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Allen, Woody"Almost nobody will be famous for even one minute."
Bailey, Ronald"The highest expression of human dignity and human nature is to try to overcome the limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution, and our environment. Future generations will look back at the beginning of the 21st century with astonishment that some very well meaning and intelligent people actually wanted to stop biomedical research just to protect their cramped and limited vision of human nature. They will look back, I predict, and thank us for making their world of longer, healthier lives possible."
Bentham, JeremyThe day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.? The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned with redress to the caprice of tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive to the same fate.? What else is it that should trace the insuperable lien? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse?? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day or week or even a month, old.? But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Bismarck, Otto von"The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try to catch on to his coattails as He marches past."
Blunkett, David"Freedom does not just mean doing what you want without harming others. It means engaging in the wider collective endeavor of shaping our society." -- The Economist, Oct 27-Nov 2, 2001, pg. 56
Bly, Robert"The corporate world dares to say to young men, knowing how much young men want to be men, that the only requirement for manhood is to become an alcoholic. That's disgusting. It's a tiny indication of the ammunition aimed at men who try to learn to talk or to feel."
Bohr, Niels"If you think you understand [quantum mechanics], that only shows you don't know the first thing about it."
Bostrom, Nick"Skeptic: Okay, it might indeed be true that that is how the word 'rational' is used. But then again, why should I be rational in that sense?
Dogmatist: Well, of course it is up to you whether you want to be rational or not. In our experience, people that are insufficiently rational have tended to end sadly: they may run out in the street and got run over by a bus, for example. It is rational to suppose that extremely irrational people in the future will have a similar fate, i.e. it follows from observations and the principle of induction that this is a probable outcome. So if you want to avoid accidents, it is rational for you to chose to be rational. If I thought there were a real danger that you would chose to go irrational, I would have added more examples here, making them as vivid as possible, in the hope that you would be sufficiently rational to see that you do not, after all, really believe that it would be good for you to go irrational. But I am certain that this won't happen, for it is as good a psychological prediction as any that you won't ever be convinced that going irrational would be good for you.
Skeptic: So I should be rational because it is rational to believe that being rational will be good for me?
Dogmatist: Correct."? -- What We Should Say to the Skeptic
Bostrom, Nick...the questions you ask are either scientific or else unimportant. I would call a question unimportant if it turns out that what it asks for is a decision between two approximately equally good conceptual frameworks, neither of which is likely to serve any scientific purpose.? -- What We Should Say to the Skeptic
Bostrom, NickPolitical Skepticism: The "doctrine that it is practically impossible for humans to have any well grounded beliefs about what political actions are likely to have good effects in the long run. This is a very serious form of skepticism; and it might be true, for human society seems to be a chaotic system." -- What We Should Say to the Skeptic
Bostrom, Nick"Currently there are levels of organizations ? such as multinational corporations and nation states ? that are highly complex and whose components include human beings. Yet, we regard these high-level organizations as of merely instrumental value. Corporations and states have no consciousness, they cannot feel pain or pleasure. We think they are good if they serve human (or animal) needs, but in cases where they don?t, we have no scruples in ?killing? them. Some extreme nationalists might think that a nation state (usually the one they happened to be born in) is a higher moral entity that is entitled to human sacrifices even when they would serve no human need, but most of us reject such views."
Bostrom, Nick"The stereotypical ethicist of today (there are exceptions) has a basically reactive attitude to technological development. He is like a blindfolded person under constant bombardment. Each new breakthrough, which he couldn't see coming, knocks him off his balance. All he can do is to condemn, worry, and call for bans."
Brin, David"It is essential to understand the radical departure taken by genuine science fiction, which comes from a diametrically opposite literary tradition -- a new kind of storytelling that often rebels against those very same archetypes Campbell venerated. An upstart belief in progress, egalitarianism, positive-sum games -- and the slim but real possibility of decent human institutions. And a compulsive questioning of rules! Authors like Greg Bear, John Brunner, Alice Sheldon, Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick always looked on any prescriptive storytelling formula as a direct challenge -- a dare. This explains why science fiction has never been much welcomed at either extreme of the literary spectrum -- comic books and "high literature."...As for the literary elite, postmodernists despise science fiction because of the word "science," while their older colleagues -- steeped in Aristotle's "Poetics" -- find anathema the underlying assumption behind most high-quality SF: the bold assertion that there are no "eternal human verities." Things change, and change can be fascinating. Moreover, our children might outgrow us! They may become better, or learn from our mistakes and not repeat them. And if they don't learn, that could be a riveting tragedy far exceeding Aristotle's cramped and myopic definition. "On the Beach," "Soylent Green" and "1984" plumbed frightening depths. "Brave New World," "The Screwfly Solution" and "Fahrenheit 451" posed worrying questions. In contrast, "Oedipus Rex" is about as interesting as watching a hooked fish thrash futilely at the end of a line. You just want to put the poor doomed King of Thebes out of his misery -- and find a way to punish his tormentors." - "Star Wars" despots vs. "Star Trek" populists (Salon)
Brin, David"Along the way, history -- once the core of every curriculum -- became a minor elective subject, with the ironic effect that today's citizens have very little idea what the past was like, how grindingly cruel and bitter life was for nearly all of our oppressed ancestors. In other words, by turning away from the past, we seem paradoxically unable to measure how far we've come. How very far."
