. "Cat English is the most sophisticated use of homonyms that has been developed.”
13. "Social forces, as they express themselves from generation to generation, tend toward caricature and so families often become more ridiculous as time goes by.”
14. “Would I be happier as someone else fantasizing about being me?”
15. “The most curious and learned of us are dilettantes and the rest of us are something less - especially those of us who think that dilettantism is for loathing"
16. "We wear uniforms, plumage, coloration and even our posture to emphasize our differences and perhaps to give each other reassurance that entropy is still held at bay"
17. "The higher the biological order, the blanker the life script at birth."
18. "Fortunately, our scientists and philosophers are not as backward as their trades.”
19. "One of the things of which I am often aware is that I am not alone in here.”
20. "As I view almost any group, I can truthfully observe zero zealously zenophobic zombie zygotes.”
21. “One of the most troublesome aspects of the state of our knowledge is that most of the things we know are either learned or remembered.”
22. “Differences between the past and our memories of the past are non-existent whereas differences between our memories of the past can be vast.”
23. “It isn’t that I dislike people, it is that I dislike being with people.”
24. “The devil owes me a couple of favors and so I will be able to talk with you for a little while.”
25. “We don’t understand what we can’t laugh at.”
26. “Cultural Divide is that gap over which humor is not transported”.
27. “A dwarf is not a dwarf in the land of dwarfs but is nonetheless dwarfed by the land of dwarfs and therefore remains a dwarf both within and without that place.”
28. “Any system that is analytical is a determinacy of the present and hence has been stripped of all potential for creativity.”
29. "Freedom is an illusion. Slavery and imprisonment are not!"
30. “The fact is that facts are facts until they are disproved.”
31. “The opposite of selfish is selfish”
32. “You place a turtle on a pedestal - perhaps so you can better see it. Do you then see it better or do you then see it worse? It is, after all, now out of context.”
33. “To think of ourselves as not a medium for the perpetuation of higher order is to be unaware of higher order”.
34. “Good questions, in themselves, are usually poorly structured and unclear.”
35. “Eventually things will change enough to make you completely wrong - unless, of course, you change with them.”
36. “He who knows his limits, limits what he knows.”
37. “We cannot sacrifice what we don’t have and very few of us really have anything other than a meager amount of time to sacrifice - and that isn’t transferable.”
38. “You know, playing with yourself is having same gender sex and”, I hastened to add, “that’s why I’ve never done it!”
Hey, we warned you.....
