Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Time has not been kind to Halliday's neo-Whorfian style, in which "the grammar" is reified as a mysterious cognitive agency responsible in part for shaping the speaker's experience not only of language but of the world. [...] For [Halliday's mentor] Firth, "systems" are set up by the linguist as a way of organizing metalinguistically the discussion of language and languages. Their construction is itself the principal "scientific" activity of the linguist; but it is an avowedly hocus-pocus activity. The "systems" are not, as Halliday seems naively to believe, objectively present in, even less constitutive of, the kinds of enterprise in which you and I - as readers and writer of a text - are, here and now, semiologically engaged.

Astrologie ist im Grunde eben nichts anderes als auf die Zukunft projezierter Namensfetischismus: Wen z.B. bei seiner Geburt im April Venus beschien, der werden den Venusqualitäten der Göttermythe entsprechend, der Liebe und den leichten Freuden des Daseins leben...

Astrology is basically nothing other than name fetishism projected onto the future: for instance, those whose birth in April was illuminated by Venus are thus thought to live a life of love and the easy pleasures of existence, all in accordance with the qualities of the myth of the divine Venus...

...daß ich vor zwei oder fünf Jahren genau zu derselben Einsicht gekommen bin - nur habe ich sie dann wieder vergessen, weil es mir nicht gelungen ist, nach meiner Einsicht zu leben; ich habe das Gegenteil gelebt mit zäher Energie.

...that two or five years ago I came to the same conclusions - but I forgot it all again since then, because I did not succeed in living by these conclusions; I have lived against them with a tenacious energy.