Bullet Tooth Tony (Snatch)"You should never underestimate the predictability of stupidity."
Ching, Tao Te "Throw away holiness and wisdom, and people will be a hundred times happier. Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing. Throw away industry and profit, and there won't be any thieves. If these three aren't enough, just stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course."
Clausewitz, Carl von"War is the continuation of politics by other means."
Coldplay"My head aches when I think of the things I shouldn't have done." - hidden track from Parachutes
Coldplay"I wanna live life, never be cruel, I wanna live life, be good to you. I wanna fly, never come down, And live my life, And have friends around." -- We Never Change
D.G. MacRaeRefers in Ideology And Society (1961) to the regrettable ?tendency of social scientists to whore after theories drawn from natural science...?. The resulting ?mass of consequent error?, he concluded, had proved too high a price for any insight thereby gained. He had in mind the infatuation with Darwinism of an earlier generation of social scientists.
Darrow, Clarence"I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure?that is all that agnosticism means." (1925, Scopes Trial)
Darwin, Charles"He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."
Davies, Paul"We can't avoid some anthropic component in our science, which is interesting, because after three hundred years we finally realize that we do matter. Our vantage point in the universe is relevant to our science. But it's very easy to misconstrue the anthropic principle, and draw ridiculous conclusions from it. You have to be very careful how you state it. What it is not saying is that our existence somehow exercises a theological or causative compulsion for the universe to have certain laws or certain initial conditions. It doesn't work like that. We're not, by our own existence, creating such a universe."
Davies, Paul"Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness. This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here."
Dawkins, Richard"?to seek the unfamiliar is a good way to illuminate oneself."
Dawkins, Richard"The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world, mainly because of the powerful influence it has over the minds of children. Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place."
Dawkins, Richard"The adversarial approach to truth isn't necessarily always the best one. On the contrary, when two people disagree strongly, a great deal of time may be wasted. It's been well said that when two opposite points of view are advocated with equal vigor, the truth does not necessarily lie mid-way between them. And in the same way, when two people agree about something, it's just possible that the reason they agree is that they're both right. There's also I suppose the hope that in a dialogue of this sort each speaker may manage to achieve a joint understanding with the other one, better than he would have done on his own."
Dawkins, Richard"We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecule known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment."
Dawkins, Richard"The selfish-gene idea is the idea that the animal is a survival machine for its genes. The animal is a robot that has a brain, eyes, hands, and so on, but it also carries around its own blueprint, its own instructions. This is important, because if the animal gets eaten, if it dies, then the blueprint dies as well. The only genes that get through the generations are the ones that have managed to make their robots avoid getting eaten and succeed in living long enough to reproduce."
Dawkins, Richard"I want to change the world in which I live so that natural selection no longer applies." -- interview with The Skeptic
Dawkins, Richard"Reductionism is explanation. Everything must be explained reductionistically. But it must be explained hierarchically and in step-by-step reductionism. Greedy reductionism, or precipice reductionism, is to leap from the top of the hierarchy down to the bottom of the hierarchy in one step. That you can't do; you won't explain anything to anybody's satisfaction."
Dawkins, Richard"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"
Dawkins, Richard"The 'pluralist' view of evolution is a misunderstanding of the distinction I make between replicators and vehicles. Natural selection works at the level of replicators, in the sense that the world becomes filled with successful replicators and empty of unsuccessful replicators. The way those replicators are successful or unsuccessful is by being good at building vehicles, or phenotypic effects. Those vehicles form themselves into a hierarchy of individuals, groups, species, and so on. The differential success of vehicles can be talked about at all levels of that hierarchy. There's a hierarchy in levels of selection as long as you are talking about vehicles. But if you're talking about replicators, there isn't. There's only one replicator we know of, unless you count memes."
Dawkins, Richard"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Dawkins, Richard"Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous." -- Is Science Killing the Soul?
Dawkins, Richard"However many ways there are of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead." -- The Blind Watchmaker
Dawkins, Richard"Our genes are like a colony of viruses ? socialized viruses, as opposed to anarchic viruses. They're socialized in the sense that they all work together to produce the body and make the body do what's good for all of them. The only reason they do that is that they all are destined to leave the present body and enter the next generation by the same route, sperms or eggs. If they could break out of that route and get to the next generation by being sneezed out and breathed in by the next victim, that's what they would do. Those are what we call anarchic viruses. Anarchic viruses, the ones that make us sneeze, are the ones that don't agree with each other. They don't care if we die. All they want to do is make us sneeze, or, in the case of the rabies virus, make the dog salivate and bite. But most of our genes are socialized viruses, socialized replicators. They're disciplined and cooperative precisely because they have only one way out of the present body: by sperm or egg."
Dawkins, Richard"I'm considered by some to be a zealot. This comes partly from a passionate revulsion against fatuous religious prejudices, which I think lead to evil. As far as being a scientist is concerned, my zealotry comes from a deep concern for the truth. I'm extremely hostile towards any sort of obscurantism, pretension. If I think somebody's a fake, if somebody isn't genuinely concerned about what actually is true but is instead doing something for some other motive, if somebody is trying to appear like an intellectual, or trying to appear more profound than he is, or more mysterious than he is, I'm very hostile to that. There's a certain amount of that in religion. The universe is a difficult enough place to understand already without introducing additional mystical mysteriousness that's not actually there. Another point is esthetic: the universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited."
