Victor Tan

“Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Every triumph is preceded by fear. Fear always initiates the act of breaking free. And why? What is the biological advantage of a trapped psyche? Breaking out, walking freely through the forest, leaving old trails for new ones always entails a certain quantum of risk. Might we not come face to face with the lurking enemy? Might we fail to measure up? Might we not be injured or killed? But both the forest and the enemy are within. Life entails risk. If it were otherwise, one could not bear to live it, for the risks of boredom, of being trapped within the self—the chick dying in the egg—of dying without having lived, are risks far greater than any that lurk in the forest.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Every living thing feels because feeling is a dimension of the universe. I daresay rocks feel in the way of rocks. I daresay the stars feel in the way of stars. If we can feel stars, feel their beauty, feel their majesty, how could we so arrogantly insist that a star, one that has existed in the universe for billions of years, one that came into being at the time of the "big bang," cannot also feel? Any astrophysicist will tell us stars have lives of their own. How can we of such piddling knowledge, of such puny understanding, of such fleeting existence, how can we who live but who cannot fully explain the life of the simplest of cells—how can such as we proclaim that the universe is bereft of all feeling except our own? Can we not leave room for the possibility that the universe itself is composed of endless feeling?”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“The German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, in his important but, in America, little-known book, The Philosophy of 'As If,' proposed that in addition to inductive and deductive thought, there exists an original thought form he calls "fictional thinking." Myth, religious allegory, metaphor, aphorisms, indeed, the world of legal fictions and analogy are examples of fictions we use every day in thinking. An ordinary road map is actually fiction, for nothing like the map exists. Yet we can move accurately, assuredly in the real world as a result of our reliance on the fictional representation of the map. An argument that depends upon "fictional thinking," as Vaihinger called it, is the most powerful of all arguments—the parables of Christ, the stories of tribal chieftains, the fairy tales and fables that are the very undergarments of our society. Jorge Luis Borges, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez, and Joseph Campbell have all made the same argument, that "fictional thinking" is the original form of human thought, that it harkens to our genes.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time