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Quote by Leland Wilkinson

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The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.

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Leland Wilkinson

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“You won the Herblock Award a few years ago and you said that your job is “worrying about how humanity is destroying itself.” Which is a good line, but do you think that is the role of the cartoonist in some way? I’m doing a lot of worrying about humanity destroying itself these days. I think it is an important role of a political cartoonist. I think sometimes it’s probably more acute than others. It’s something that’s hard to deal with sometimes. Right now I find that these aren’t really funny times. There are ludicrous characters and you can make fun of Trump and these ridiculous nominees, but at the same time I don’t want to normalize him. I find myself not even wanting to draw him. I mean, I do and I will, but I don’t want to treat him like any other President. I’ve been struggling with that. How to be humorous at a time when things are just very serious. I guess what I wind up doing is somewhat darker humor, darker cartoons, and more informative cartoons that say, this is what’s happening, can you believe it? With the Bush administration things were terrible and there were definitely some dark times, but I felt like you could make fun of Bush for being a buffoon and the implications just weren’t quite as grave. It’s a different time now. (Interview with Comicsbeat)”

“Western science has been our god. In the variety of its power it has preserved, comforted, healed, warmed, fed and entertained us and we have felt free to criticize and occasionally reject it as men have always rejected their gods, but in the knowledge that, despite our apostasy, this deity, our creature and our slave, would still provide for us; the anaesthetic for the pain, the spare heart, the new lung, the antibiotic, the moving wheels and the moving pictures. The light will always come on when we press the switch and if it doesn’t we can find out why.”

“I do not truly fight because I want to be king or Emperor or whatever word you slap above my name in the history texts. The universe does not notice us. There is no supreme being waiting to end existence when the last man breathes his final breath. Man will end. That is the fact accepted, but never discussed. And the universe will continue without care. “I will not let that happen, because I believe in man. I would have us continue forever. I would shepherd us out of the Solar System into alien ones. Seek new life. We are barely in our infancy as a species. But I would make man the immutable fixture in the universe, not just some passing bacteria that flashes and fades with no one to remember.”