Dennett, Daniel"The traditional idea of a sacrosanct pearl of genius which is outside the realm of the mechanistic and is the source of creativity is just a hopeless idea, a fantasy. I know some people find this notion terribly offensive but that's too bad for them, since my job is to shock or cajole them out of their sqeamishness."
Diamond, JaredThe Anna Karenina Principle: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."
Diamond, Jared"The [Phaistos Disk] thus constitutes a threatening challenge to historians. If inventions are as idiosyncratic and upredictable as the disk seems to suggest, then efforts to generalize about the history of technology may be doomed from the outset. [The disk was made in Greece about 1700 B.C., and was effectively a precursor to the printing press. However, the next efforts did not appear until 2500 years later in China and 3100 years later in medieval Europe]" -- Guns, Germs, and Steel
Dostoevsky, Fyodor"The mass of man will in the end accept desperatism in return for security in order to gain release."
Dostoevsky, Fyodor"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic....Instead of taking possession of man's freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever." "The Grand Inquisitor," Brothers Karamozov, Book V, Chapter 5.
Durkheim, Emile"When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion out to be an enormous error conceived by priests, at least they were able to explain its persistence by the interest the sacerdotal caste had in deceiving the masses. But if the peoples themselves have been the artisans of these sytems of erroneous ideas, at the same time that they were their dupes, how has this extraordinary hoax been able to perpetuate itself throughout the course of history?"
Einstein, Albert"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
Einstein, Albert"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." - Physics and Reality
Einstein, Albert?Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.?
Einstein, Albert"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Feynman, Richard"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
Feynman, Richard"It has not yet become obvious to me that there's no real problem [with quantum mechanics]. I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm sure there's no real problem."
FM-2030"We are emerging from ages during which we rarely planned ahead. We did not understand the dynamics of change. Planning for the future is a sure sign of intelligence."
Freud, Sigmund"It is a mistake to believe that a science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand only made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form and a need to replace the religious catechism by something else, even if it be a scientific one."
Friedman, David"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later convinces himself."
Galilei, Galileo"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
Gilbert, Nigel"There is an interesting consequence for debates over free will and determinism. Sociologists hardly seem to worry about this issue any more. This is as it should be, because the classic debate assumed incorrectly that if we were ever in a position to understand human action completely, we would then be able to predict it, leaving no room for free will. Complexity theory shows that even if we were to have a complete understanding of the factors affecting individual action, that would still not be sufficient to predict behaviour. The message is even stronger if we make the plausible assumption that it is not only social action that is complex, but also individual cognition." - Simulation: An emergent perspective
Gilbert, Nigel"Some philosophers of science maintain that all scientific explanation depends on building models. - Simulation - An Emergent Perspective
Gilbert, Nigel"...while we assume that, for instance, wasps have no ability to reason, they just go about their business and in doing so construct a nest, people do have the ability to recognize, reason about and react to human institutions, that is, to emergent features. Behaviour which takes into account such emergent features might be called 'second order emergence'. The fact that humans engage in such Behaviour might be one of the defining characteristics of human societies, distinguishing them from animal societies (Gilbert 1995). It is what makes sociology different from ethology. Not only can we as scientific observers distinguish patterns of collective action, but the agents themselves can also do so and therefore their actions can be affected by the existence of these patterns." - Simulation: An emergent perspective
Gilligan, James "...to paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark about democracy, the human sciences are the worst (the least cognitively adequate) of all possible forms of practical reason ? except for all the others (such as moralism, fundamentalism and totalitarianism)! What that implies is that nothing is more important for the continued survival of the human species than a stupendously increased effort to make progress in the further development of the human sciences, so as to increase our understanding of the causes of the whole range of our own behaviors, from life-threatening (violent) to life-enhancing."
Goddard, Robert?It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. (1927)
Goertzel, Ben"While I have great respect for the deep spiritual experience that lies at the heart of all religions, it seems to me that religious superstitions have been and will be the cause of a lot more pain and suffering than could ever come from human cloning."
Goodwin, Brian"The most interesting point emerged at the end of The Selfish Gene, where Richard said that human beings, alone amongst all the species, can escape from their selfish inheritance and become genuinely altruistic, through educational effort. I suddenly realized that this set of four points was a transformation of four very familiar principles of Christian fundamentalism, which go like this; (1) Humanity is born in sin; (2) we have a selfish inheritance; (3) humanity is therefore condemned to a life of conflict and perpetual toil; (4) but there is salvation. What Richard has done is to make absolutely clear that Darwinism is a kind of transformation of Christian theology. It is a heresy, because Darwin puts the vital force for evolution into matter, but everything else remains much as it was. I suspect that Richard was at one stage fairly religious, and that he then underwent a kind of conversion to Darwinism, and he feels fervently that people ought to embrace this as a way of life."
Gould, Stephen J."If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields."
Gould, Stephen J."In science, ?fact? can only mean ?confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent?."
Gurian, Michael"By the time I had become a young man, I did not know what being brave, truthful, and good looked like. Nor did most young people. War - the great initiator of young men - had become a place not of bravery but of shame. Truth had become an icon of stodgy old men - we young people knew that truth, once deconstructed, became naivete, and naivete rarely led either to social change, or, once we had kids to support, to profits and social success. Traditional morality had become a bastion not of goodness but of stultification." -- The Wonder of Boys
Gyatso, Tenzin (14th Dalai Lama)"My Tibetan Buddhist goals are the same as those of Western science: to serve humanity and to make better human beings."
