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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6bf5340 | There's a voice that says: "So what?" It's not my voice, it's probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. "So what if a bunch of species go extinct?" It says. "Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn't he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. .. | darwin extinctions future so-what | David Quammen | |
| 1825df5 | Influenza is caused by three types of viruses, of which the most worrisome and widespread is influenza A. Viruses of that type all share certain genetic traits: a single-stranded RNA genome, which is partitioned into eight segments, which serve as templates for eleven different proteins. In other words, they have eight discrete stretches of RNA coding, linked together like eight railroad cars, with eleven different deliverable cargoes. The .. | David Quammen | ||
| d176637 | Lyme disease, psittacosis, Q fever: These three differ wildly in their particulars but share two traits in common. They are all zoonotic and they are all bacterial. | David Quammen | ||
| af78bc2 | Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." There's a nice word: ramifications. It's especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is "a structure formed of branches," from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is "implications." Darwin's tree certainly had implications." | David Quammen | ||
| 36d4ed0 | With influenza and many other diseases the order is reversed, high infectivity preceding symptoms by a matter of days. A perverse pattern: the danger, then the warning. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza: high infectivity among cases before they experienced the most obvious and debilitating stages of illness. | David Quammen | ||
| 9032df2 | The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen. | David Quammen | ||
| 681ddfc | a mutation in that strain might have made it especially aggressive, efficient, transmissible, and fierce. | David Quammen | ||
| 22d442a | A few patients do bleed to death, Rollin said, but "they don't explode, and they don't melt." In fact, he said, the conventional term then in use, "Ebola hemorrhagic fever," was itself a misnomer, because more than half the patients don't bleed at all. They die of other causes, such as respiratory distress and shutdown (but not dissolution) of internal organs. It's for just these reasons, as cited by Rollin, that the WHO has switched its ow.. | David Quammen | ||
| 6dac949 | It wasn't a petty squabble. It was a big squabble, in which pettiness played no small part. | David Quammen | ||
| 908e52f | Imagine a single survivor, a lonely fugitive at large on mainland Mauritius at the end of the seventeenth century. Imagine this fugitive as a female. She would have been bulky and flightless and befuddled--but resourceful enough to have escaped and endured when the other birds didn't. Or else she was lucky. Maybe she had spent all her years in the Bambous Mountains along the southeastern coast, where the various forms of human-brought menac.. | David Quammen | ||
| c1476a2 | The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast--above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill--has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now. | David Quammen | ||
| 1424d04 | Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo. | David Quammen | ||
| 118c912 | The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels--that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem. | David Quammen | ||
| d4961a3 | To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn't do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity--into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny--and not just in the form of froz.. | David Quammen | ||
| d9b90f1 | Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health. | David Quammen | ||
| cb7c2f7 | Habitat doesn't replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus. | David Quammen | ||
| bf4f400 | Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes. | Spider Robinson | ||
| 6b08c85 | Hey Jake. I got an idea.' 'Be gentle with it,' the Doc grinned. 'It's in a strange place. | ideas | Spider Robinson | |
| 1e9f981 | A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman. | Spider Robinson | ||
| cb9600e | It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more. | hurt problems sympathy | Spider Robinson | |
| f3d2625 | Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain. | description | Spider Robinson | |
| 3c12ebe | I was a little afraid you might get all macho about not exposing your wife to danger. I am. I wouldn't want you to accidentally suffer any harm while beating the shit out of me for trying to keep you out of the party. You could forget and hit me on the head, and hurt your knuckles. | Spider Robinson | ||
| e196191 | What shocked us the most was that we had no idea why we should be so shocked. Like opening a ginger ale and finding Jamesons' inside: nothing wrong with it, but it sort of takes you by surprise. | surprise whisky | Spider Robinson | |
| 124c204 | Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie -- and the A-movie for that matter -- that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love. | destiny dramatic-moment entrance love love-at-first-sight | Spider Robinson | |
