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The Kingdom of Speech

The maestro storyteller and reporter provocatively argues that what we think we know about speech and human evolution is wrong. "A whooping, joy-filled and hyperbolic raid on, of all things, the th

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Tom Wolfe (13)

“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution, Speech, Communication Secrets

“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 ‘mu…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

“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 c…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution

“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 differ…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution

“Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below.”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution

“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 fi…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution

“In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: ‘God is dead.’ Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the ‘doctrine that there is no cardina…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Evolution

“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, amazon.com

“Charles Darwin’s dad nudged him into marrying in his perfectly nice, if plain, thirty-year-old spinster first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, and bought them a country place and settled enough money on him for the boy to live well forever and ever. Living well included eight or nine servants— a butler, a coo…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Darwin Was A Dumb Rich Guy?, Darwin (The Bro)

“Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Language, How Things Came To Be, Communications

“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…”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Religion, History

“Jesus is the Rock of Ages for both Marxism and its less vulgar child, Political Correctness in American colleges and universities, today, even though Jesus’s latter-day ducklings would gag on the very thought.”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: Secularized Theology, Liberalism and Christianity, Christianity Lives, Christian Leftism, Religion

“It was not so much the book The Origin of Species as the talk about it that created such a stir.”

— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com

Tagged: The Medium Is The Message?, Do Words Matter?