Great Throughts Treasury

"Underneath all the complex and seemingly random currents and crosscurrents, is the struggle between two very different ways of relating, of viewing our world and living in it. It is the struggle between two underlying possibilities for relations: the partnership model and the domination model." - Riane Eisler, fully Riane Tennenhaus Eisler

"The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology. There is no reason to suppose that electronic computers are conscious when they simulate, although we have to admit that in the future they may become so. Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself...Whatever the philosophical problems raised by consciousness, for the purpose of this story it can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision-takers from their ultimate masters, the genes. Not only are brains in charge of the day-to-day running of survival machine affairs, they have also acquired the ability to predict the future and act accordingly. They even have the power to rebel against the dictates of their genes, for instance in refusing to have as many children as they are able to. But in this respect man is a very special case, as we shall see." - Richard Dawkins

"The God of the Old Testament himself, with his pitilessly vengeful jealousy, his racism, sexism, and terrifying bloodlust, will not be adopted as a literal role model by anybody you or I would wish to know. Yes, of course it is unfair to judge the customs of an earlier era by the enlightened standards of our own. But that is precisely my point! Evidently, we have some alternative source of ultimate moral conviction that overrides Scripture when it suits us." - Richard Dawkins

"Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labor party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows - but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe ... no, that's holy? ... We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard (Dawkins) creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be." - Richard Dawkins

"The more you see how strangely Nature behaves, the harder it is to make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually work. So theoretical physics has given up on that." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"I had never thought I had much in common with anybody. I had no mother, no father, no roots, no biological similarities called sisters and brothers. And for a future I didn't want a split-level home with a station wagon, pastel refrigerator, and a houseful of blonde children evenly spaced through the years. I didn't want to walk into the pages of McCall's magazine and become the model housewife. I didn't even want a husband or any man for that matter. I wanted to go my own way. That's all I think I ever wanted, to go my own way and maybe find some love here and there. Love, but not the now and forever kind with chains around your vagina and a short circuit in your brain. I'd rather be alone." - Rita Mae Brown

"During the fifties, for example, the American character appeared with some consistency that became a model of manhood adopted by many men: the Fifties male. He got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife and children and admired discipline. Reagan is a sort of mummified version of this dogged type. This sort of man didn't see women's souls well, but he appreciated their bodies; and his view of culture and America's part in it was boyish and optimistic. Many of his qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity. Unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive. The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.... During the sixties, another sort of man appeared. The waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was. If manhood meant Vietnam, did they want any part of it? Meanwhile, the feminist movement encouraged men to actually look at women, forcing them to become conscious of concerns and sufferings that the Fifties male labored to avoid." - Robert Bly

"The family has always been the cornerstone of American society. Our families nurture, preserve, and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish, values that are the foundation of our freedoms." - Ronald Reagan, fully Ronald Wilson Reagan

"As we have seen, an adaptive challenge consists of a gap between the shared values people hold and the reality of their lives, or of a conflict among people in a community over values or strategy. 1. What’s causing the distress? 2. What internal contradictions does the distress represent? 3. What are the histories of these contradictions? 4. What perspectives and interests have I and others come to represent to various segments of the community that are now in conflict? 5. In what ways are we in the organization or working group mirroring the problem dynamics in the community?" - Ronald A. Heifetz

"Even in retrospect, analysts seem to assume that Johnson’s tasks would be, first, to find a policy solution and, second, to persuade the public. This assumption reflects the constraint on leading from a position of authority. Even in our retrospective analyses, we cannot imagine a President raising hard questions to which he has no decisive answers." - Ronald A. Heifetz

"Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again." - Rosa Parks

"Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause and no person that they will not betray to stay alive." - Sidney Hook

"Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as "right" in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as "brute force."" - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"The young should be able to see in your wisdom how they should behave." - Jean Baptiste Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

"In the choice of a lover a woman places more importance on how other women view him than on how she herself sees him." - Stendhal, pen name of Marie Henn Beyle or Marie-Henri Beyle NULL

"And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati — who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster." - Stephan Jay Gould

"In what other world is myth so harmless? Great battles kill and maim; great homers and no-hitters are pure joy or deep tragedy without practical consequence… Life is inherently ambiguous; baseball games pit pure good against abject evil. Even Saddam Hussein must have committed one act of kindness in his life, but what iota of good could possibly be said for aluminum bats or the designated hitter rule?" - Stephan Jay Gould

"Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency--the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known." - Stephan Jay Gould

