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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9ac535c | Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 27e8fd1 | Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 05a9839 | human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 71c80dd | So Paley was right in saying not just that Design was a wonderful thing to explain, but also that Design took Intelligence. All he missed--and Darwin provided--was the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn't count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process. | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| bf1e869 | When I was a child, I used to pray to God for a bicycle. But then I realized that God doesn't work in that way--so I stole a bike and prayed for forgiveness! | Daniel C. Dennett | ||
| 56e7088 | Don't be afraid of a little metaphor; it won't bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge. | philosophy-of-language | Daniel C. Dennett | |
| 06c9cc3 | Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. | perception zen | Michael Cunningham | |
| 2fd7c01 | One of Richard Dawkins's main God Delusion arguments is that, if God created everything, we would have to ask who created God. But the very asking of this question reveals at once that Dawkins has in mind a created God: "Who created God?" Created gods certainly are a delusion." | John C. Lennox | ||
| f5cc0f9 | He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. | John C. Lennox | ||
| ded6151 | There is a real conflict, but it is not science versus religion. It is theism versus atheism, and there are scientists on both sides. | John C. Lennox | ||
| e397030 | Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.' It was this conviction that led Francis Bacon (1561-1626), regarded by many as the father of modern science, to teach that God has provided us with two books - the book of Nature and the Bible - | John C. Lennox | ||
| 3d790f5 | This love of theirs, with its reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence, has yoked Sally directly to the machinery of mortality itself. Now there is a loss beyond imagining. | mortality | Michael Cunningham | |
| defc22c | Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective--society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.--is the unit of reality and the standard of value. | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| c4b138a | The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27 | Leonard Peikoff | ||
| 81247f0 | She could, she thinks, have entered a different life. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself. | ennui exciting-life fantasy-life life-worth-living regret resignation | Michael Cunningham | |
| 2c831cb | Zoe loved Trancas's mother. She respected her exhausted and ironic hope for rebirth. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 575bede | Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him? | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 60d236b | Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become? | Michael Cunningham | ||
| c238cfb | Peter is still amazed at the degree to which a certain widening gyre of accolades can change an artist's work, literally change it, not just the new stuff but the old as well, the pieces that have been around for a while, that have seemed "interesting" or "promising" but minor, until (not often, just once in a while) an artist is by some obscure consensus declared to have been neglected, misrepresented, ahead of his time. What's astonishing.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 6aeeba0 | Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 57b2d97 | He's filled with a sense of childish release, the old feeling that because you are sick, all your trials and obligations have been suspended. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| f295c94 | Peter hesitates. "Ridiculous" is the least of it. How about offensive, insulting? How about the implication that "someone who's never used" is a sad and small figure, standing on the platform, sensibly dressed, as the bus pulls in? Even now, after all those ad campaigns, after all we've learned about how bad it really and truly gets, there is the glamour of self-destruction, imperishable, gem-hard, like some cursed ancient talisman that can.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 438dae9 | Venture too far for love... and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 14c5f91 | Who has more power than a child? She can be as cruel as she wants to be. He can't. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 4d456df | It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize you are, to him, an essentially fictional character, one he has invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| ea408db | The Taylors have this gift for imperturbable presence. They are not nervous talkers. The Harrises, on the other hand, have always been constant talkers, not so much for the sake of entertainment or information but because if a silence caught and held for too long they might have fallen into a bottomless sullen discord, a frozen mutual quietude that could never be broken because there never had been and never would be a shared topic of suffi.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 8dfa732 | Beauty - the beauty Peter craves - is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn't shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he's young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, it's something the old tend to forget. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 2d890cb | What did Shakespeare say? Or little lives are rounded with a sleep. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| ca90950 | Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 6fb8bcf | Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, three's nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they're good people (mo.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 1d35243 | Sometimes the fabric that separates us tears just enough for love to shine through. Sometimes the tear is surprisingly small. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| f5e456f | She'll be willing to meet someone who can hold her interest for more than a few months, and that guy will teach her about domestic deepenings, the modest reliable thrill of the familiar, which as almost everyone but Liz knows has been the way of human happiness since humanity was born. | love | Michael Cunningham | |
| 26f0519 | She doesn't really want to go far, she just wants the solitude, the public solitude, of the street; the un-company of passing strangers, no one embracing her, no one looking with compassion and wonder into her eyes, no one marvelling at her. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 3f4b549 | And here he is, letting the massive steel street door click shut behind him, standing at the top of the three iron steps that lead down to the shattered sidewalk. New York is probably, in this regard at least, the strangest city in the world, so many of its denizens living as they (we) do among the unreconstructed remnants of nineteenth-century sweatshops and tenements, the streets potholed and buckling while right over there, around the co.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| b521f24 | And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| e2489c0 | Who was it who said, the worst thing you can imagine is probably what's already happening? Shrink phrase. Not untrue, though. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| b1a8c27 | Beauty is a whore. I prefer money. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 105d4e0 | She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| e3ea43b | They're not tourists, either, they're nothing like the gawkers and brayers in a place like Times Square, but they don't live here, they live in Jersey or Westchester, they're burghers right out of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, they cross Broadway as if they fucking own it, they think they look rakish, they think they're creatures of the night, they have neighbors whom they consider burghers because they don't like driving in New York, beca.. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 097d31e | Clarissa, sane Clarissa-exultant, ordinary Clarissa- will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasure, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die. | Michael Cunningham | ||
| 4b4b69a | She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed. | domestic-life loved-ones numb-depression preparation-to-face-the-day putting-on-an-act | Michael Cunningham | |
| 48b6266 | The past is always gone," Wahram said. "Whether the place is still there or not." | Kim Stanley Robinson | ||
| 0d33fa5 | Roosevelt declared, arguing that "the insistence upon having only the perfect cure often results in securing no betterment whatever." | Doris Kearns Goodwin | ||
| 14f8d5e | The U.S. Senate presented the most powerful obstacle to any progressive reform. | Doris Kearns Goodwin |