Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.
Charlotte was coming to believe that arrogance was a quality not just correlated with but a manifestation of stupidity, a result of stupidity.
But it is an orchestra, I say. It’s an imitation orchestra—an orchestrion, an orchestrina—whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you’ve done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act...
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 when the crash comes, the government needs to nationalize the banks. No more bailing them out and forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. You
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,...
Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.
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
Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
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...
Anyway that’s a large part of what economics is—peo-ple arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the nu...
And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don’t know we have, glimpses of that larger world—vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of e...
And with our work, John continued, we are carving out a new social order and the next step in the human story—i.e., the latest variant in primate dominance dynamics.
Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I a...
Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one anothe...
What has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made i...
Teaching was the most rigorous form of learning.
And were making themselves into many things they have never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But...
We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we h...
We all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were t...