| c13e817 | There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance. | forgiveness penance | Spider Robinson | |
| 35b9bec | If you're under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings: Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich village. To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village s.. | Spider Robinson | ||
| 0e424c1 | Knigi se pishat po nai-shashavi prichini. Niakoi sa napisani, za da izplatiat ipoteka, drugi -- za da spasiat sveta, a treti -- prosto ot niamane kakvo da se pravi. Edin ot liubimite mi anekdoti e za pisatelia, deto se khvanal na bas, che e bukvalno nev'zmozhno da se napishe tolkova KOFTI kniga, ta da ne se nameri koi da ia izdade. I kakvo stanalo po-natat'k -- pisateliat vzel, che napisal nai-t'piia i nai-shablonniia roman, na koito bil sp.. | Spider Robinson | ||
| 705d88b | She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all. | Spider Robinson | ||
| 3812bd6 | You don't have to be here," William offered with his trademark quiet solemnity. I shook my head but kept my eyes fixed on the closed doors at the end of the hall. "No. I wouldn't miss it." Would rather be home in my slippers watching Judge Judy, sure, but duty calls. That was my style of party these days. Throw in a slice of Battenberg and some Werther's Originals and I could go wild on a sugar high. But no, today was William's birthday, so.. | L.H. Cosway | ||
| 5ed5198 | I trust that our merciful God, our only help & refuge, will not desert us in this our hour of need, but will deliver us by His almighty hand, that the whole world may recognize His power & all hearts be lifted up in adoration & praise of His unbounded loving kindness," he said. "We must however submit to His almighty will, whatever that may be." | William C. Davis | ||
| c83c2af | This was a people's war. All the people had a stake in it. All the people had an obligation to put their hearts and wealth and blood into it. All would find their futures indelibly shaped by it. | William C. Davis | ||
| be76c43 | silent. This was | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 38830fa | La gente aparece en nuestras vidas en momentos determinados por diversos motivos que tienen que ver con las lecciones que hay que aprender. No | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 6d44b3f |
Pero si la gente supiera que < |
Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 5327856 | Se que hay un motivo para todo. Tal vez en el momento en que se produce un hecho no contamos con la penetracion psicologica ni la prevision necesarias para comprender las razones, pero con tiempo y paciencia saldran a la luz. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 91257d5 | El miedo es un derroche de energia; impide a las personas cumplir con aquello para lo cual fueron enviados. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 8e6789b | Wisdom is achieved very slowly. This is because intellectual knowledge, easily acquired, must be transformed into 'emotional,' or subconscious, knowledge. Once transformed, the imprint is permanent. Behavioral practice is the necessary catalyst of this reaction. Without action, the concept will wither and fade. Theoretical knowledge without practical application is not enough. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| c8c1694 | By knowledge we approach God. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| e067af4 | George told me that there was a hierarchy of spirits and that the one who visited him in his dream wasn't necessarily at the highest level. There are other places and other dimensions that are even higher and do not belong to the Earth. Still, we have to learn the lessons of the Masters because the important thing was to progress, he said. ... His blue spirit told him that we see the past lifetimes that are important to this one. ... "You.. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| a1aae2f | Poor health tends to make narcissists of us, and narcissism makes us blind to compassion, empathy, anger management, and patience - all elements that, when mastered, will lead us higher up the evolutionary scale toward immortality. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 1b6117a | We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. | Robert T. Kiyosaki | ||
| b0421f7 | I thought about how people tended to congregate in homogeneous groups, avoiding and often fearing outsiders. This was the root of prejudice and group hatreds. "We also must learn not to just go to those people whose vibrations are the same as ours." To help these other people. I could feel the spiritual truths in her words." | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 8b12c32 | A constantly criticized child can loose as much confidence and self-esteem as one who remembers being humiliated on one particular, horrifying day. A child whose family is impoverished and has very little food available on a day-to-day basis might eventually suffer from the same psychological problems as a child who experienced one major episode of accidental near-starvation. | Brian L. Weiss | ||
| 0f4e6fa | Our task is to learn, to become God-like through knowledge. We know so little. You are here to be my teacher. I have so much to learn. By knowledge we approach God, and then we can rest. Then we come back to teach and help others. | Brian L. Weiss |