Sheep may be marched without protest to slaughter, even though they can look ahead and see the results at the end of the line, but people have an instinctive sympathy for others and will fight to save them, not only for humane considerations but because they can see that they, themselves, may be the next victims ( Read more... )

"I can tell you all I have learned in a lifetime of study in just three laws of history. And here they are ( Read more... )

A victim of the cancerous disease of egotism, he failed to realize that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth. He talked as though he could plow the fields and build the barns alone. He failed to realize that he was an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead had contributed. When an ( Read more... )

The habit of narration, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break. Narration came naturally after a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats; it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how ( Read more... )

As a child of the 1970s in California, I was constantly told, "You create your own reality." But I lived in a home I did not design, breathed air I did not pollute, went to public schools I did not vote to underfund, rushed home as soon as the last bell rang to avoid the flasher who skulked in the yard across the street, ate off beautiful antique ( Read more... )

Welcome to Big-Time Television: All day and every day making tomorrow seem like yesterday.

Now, remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it.

Right! Next up, more of the same.

--Blank Reg, in the Max Headroom episode "Body Banks"

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It's just that most people's machines ( Read more... )

You create the world by your belief in it, so it's important to believe this: There really is a path. It takes you not back to your old life but onward to the new one.

--Laurence Gonzales in Surviving Survival

Three quotes from Eric Hoffer's The Passionate State of Mind:

237 ( Read more... )

One thing that puzzled me was, how do microbes always seem to show up in extreme environments ready to carpe diem? When new hydrothermal vents open on the cold, dark, ocean floor, where do the hyperthermophiles come from? Are they floating in some dormant state waiting for a gush of boiling sulfuric acid to wake them up or are they already down ( Read more... )

"Genius is the error in the system."

--Paul Klee