Gyatso, Tenzin (14th Dalai Lama)"The foundation of the Buddha's teachings lies in compassion, and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compasion."
Gyatso, Tenzin (14th Dalai Lama)"It may seem odd that a religious leader is so involved with science, but Buddhist teachings stress the importance of understanding reality, and so we should pay attention to what scientists have learned about our world through experimentation and measurement."
Haig, David"[T]he? organism is a machine...a fitness-maximizing computer trying to solve some problem."
Haldane, J. B. S."Important historical events usually surprise those to whom they happen."
Haldane, J. B. S."The biologist is the most romantic figure on earth. With the fundamentals of ectogenesis in his brain, the biologist is the possessor of knowledge that is going to revolutionize human life....The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural." -- Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1923)
Haldane, J. B. S."The universe is not only queerer that we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Haldane, J. B. S."I have sketched my own utopia, or as some readers may think, my own private hell. My excuse must be that the description of utopias has influenced the course of history."
Haldane, J. B. S."Once poverty is a state which no one has experienced, but merely an evil smell from the past, like cannibalism, I think there will be much less interest in acquiring material objects, and more and more interest in our own bodies and minds, and those of others in whom we are interested and whom perhaps we love."
Hamilton, Alexander"...to be more safe, [people] at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."
Haraway, Donna J."Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century until now, machines could be animated - given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities."
Haraway, Donna J."Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse."
Haraway, Donna J."I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
Hawking, Stephen?We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.?
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich"What is rational is real; And what is real is rational."
Henderdson, Charles P."Teilhard [de Chardin] writes, "Since Aristotle there have been almost continual attempts to construct 'models' of God on the lines of an outside Prime Mover." The high and all-powerful God of traditional theology can influence the world only by intervening in its natural processes and contradicting its natural laws...The chief signs of God's action in the world are taken to be those otherwise inexplicable events, apparently contradicting all reasonable explanation. Obviously this concept of God is still very much with us."
Herbert, Frank"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." -- 'Litany Against Fear' from Dune
Hirschberg, Don"Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
Hobbes, Thomas"There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here because life itself is but a motion and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense...there can be no contentment but in proceeding.''
Hobbes, Thomas[The life of man is] "nasty, brutish, and short." [As a result, people band together and create governments for self protection.]
Hollingdale, R. J. "I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there."
Hughes, James?Posthumanity does not change the goal-posts.?
Hughes, James"[M]any people...fear becoming dependent on machines and other people. Fact is if you live in an industrialized country you are already dependent on other humans and on technology -- we are all hooked up to machines." Without the human-cum-technological grid most of us worker bees in the mechano-hive would die in short order. We've been brainwashed by propagandists of the "natural life" and the culture of rugged individualism to think that only the "autonomous" life, in which we work for wages and bathe ourselves and only need electricity for warmth and not to breathe, is worthwhile. The disabled person has just been pushed one step ahead of the cyborgization curve."
Hughes, James"This is a true perversion of the origins of the concept of dignity, which is closely tied with the expansion of liberal democracy. The origins of the term dignity come from the respect and deference shown to aristocracy. The concept of the dignity of every person must then mean that we want every individual to have the freedoms of nobles, rather than the constraints of serfs. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, like the French and American revolutionaries before them, asserts that the defense of human dignity requires an expansion of personal freedom and rights. How bizarre then that these leading bioethicists want to defend human dignity by restricting individual freedom?"
Hume, David"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."
Huxley, Julian"[Humanity is] nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself."
Inayatullah, Sohail "Macrohistory is the study of the histories of social systems, along separate trajectories, through space and time, in search of patterns, even laws of social change.? Macrohistory is thus nomothetic and diachronic.? Macrohistorians -- those who write macrohistory -- are to the the historian what an Einstein is to the run-of-the-mill physicist: in search of the totality of space and time, social or physical. Macrohistorians use the detailed data of historians for their grand theories of individual, social and civilizational change."
James, William"Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible." (1897)
Jones, Steve"That the world somehow is a beautifully harmonious structure is an optimist's point of view: everthing fits beautifully together, and if you see the whole edifice you don't have to worry about how it's constructed, it just stands up. That's a pernnicous idea. It's an anti-intellectual, working-out God's-plan, know-nothing kind of idea...Evolution is a magical thing, with an intrinsic beauty of its own, which you can't hope to break down into the individual genes that make it happen. In other words, there's a limit to reductionism."
Kaku, Michio"Evolution says organisms are replaced by species of superior adaptability. When our robots are tired of taking orders, they may, if we're lucky, show more compassion to us than we've shown the species we pushed into oblivion. Perhaps they will put us into zoos, throw peanuts at us and make us dance inside our cages."? -- "The Future of Technology" (Time magazine cover story, June 2000).
Kant, Immanuel
Kant, Immanuel
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe - the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Kosko, Bart"Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature's first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny."
Kraftwerk"He made up the person he wanted to be / And changed into a new personality"
Kurzweil, Ray"It is part of our destiny and part of the destiny of evolution to continue to progress ever faster, and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially. To contemplate stopping that to think human beings are fine the way they are is a misplaced remembrance of what human beings used to be. What human beings are is a species that has undergone a cultural and technological evolution, and it's the nature of evolution that it accelerates, and that its powers grow exponentially, and that's what we're talking about."
