67 quotes found
“fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.”
“Consistency is the playground of dull minds”
“Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?”
“Healing is the initial justification for every upgrade.”
“The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes”
“There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”
“The right to the pursuit of happiness, originally envisaged as a restraint on state power, has imperceptibly morphed into the right to happiness as if human beings have a natural right to be happy...”
“After all, when the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become He resolved to wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created and with them the animals, the birds...”
“If you want to see philosophy in action, pay a visit to a robo-rat laboratory. A robo-rat is a run-ofthe-mill rat with a twist: scientists have implanted electrodes into the sensory and reward area...”
“Money is the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans th...”
“If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.”
“China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional MarxistLeninist ideals, but in practice it is guided by Deng Xiaopings famous maxims that development is the only hard truth and that...”
“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is Invest! The supreme commandment of the rest of us is Buy! ...”
“Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can't play football unless everyone beli...”
“We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspir...”
“For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and w...”
“This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.”
“The Theory of Relativity makes nobody angry because it doesn't contradict any of our cherished beliefs. Most people don't care an iota whether space and time are absolute or relative. If you think ...”
“Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals. Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given...”
“Listen, Google, I will say, both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and its so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to ...”
“Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didnt want us to i...”
“So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our ...”
“Thats how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have...”
“Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.”
