“What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?”

“If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert”

“After four thousand years we cant even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.”

“Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligencespiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we...”

“You cant turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.”

“The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.”

“It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.It's not a weakness.It's your best strength.”

“No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“They told me exactly how it worked, the marketing of it. Our target market was always going to be young teenage girls, because boys are into sports, and they like buying jerseys and caps and so on,...”

“the desperate need to belong is perhaps never as great as during adolescence. Advertisers seek to communicate with teenagers by frequently using that powerful appeal.”

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”

“Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreedinga conical mass of threads, expanding into the ...”

“Words are memes that can be pronounced.”

“Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be r...”