29 Quotes by Leonard Shlain

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The first book ever written in an alphabet was the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. And the most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first commandment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written. It states: "I am the Lord thy God there is no other." The second prohibits us from making images. Thus, there is a profound rejection of any goddess influence and a ban of representative art.

I suggest that a culture adopting an alphabet would denigrate right hemispheric values because the alphabet is a left hemispheric mode of reception. And this right hemispheric denigration would manifest in two principal ways: Women's rights would be taken away, and images would be declared abominations.

Images are so prevalent that we get most of our information from them. We receive multiple layers of meaning within a very short compact picture, and that is what the right brain does best. Indeed, as our culture becomes more image-based, we're balancing our hemispheres. Through this new re-wiring, we're becoming a much gentler and kinder society.

Edited by mostly unknown scholars in A.D. 367, compiled from documents written 30 to 110 years after the Christ event by no one who was present at the events, and composed for the most part by unknown authors in the Greek language that Jesus never spoke, it is held up as the only true record of the Christ story.