History is humankind trying to get a grip.
Here they were, on the only planetary surface on which you could walk freely, naked to the wind and the sun, and when they had a choice, they sat in boxes and stared at littler boxes, just as if they...
Heather the midwife, the herb woman, the loudmouth, the witch, the crone, the horrible hag, the deadly poisoner. A very busy and bossy old woman, small and bent and proud to have three teeth left, two...
He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s pol...
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.
Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.
Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.
Consciousness is the hard problem.
Charlotte poured a stiff Irish coffee for herself, wanting both stimulation and sedation. It didn’t work, in fact it backfired, making her antsy but confused. An anti-Irish coffee, must be an English...
But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.
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...
And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell. But...
The party was a hierarchy; you started at the bottom and moved up one step at a time—school board, city council, state assembly—and then if you had demonstrated lockstep team loyalty, the powers at th...
The current coastline of Labrador, or Norway, or for that matter southern Chile. Elsewhere on the map, western Antarctica was an archipelago somewhat resembling the Philippines.
The crowds just background tapestries for you to play your life against, lurid backdrops providing a fake sense of drama to help you imagine you’re doing more than you would be if you were in some sle...
No extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340
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...
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 you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are p...