Kurzweil, Ray"Take death for example. A great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it and often consider its intrusion a tragic event. Yet we?d find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinately put off the human psyche would end up, Well, like the gambler of the Twilight Zone episode."
Lewontin, Richard"If the widespread genomania propagated by the press and by vulgarizers of science produces a false understanding of the dominance that genes have over our lives, then the appropriate response of the state is not to ban cloning but to engage in a serious educational campaign to correct the misunderstanding."
Ley, Willy?The younger generation of rocket engineers is just beginning. They are of the new generation to which space travel is not going to be a dream of the future but an everyday job with everyday worries in which they will be engaged.? (1951)
Linus"I've learned that there are three things you should never discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."
Lord Mansfield?fiat justicia, ruat coelumtet? (?let justice be done, though the heavens may fall?)
Lucas, GeorgeObi Wan Kenobi: "But Master Yoda says to be mindful of the future." Qui Gon Jinn: "Yes, but not at the expense of the present."
Maine, Henry Sumner "The movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract."
Malcolm, Dr. Ian from "Jurassic Park""Oooh! Ahhh! That's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming." -- [referring to new technology]
Marchal, Bruno"Physics is? but a branch of (machine) psychology." -- [describing his 'Arithmetic Platonism' in which observers' knowledge must obey quantum logic.]
Margulis, Lynn"Richard Dawkins epitomizes my comments about how scientists rationalize. In his televised response to the Gaia hypothesis, he said, and I quote: "The idea [of Gaia] is not dangerous or distressing except to academic scientists who value the truth." That quote captures the arrogance of Dawkins. I invited him to come and discuss Gaia ideas with Lovelock and me, and he declined even a telephone conversation. I would have happily arranged such a trip and a meaningful idea-tournament with Jim, as Dawkins knew. He prefers to take potshots instead of actually discussing the details of Gaia. When he says Gaia is "dangerous and distressing to scientists who value the truth," he's talking about himself. Gaia is dangerous and distressing to him because, unlike the rest of us, he values the truth. The inference of his statement simply exposes his solipsism."
Marx, Karl"Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."
Matrix, TheSpoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. Neo: What truth? Spoon boy: There is no spoon. Neo: There is no spoon? Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
McCain, Roger A."This remarkable result [derived from the Prisoner's Dilema thought experiment] -- that individually rational action results in both persons being made worse off in terms of their own self-interested purposes -- is what has made the wide impact in modern social science. For there are many interactions in the modern world that seem very much like that, from arms races through road congestion and pollution to the depletion of fisheries and the overexploitation of some subsurface water resources. These are all quite different interactions in detail, but are interactions in which (we suppose) individually rational action leads to inferior results for each person, and the Prisoners' Dilemma suggests something of what is going on in each of them. That is the source of its power."
Medawar, Peter"The apocalyptic forecast was, of course, a source of strength and consolation to those who had no high ambitions for life on earth."
Mencken, H. L."The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."?
Messhugah"Mechanical thoughts I now concieve no longer me always to see inanity millions to be units like me eternally human patterns copied dissected distorted completed to fit the machine the nerve fibres give in to cords to the unknown" -- Future Breed Machine
Military Operations Golden RuleAlways attack in overwhelming strength, since the more you use, the less you lose.
Minkowsky, HermannSpace of itself and time of itself will sink into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between them shall survive.
Mirandola, Pico Della"We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, Neither motral nor immortal, So that with freedom of choice and with honor, As though the maker and molder of thyself, Thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul's judgement, To be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine." -- - God's Speech to Adam From Pico Della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man
Modest MouseIf life's not beautiful without the pain, well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again. Well as life gets longer, awful feels softer. And it feels pretty soft to me.
Moravec, Hans?Today, as our machines approach human competence across the board, our stone-age biology and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched. Work in the developed countries has become increasingly specialized and esoteric, and it now often take a graduate degree, representing half a working lifetime of sustained learning, to master the necessary unnatural skills. As societal roles become yet more complex, specialized, and far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to master, while providing fewer visceral rewards. The essential functions of a technical society elude the understanding of an increasing fraction of the population. Even the most successful individuals often find their work boring, difficult, unnatural, and unsatisfying, more like a sustained circus performance than real life. Caffeine substitutes for natural adrenaline. Those original activities that do remain ? eating and child raising, for instance ? are often squeezed by the strange new tasks. The mismatch between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical plenty.? ? Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
Moravec, Hans"The strangeness begins just beyond the edges of the everyday world. When an object travels from one place to another, common sense insists that it does so on a definite, unique trajectory. Not so, says quantum mechanics. A particle in unobserved transit goes every possible way simultaneously until it is observed again. The indefiniteness of the trajectory manifests itself in the kind of interference pattern created by waves that spread and recombine, adding where they meet in step and canceling where out of step. A photon, a neutron, or even a whole atom sent to a row of detectors via a screen with two slits, will always miss certain detectors, where the wave of its possible positions, having passed through both slits, cancels." (From Simulation, Consciousness, Existence)
Moravec, Hans"When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist and never in ones where we don't. The nature of the next simplest world that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess. Does physical reality simply loosen just enough to allow our consciousness to continue? Do we find ourselves in a new body, or no body? It probably depends more on the details of our own consciousness than did the original physical life. Perhaps we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of superintelligent successors, or perhaps in dreamlike worlds (or AI programs) where psychological rather than physical rules dominate. Our mind children will probably be able to navigate the alternatives with increasing facility."
