Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be great.
How strange. Humans always seem so much in control. Is it just a grand act, to fool both others and themselves?
I had to admit, standing there, that sometimes you just gotta admire the passion of the truly insane -- a passion that bulls right past all sense or reason.
Free speech should be viewed as sacred and inviolable not simply for its own sake, but for utterly pragmatic reasons. Only through an active, vibrant, noisy ferment of criticism can blunders be discov...
It wasn’t his place to judge the women. Theirs was the harder job, here in the wilderness. His tasks were simple—to hunt, fight, and if need be, to die. Theirs was to go on, whatever it took.
What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness? The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack— flexibility— to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidenc...
Where is it written that one should only care about big things?
She had called in the debt that parents owe a child for bringing her, unasked, into a strange world.
So if it appears that my argument supports the necessity of lawyers, please accept that I say it with reluctant awareness that things would be worse without them.
Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha and countless other mystics, in countless cultures, have preached the same thing -- that we all exist amid a blur of uncertainty. That one can never know complete truth...
Someday we may look back on this era as a time when rational compromises might have enhanced both security and liberty, but those compromises were refused because each side was so busy self-righteousl...
As sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap. But science fiction has not been forgiven for its crap. The reason is that science fiction inherently distrusts the 'eternal...
Strong privacy advocates—especially those promoting encryption and anonymity—may deny that this phenomenon is a direct physical corollary of their message, so I will let the reader decide whether a ph...
As simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave . . . an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something left ove...
But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us i...
Each of us remains convinced that our own subjective viewpoint is more urgent than anyone else’s—indeed, even more valid than the objective matrix that underlies so-called reality. After all, the subj...
Give up, they preached. Don’t bother trying to figure out how the flawed world works. Perfect knowledge is to be found only within the mind, the soul. Seek your own private salvation then, apart from...
I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True... but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn’t true! Moreover, I can improve my model of the world, by slowly, carefully finding ou...
In 1983, Michael W. Doyle commented on the common observation that democracies almost never wage war on one another. Understanding the reasons for this phenomenon may be crucial to our hopes for preve...
We can’t save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
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