XL…莫里斯·萨奇的《野蛮的简单思想》

This book celebrates moments when Brutal Simplicity of Thoughtchanged the world, and proved that nothing is impossible. the fire … I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbour, my garden hose cost me $15;you have to pay me $15 for it” … I don’t want $15 – I want my garden hose back after thefire is over.’ A few words on simplicity That’s how it was done. A simple story of a fire and a hose. The rest is history. The most powerful rallying cries are simple and to the point:Your country needs you!No taxation without representation!One man! One vote!There was nothing complicated about:Liberté, Egalité, FraternitéNobody had to explain what it meant when they heard John F. Kennedy say:The torch has been passed to a new generation of AmericansOr when they read on the Statue of Liberty:Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breath freeNobody needed further elucidation when they heard:Do unto others as you would be done byOr when Martin Luther King said:I have a dream If you want your work to achieve the impossible, you will need Brutal Simplicityof Thought. You will need a deep distaste for waffle, vagueness, platitudes and flim flam – a strongpreference to get to the point. Your mind will become a threshing machine, sorting the intellectual wheat from the chaff. Winston Churchill was a great believer in simplicity. He liked to quote Blaise Pascal’sletter to a friend that started: I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead He knew that to achieve simplicity is very hard. He understood that it required whatBertrand Russell called: The painful necessity of thought Simplicity is more than a discipline: it is a test. It forces exactitude or it annihilates.It accelerates failure when a cause is weak, and it clarifies and strengthens a causethat is strong. When President Roosevelt wanted to persuade a profoundly isolationist America tohelp Britain in her hour of need, he invented a simple phrase to help him do it. Hecalled his policy: Lend-Lease And he used simple language to express it: In all aspects of life, simplicity rules. It means the only possible words in the onlypossible order. ‘Suppose my neighbour’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose … ifhe can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out Simplicity in poetry.John Keats was sitting in a coffee shop with his friend, Stephens. The post war 1918 general election was won by Lloyd George, with five words: He was writing. He said: A land fit for heroes A thing of beauty is a constant joy. What think you of that, Stephens? In the post war 1945 General Election, Clement Atlee defeated the war hero WinstonChurchill with nine words: No response from Stephens. Keats carried on. Half an hour later, Keats said: A thing of beauty is a joy forever We won the war. And now - win the peace That, his friend said, will last forever. And it did. The Conservatives were helped to win the 1979 General Election by three words: Simplicity in art.Delacroix explained: Labour isn’t working If you are not skilful enough to sketch a man falling out of the window during thetime it takes to get him from the fifth story to the ground, then you will never be able toproduce monumental work You hear it said that this search for simplicity is insulting the intelligence of the public,or treating them like morons. On the contrary, it is a mark of respect for the listener.The world is always short of time, so a précis is a form of good manners. Simplicity in prose.Is it any wonder that Kafka lives forever, when you consider theopening words ofThe Trial? At this point, you are thinking what has all this to do with the time of day? Wordsspell money. Someone must have laid a false accusation against Joseph K because one morning hewas arrested without having done anything wrong Simplicity in business.Every day, a blind man sat on the pavement in Central Park. Hehad his hat in front of him, begging for money. A sign read: Simplicity in drama.Could Shakespeare have imagined thatHamletwould be the mostperformed play in history; that four hundred years later, there would be a performanceofHamlet, somewhere in the world, every minute, because he captured the humandilemma in ten words: I am blind Passers-by ignored him. One day, an advertising man saw his plight. He altered thewording on his sign and the cash started pouring into the hat. What had he done? To be or not to be, that is the question He had changed the sign to read: Simplicity in politics.During Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill was presentedwith the proposal for a Local Defence Volunteers Force, to be Britain’s last stand in theevent of a German invasion. The LDVF. He liked the plan. And approved it. But he didn’tlike the name. He changed it to: It is spring and I am blind When William Procter and James Gamble started Procter and Gamble, they only hadone insignificant product –