Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.
Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last.
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
It’s like in eco-economics where what you take from the system has to be balanced by what you give in to it, balanced or exceeded to create that anti-entropic surge which characterizes all creative li...
It looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly
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?
What can I say, friends? he cried. This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
We are making a better way to live. This was the myth, they had all grown up with it.
Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.
To hope without hope, which would be wise, is impossible. —MARCEL PROUST, Les Plaisirs et les Jours
Then comes September and the sun tilts to the south. Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but...
The rounded slopes, Phyllis said, indicated ancient water as clearly as the grain in petrified wood indicated the original tree. By the way she spoke Nadia understood that this was another of her disa...
The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released in...
The Amex man had even lifted his wrist to his mouth to take down a note, in a gesture obviously meant to be seen:
Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.
Sometimes I think it's post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away,...
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 you attempt what De Bruik attempted, in her Free Radical Binds to Macromolecule. We all attempt what De Bruik attempted, in one way or another. In Free Radical De Bruik had represented the macromol...
So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your lo...
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.