31 quotes found
“fantasy gives meaning to the suffering.”
“Healing is the initial justification for every upgrade.”
“the crucial factor in ourconquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another.”
“Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.”
“Sapiens dont behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.”
“Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.”
“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...”
“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...”
“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...”
“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...”
“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...”
“Famine, plague and war will probably continue to claim millions of victims in the coming decades. Yet they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless hum...”
“Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry, and promise ourselves that next time well do better.”
“If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.”