Moravec, Hans"...quantum mechanics, where unobserved events dissolve into waves of alternatives."
Moravec, Hans"...our existence is a product of self-interpretation in the space of all possible worlds..."
Nietzsche, Friedrich"Man is a rope, fastened between animal and overman a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."?
Nietzsche, Friedrich"... [Is] man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?"
Nolan, Christopher"Everyone has a box." - Following [a box which contains personal affects for subconscious display]
Paglia, Camille(Andrea) Dworkin's blanket condemnation of fellatio as disgusting and violent should make every man furious. (Catharine) MacKinnon and Dworkin are victim-mongers, ambulance chasers, atrocity addicts. MacKinnon begins every argument from big, flawed premises such as "male supremacy" or "misogyny," while Dworkin spouts glib Auschwitz metaphors at the drop of a bra. Here's one of their typical maxims:"The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence." Anyone who could write such a sentence knows nothing about pornography or Nazism....In arguing that a hypothetical physical safety on the streets should take precedence over the democratic principle of free speech, MacKinnon aligns herself with the authoritarian Soviet comissars. She would lobotomize the village in order to save it...Feminist anti-porn discourse virtually always ignores the gigantic gay male porn industry, since any mention of the latter would bring crashing to the ground the absurd argument that pornography is by definition subordination of women...Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer....What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree where growth and harvest are simultaneous. (Vamps & Tramps, p. 66)
Paglia, CamilleA major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact-as I know full well, from my own mortifying lesbian experience- men are tormented by women's flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women's merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women. Women literally size up men- "What can you show me?"- in bed and out. If middle class feminists think they conduct their love lives perfectly rationally, without any instinctual influences from biology, they are imbeciles. (Vamps & Tramps, p. 35)
Paglia, CamilleWhat is most disgusting about current political correctness on campus is that its proponents have managed to convince their students and the media that they are authentic Sixties radicals. The idea is preposterous. Political correctness, with its fascist speech codes and puritanical sexual regulations, is a travesty of Sixties progressive values. (Vamps & Tramps p, 118)
Pearson, NoelOur society and our culture is not a conspiracy. There are no cynics at the top of the pyramid who use their power to maintain an unnecessarily unequal society. Stratified society is perpetuated because of the self-interest that everybody has in not sinking down.
Pinker, Steven"Unfortunately, most highschool and college curricula have barely changed since medieval times, and are barely changeable, because no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English? literature, or trigonometry, or the classics. But no matter how valuable a subject may be, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than to know elementary economics. In a world whose complexities are constantly? challenging our intuitions, these tradeoffs cannot responsibly be avoided."
Pinker, Steven"Intellectual life was enormously affected by an understandable revulsion to Nazism, with its pseudoscientific theories of race, and its equally nonsensical glorification of conflict as part of the evolutionary wisdom of nature. It was natural to reject anything that smacked of a genetic approach to human affairs. But historians of ideas have begun to fill in another side of the picture. During the twentieth century, equally horrific genocides were carried out in the name of Marxism, such as in the mass purges and manmade famines of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and the madness in Kampuchea. The remarkable fact is that the two great ideologically driven genocides of the 20th century came from theories of human nature that were diametrically opposed. The Marxists had no use for the concept of race, didn't believe in genes, and denied Darwin's theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary adaptation. This shows is that it's not a biological approach to human nature that is uniquely sinister. There must be common threads to Nazism and totalitarian Marxism that cut across a belief in the importance of evolution or genetics. One common thread was a desire to reshape humanity. In the Marxists' case it was through social engineering; in the Nazis' case it was eugenics. Neither of them were satisfied with human beings as we find them, with all their flaws and weaknesses. Rather than building a social order around enduring human, traits they had the conceit that they could re-engineer human traits using scientific-in reality pseudoscientific-principles. In Martin Amis's new book about Stalinism, he argues that intellectuals have not yet come to grips with the lessons of Marxist totalitarianism in the way that they did with Nazi totalitarianism many decades ago. A number of historians and political philosophers have made the same point. This blind spot has distorted the intellectual landscape, including the implications and non-implications of genetics and evolution for understanding ourselves."
Pinker, Steven"...connoisseurs and appreciators of art are getting sick of the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring mangled body parts, or ironic allusions to commercial culture that are supposed to shake people out of their bourgeois complacency but that are really no more insightful than an ad parody in Mad magazine or on Saturday Night Live."
Pinker, StevenIt possible to "express or understand an infinite number of distinct thoughts, limited in practice only by stamina and mortality"
Pinker, StevenThat is the idea that the mind is the physiological activity of the brain, in particular the information processing activity of the brain; that the brain, like other organs, is shaped by the genes; and that in turn, the genome was shaped by natural selection and other evolutionary processes. -- Is Science Killing the Soul?
Planck, Max"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
Plato"Our ideas are born from our soul, not our experiences."
Pope, Alexander"Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,/A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:/With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,/With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,/He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,/In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast,/In doubt his mind or body to prefer;/Born but to die, and reasoning but to err."
Posen, David B."In a healthy relationship, you should feel better about yourself, not worse."
