So, you know, Fermi’s paradox has its answer, which is this: by the time life gets smart enough to leave its planet, it’s too smart to want to go. Because it knows it won’t work. So it stays home. It...
So that human beings were miraculous indeed - conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiou...
Remember: ease of representation. It’s always more than what you see, bigger than what you know. That said, people in this era did do it. Individuals make history, but it’s also a collective thing, a...
People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.
My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit.
Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver.
Bugs like these we’ve got here, you aren’t going to find those unless you slow down and hunt really hard. Live nearby for a while and look. At which point it’s too late, if you get a bad result. You’r...
Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and l...
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong,...
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than any real thing. But this time who could say? This time might be the golden one at last
Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the num...
And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there’s no way back, no way to go but onward.
Teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.
Was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people’s souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be...
Policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so
Indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing son...
If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose?
If one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new...
History never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.