It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.
It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.
And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.
Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In tha...
The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind, he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any oth...
Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one...
Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.
I grew up in a utopia, I did. California when I was a child was a child's paradise, I was healthy, well fed, well clothed, well housed. I went to school and there were libraries with all the world in...
Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—
Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something. Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a...
From the road he wrote bitterly to Sagredo: Of all the hatreds, none is greater than that of ignorance for knowledge.
For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe...
There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of...
Health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety...
Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling or...
Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.
The Earth is bathed in a flood of sunlight. A fierce inundation of photons—on average, 342 joules per second per square meter. 4185 joules (one calorie) will raise the temperature of one kilogram of w...
People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present. Maybe
Actually, I’d better look that thing up and find out what it’s called. I’m pretty sure it has a name. Everything has a name! Yes, I guess that’s right.