"So why fret and care that the actual version of the destined deed was done by an upper class English gentleman who had circumnavigated the globe as a vigorous youth, lost his dearest daughter and his waning faith at the same time, wrote the greatest treatise ever composed on the taxonomy of barnacles, and eventually grew a white beard, lived as a country squire just south of London, and never again traveled far enough even to cross the English Channel? We care for the same reason that we love okapis, delight in the fossil evidence of trilobites, and mourn the passage of the dodo. We care because the broad events that had to happen, happened to happen in a certain particular way. And something unspeakably holy—I don't know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world and also, in realms of contingency, assured the minutiae of its construction in the manner we know, and not in any one of a trillion other ways, nearly all of which would not have included the evolution of a scribe to record the beauty, the cruelty, the fascination, and the mystery." - Stephan Jay Gould

"Our worship is spiritual when the door of the heart is shut against all intruders, as our Savior commands in closet-duties. It was not his meaning to command the shutting the closet-door, and leave the heart-door open for every thought that would be apt to haunt us. Worldly affections are to be laid aside if we would have our worship spiritual; this was meant by the Jewish custom of wiping or washing off the dust of their feet before their entrance into the temple, and of not bringing money in their girdles. To be spiritual in worship is to have our souls gathered and bound up wholly in themselves, and offered to God." - Stephen Charnock

"Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in." - Stephen Hawking

"Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions." - Stephen Hawking

"One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist" - Stephen Hawking

"Our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery. Without it, we would stagnate." - Stephen Hawking

"The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope." - Stephen Hawking

"What is real and what is imaginary? Is the distinction just in our minds?" - Stephen Hawking

"And at the lowest level what I expect is that even though the rules being applied are perfectly definite, the overall pattern of connections that will exist in the network corresponding to our universe will continually be rearranged in ways complicated enough to seem effectively random. Yet on a slightly larger scale such randomness will then lead to a certain average uniformity. And it is then essentially this that I believe is responsible for maintaining something like ordinary space - with gradual variations giving rise to the phenomenon of gravity. But superimposed on this effectively random background will then presumably also be some de some definite structures that persist through many updatings of the network. And it is these, I believe, that are what correspond to particles like electrons." - Stephen Wolfram

"Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge." - Theodore Roszak

"Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised." - Thomas Carlyle

"Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation." - Thomas Carlyle

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates." - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"Blindness is never bashful, for the one simple reason that that blindness cannot see." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins

"What is reading but silent conversation." - Walter Savage Landor

"There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis

"Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work - its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm's own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish. Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a landowner. He was the farm's farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter." - Wendell Berry

"The Self, The Ego, and The Shadow operate in time and out of time. The ego operates almost exclusively in time. The Ego is the chief organ of Temporal Awareness." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy

"An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond. But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed." - Walker Percy

"I am in general trying to read Hegel materialistically: Hegel is materialism which has been stood on its head (according to Engels) – that is to say, I cast aside for the most part God, the Absolute, the Pure Idea, etc." - Vladimir Lenin, fully Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion, then I go out and paint the stars." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"The child’s murmuring is more and is less than words; there are no notes, and yet it is a song; there are no syllables, and yet it is language…. This poor stammering is a compound of what the child said when it was an angel, and of what it will say when it becomes a man." - Victor Hugo

"We long ago pulled down the great wall which divided us from democratic Europe, but equally we tolerate the slow and inconspicuous growth of new walls, no better than those which fell," - Václav Havel

"We shall fight for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"And nothing is, but what is not." - William Shakespeare

"The illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred … Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun "my", to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" - William Godwin

"O excellent! I love long life better than figs." - William Shakespeare

"To wash and scrub filth away; to keep clothes and ornaments fresh and clean; to wash the head and bathe the body regularly, and to keep the person free from disgraceful filth, may be called the characteristics of womanly bearing." - Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban

"As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. - Armies cannot protect it then; and walls that have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured, and yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is regarded as a sign of hostility to religion." - Edwin Percy Whipple

"We are born with a body that experiences pain and comfort, a heart that suffers and feels joy, a mind that strives and is peaceful, a spirit that yearns for both solitude and communion with others, and a contract on earth that has a beginning and an end. Each one of us knows this, and yet, each one of us spends much of our time swimming against the current of life's reality. The spiritual path teaches us how to float on our backs, relaxed and aware, in the waters of reality. The Buddhists define spirituality as shamatha, or 'tranquil abiding.'" - Elizabeth Lesser

"But anarchy is not disorder as opposed to order, as the eclipse of themes is not, as js said, a return to a diffuse 'field of consciousness' prior to attention. Disorder is but another order, and what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives." - Emmanuel Lévinas , originally Emanuelis Lévinas