Priestley, Joseph"Whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imagination can conceive."
Radford, Tim"We think we're occupying reality, but it's only our brain that tells us this."
Rees, Martin"All these multiverse ideas lead to a remarkable synthesis between cosmology and physics...But they also lead to the extraordinary consequence that we may not be the deepest reality, we may be a simulation. The possibility that we are creations of some supreme, or super-being, blurs the boundary between physics and idealist philosophy, between the natural and the supernatural, and between the relation of mind and multiverse and the possibility that we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself."
Rees, Martin"It may not be absurd hyperbole - indeed, it may not even be an overstatement - to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang) could be here and now. I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end of the present century. Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in contrast, through malign intent or through misadventure, twenty-first century technology could jeopardise life's potential, foreclosing its human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter."
Rees, Martin"Another thing which interests me is the psychology of practitioners of the subject. Many people become strongly emotionally committed to their theories and defend them, almost like advocates, against contrary evidence. It's a real trauma for them to have to give their theories up. I've never been like that myself. I've always been quite happy to work almost simultaneously on two contradictory hypotheses, simply because if we don't really know what the explanation for something is, and we want to understand it, then exploring the consequence of different ideas is a good methodology. One's research may lead to a new test, or reveal a new contradiction. The scientific community collectively works like that, but not all individuals seem as content as I am to work simultaneously on two different theories." -- An Ensemble of Universes
Reznor, Trent (Nine Inch Nails)"I am that voice inside your head" - Mr. Self Destruct (The Downward Spiral)
Rhoads, Kelton"...society is a massive group of people influencing, persuading, requesting, demanding, cajoling, exhorting, inveigling, and otherwise manipulating each other to further their ends."
Rush"Quick to judge, Quick to anger, Slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice And fear walk hand in hand." -- Witch Hunt (Moving Pictures)
Russell, Bertrand"I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, everyone else's satisfy me less."
Rutherford, James"It is not in the nature of science for one man to make great leaps. Science is a matter of thousands taking an occasional small step. .......Science is dependent on the combined wisdom of thousands of men."
Sagan, Carl?The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.? (1994)
Sagan, Carl"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
Sagan, Carl"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
Sagan, Carl"Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?"
Sagan, Carl"The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?"
Sagan, Carl"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
Sagan, Carl"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."
Sagan, Carl"Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works."
Sagan, Carl"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
Sagan, Carl"An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth-scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books-might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism."
Sagan, Carl"A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable."
Sagan, Carl"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
Sagan, Carl"Science requires us to be freed of gross superstition and gross injustice both. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, skepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together. Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science."
Sagan, Carl"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
Sagan, Carl"The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalism are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet."
Sagan, Carl"There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything."
Sagan, Carl"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
Sagan, Carl"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
Sandberg, Anders"When it comes to political memes, transhumanism in its purest form doesn't have any fixed niche. Instead each host or group of hosts link it to their previous political views."
Saul, John Ralston"There's no convincing evidence that writers can do their job by being nice."
Schank, Roger"The most important thing to understand about the mind is that it's a learning device. We're constantly trying to learn things. When people say they're bored, what they mean is that there's nothing to learn. They get unbored fast when there's something to learn. The important thing about learning is that you can learn only at a level slightly above where you are. You have to be prepared."
Selznick, David O."I don?t want to be normal. Who wants to be normal?"
Shermer, Michael"Most political and social systems are difficult to test scientifically because it quickly reduces to political philosophy. That's why America has a democracy -- we just vote on our personal preferences. People have tried rather unsuccessfully to marshal evidence for a particular political position, but it never seems to work very well. In that sense, I'm not terribly confident that political science is very scientific. Political scientists, when they do science, are measuring people's voting behavior. When they do that, they're being rigorous...Political systems are testable. We can learn lessons from history and treat history as a science. We should. We can take the 75-year Soviet experiment and learn, well, they had to kill 40 million people to make this work. That can't be good. Let's scrap that and try something else."
Shermer, Michael"[Creationists] use whatever science they can find that they think supports their belief. But creationists don't actually do science. What they do is rummage through scientific journals and books and try to find holes in theories or find what looks like corroborative evidence for creation. That's not doing science. They're not trying to answer any questions about nature. They already have their answers and then they're trying to find evidence to support it."
Shermer, Michael"Skeptics are the watchmen of reasoning errors, the Ralph Naders of bad ideas."
Singer, Peter"If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without therby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it."
Singer, Peter"One of the things that causes a problem for the animal movement is the strong strain of fundamentalist Christianity that makes a huge gulf between humans and animals, saying humans have souls but animals do not. That kind of attitude is a problem in getting people to think of animals as objects of moral value."
Singer, Peter"Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judaeo-Christian Religious tradition."
Singer, Peter"An animal experiment cannot be justifiable unless the experiment is so important that the use of a brain-damaged human would be justifiable."
Singer, Peter"Surely there will be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans."
Singer, Peter"All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals."
Singer, Peter"My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues."
Singer, Peter"What matters is people's welfare, not the size of the gap between rich and poor."
Smart, Maxwell from "Maxwell Smart""Don?t be silly, 99. We have to shoot, kill, and destroy. We represent everything that?s wholesome and good in this world."
Smith, Dean"Why sir, if it be as you say, I can drink and whore and defy the parson." - [country yokel on the ramifications of atheism]
Spielberg, Steven"Just remember, the best science fiction stories have the most dire warnings about civilization and the future. Most of them are cautionary tales."
