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[Nikola Tesla and Leon Theremin] were European gentlemen, very well-mannered, all of the stuff you associate with living in Europe.

Paul Laffoley

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Paul Laffoley
Age: 80 †
Born: 1935
Born: August 14
Died: 2015
Died: November 16
Architect
Artist
Diarist
Inventor
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Paul George
Jr. Laffoley
Gentleman
Europe
Mannered
Living
Leon
Stuff
Tesla
Wells
Associate
Well
Gentlemen
Associates
European

More quotes by Paul Laffoley

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[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.
Paul Laffoley
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I belong to the Lovecraft Society, which meets at the University. They do things like follow in Lovecraft's footsteps, just like he followed in Edgar Allan Poe's footsteps. I mean the actual footfalls, you know, like they're going out looking for sasquatch, this kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.
Paul Laffoley
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At one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.
Paul Laffoley
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It was on Long John's show that I heard Orfeo Angelucci being interviewed. In other words, the whole thing about the green globes on the top of a car bumper and the voice coming out, you know, and then this beautiful lady.... So he went through the whole number, what you read in his book, that kind of stuff. A whole raft of things.
Paul Laffoley
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Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.
Paul Laffoley
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You know, in the suburbs, most people believe in gravity, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.
Paul Laffoley
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[Buckminster Fuller] always liked to say that he got kicked out of Harvard three times. Mostly you only got kicked out once, but he kept coming back.
Paul Laffoley
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Both [Nikola] Tesla and [Leon] Theremin were preternaturally young. I mean, for a long time Tesla was a young man well into his 70s. And so was Theremin, even though, at the end, he looked pretty old. But he was still doing things that young guys do, beyond the time you'd normally think people should be doing that stuff.
Paul Laffoley
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The tetrahedron was [ Buckminster Fuller's] big thing. He'd talk about it in the same way Plato talked about angles.
Paul Laffoley
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My father knew all about this stuff [C.W. Leadbeater]. I owe a lot of what I'm doing, I think, to him. I'm sort of continuing my father's work.
Paul Laffoley
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The whole theory of what Satan is, it's Lucifer, the highest of the seraphim, the bearer of God's light, who at a certain point comes to believe he is what is being revealed to him.
Paul Laffoley
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My father said he did have the mathematics of mind physics, or the physics of consciousness.
Paul Laffoley
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I was always doing paintings. I actually started painting with oil paints when I was four years old. Not crayons, not pencils and that kid of stuff. I'd paint birds. Anything that moved, stuff like that.
Paul Laffoley
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In other words, you've got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read Pickman's Model, in other words, they're winding their way through the Boston Streets and [H.P.] Lovecraft researched what was there.
Paul Laffoley
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When I was in New York working for [Frederick] Kiesler, at night I listened to Jean Shephard who lasted from 1957 until 1976 and then went off the air. But also I was listening to Long John Nebel. Now, Long John was what Art Bell and George Noory do now.
Paul Laffoley
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Any sort of working drawings are simply diagrams. Architecture encourages your imagination to work that way.
Paul Laffoley
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[My father] was also a lawyer in his bank and specialized in tax law. He would have to do the tax returns for all the Harvard profs because they were buffaloed by that kind of reasoning. Professors in the economics department, even they knew nothing about it.
Paul Laffoley
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I mean, even New York isn't in any great shape anymore in relation to the rest of the world.
Paul Laffoley