You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place, she said to all of them, over the common band. It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a...
We demand justice, Jeff says. we don't have it, the world is a mess because of assholes who think they can steal everything and get away with it. So we have to overwhelm them and get back to justice.A...
Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.
There is no such thing as purity. It’s an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous.
The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
That's libertarians for you — anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
Some mistakes you never can make good.
So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultur...
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive
Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
Really? Yes. Lord of the Flies is like some Christian support group compared to the mean girls’ club.
Mozart’s pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. ‘...
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped...
If you’re in Congress, don’t you have to be there sometimes?
I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it’s hard not to f...
He stood and walked to her. Beside her a bucket stood on the sand, filled with the little silver fish from the previous night. She gestured at the bucket, offering him some of the fish, and he saw tha...
Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That's life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so ever...
Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed.
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.