Spielberg, Steven"I thought Ridley [Scott] painted a very bleak but brilliant vision of life on earth in a few years. It's kind of acid rain and sushi. In fact, it's coming true faster than most science fiction films come true. Blade Runner is almost upon us. It was ultranoir."
Spielberg, Steven"We have to be very careful about how we as a species use our genius. I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters."
Spinoza, Baruch"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."
St. Boniface (Cyberia)"...we imagine we can regulate and canalize the next great lusty phase of evolution upon the Earth for our utility and profit. But what comes for us in the next few centuries is a vast and devouring typhoon. I feel its bright abrasive winds and steel thunder approach and rustle the fragile lineaments of our civilization."
Sterling, Bruce"People want chaos for about five minutes. After that they want a back rub and some money."
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre"The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope."
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre"There is less difference than people think between research and adoration."
Tipler, Frank J."Either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content, or else theology must ultimately become a branch of physics. The reason is simple. The universe is defined to be the totality of all that exists, the totality of a reality. Thus, by definition, if God exists, He/She is either the universe or part of it. The goal of physics is understanding the ultimate nature of reality. If God is real, physicists will eventually find Him/Her." -- The Physics of Immortality
TOOL"Some say a comet will fall from the sky. Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves. Followed by faultlines that cannot sit still. Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits." -- Aenima
TOOL"Something has to change. Un-deniable dilemma. Boredom's not a burden Anyone should bear. Constant over stimulation numbs me But I wouldn't want you Any other way. Just, not enough. I need more. Nothing seems to satisfy. I said, I don't want it. I just need it. To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive...Something kinda sad about the way that things have come to be. Desensitized to everything. What became of subtlety? How can it mean anything to me If I really don't feel anything at all?...Relax. Turn around and take my hand."? -- Stinkfist
TOOL"Rediscover communication." - Schism
TOOL"Cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any Sense of compassion Between supposed lovers" - Schism
TOOLSpiral out, keep going. - Lateralus
TOOL"Black then white are all I see in my infancy. Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me. Lets me see there is so much more and beckons me to look through to these infinite possibilities. As below, so above and beyond, I imagine drawn outside the lines of reason. Push the envelope. Watch it bend." -- Lateralus
TOOL"I'm breathing, so I guess I'm still alive." - Prison Sex
Tow, Rob"There are four basic ideas in the intellectual history of the period we now call the Enlightenment that distinguish it from what came before, and which are worthy of reconstructing in today's climate: that Humanity is perfectible (or at least improvable); that we may know more than the ancients; that the right way to do that is a dialogue with Nature; and that once gained, knowledge should be communicated to the masses. These ideas have fallen into disfavor, in these latter days of Postmodernism and Deconstructionism - it is asserted by many that all points of view are equally valid and that science constructs reality rather than discovers it. I believe that we embrace total relativism at our peril; it is in fact not merely wrong, but unethical. It is timely to once more assert the possibility of Truth and Beauty, in ways that are freshly informed by what Postmodernism and Deconstructionism have taught of the limits of discourse, as well as by what has been discovered by Natural Science since the 17th century."
Unknown"People who have every reason to be happy will search for a reason not to be."
Unknown, Buddhist saying (Pali Canon)?Ignorance may be bliss, but it does not lead to liberation.?
Ustinov, PeterIf the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
Vepstas, Linas"Consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the perception of the passage of time, and indeed, the idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable. This fits well, because if the future were predetermined, then there'd be no free will, and no point in the participation of the passage of time." -- "Free Will & Determinism"
Verbal from "The Usual Suspects""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn`t exist."
Vinge, Vernor"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity - a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied - and the world will pass beyond our understanding." -- Vernor Vinge, _True Names_, p. 47
Vinge, Vernor"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."
Voivod"Fate lights me from within. To the stars...I'm fleeing. Earth heeds not my warning...Forever sleepwalking, dreaming." -- Jack Luminous
Voivod"Why don't we leave this old town? A new world waits to be seen. Give me a reason to stay. I'm not afraid to live?" -- Fix My Heart
Voivod"I can tell/This is hell/No one talks/no one stops/One day will we understand/How much the future is here right now?/One day will they understand.../How true...the future is here and how!" -- The Lost Machine
von Neumann, John"If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not 1 o'clock?"
Wachhorst, Wyn?Soon there will be no one who remembers when spaceflight was still a dream, the reverie of reclusive boys and the vision of a handful of men.? (1995)
Weinberg, Steven"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." - The First Three Minutes
Welesa, Lech"Communism is a monopolistic system, economically and politically. The system suppresses individual initiative, and the 21st century is all about individualism and freedom. The development of technology supported these directions. When I was fighting communism, there was rapid development of satellite television and cell phones, and communism, to survive, would have to block all these information devices. To control the free flow of information, the Communists would have to increase the secret police by a factor of four. It would be a huge effort for police to control the channels you get on TV or the phone numbers you are allowed to dial. So technology helped end communism by bringing in information from the outside. It was possible to get news from independent sources; stations like the BBC (British Broadcasting System) and VOA (Voice of America) were beyond government control. During '50s and '60s, the Communist government put people accused of listening to these stations in prison." (Interview with Wired, June 2002)
Wells, H. G. "All that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening."</