Date: 1946

"The State had reasons: on the whole, / It acted out of kindness when it locked / Its servants in this place and had him watched / Until an ordered darkness left his soul / A tabula rasa"

— Lowell, Robert (1917-1977)

Date: 1963

"And she set something on my tongue and in panic I bit down, and darkness wiped me out like chalk on a blackboard."

— Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)

Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1968

"This is, I think, perfectly correct. The little man [in one's head], as we might say, has in his library pamphlets entitled 'Tying One's Shoes', 'Speaking Latin', and 'Typing 'Afghanistan"', but no pamphlet entitled 'Being Intelligent' or 'Speaking Latin Fluently' or 'Typing "Afghanistan" with P...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1972

"Proof that a Justice's mind at the time he joined the Court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias."

— Rehnquist, William (1924-2005)

Date: 1975

"If learning is a generalized process whereby each brain is stamped afresh by experience, the role of natural selection must be solely to keep the tabula rasa of the brain clean and malleable."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: 1975

"Only small parts of the brain resemble a tabula rasa; this is true even for human beings."

— Wilson, E. O. (b. 1929)

Date: September, 1979

"Indeed, some philosophers have thought of intentional mental events as being inner, physical sentence (or symbol) tokens--a sort of brain writing."

— Burge, Tyler (b. 1946)

Date: 1984

"Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print literate."

— Gibson, William (b. 1948)