It’s not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.
You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it.
We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.
Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional – to become what everyone believes – the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.
Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.
Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it.
I hadn’t traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.
I was certain that some people, whether by accident of birth or some pecularity of training, could tune in to another source of information and could know things about people we didn’t think were possible to know.
If true computer music were ever written, it would only be listened to by other computers.
Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!
Scientific power is like inherited wealth; attained without discipline. You read about what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast.
Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.
In a media-saturated world, persistent hype lends unwarranted credulity to the wildest claims.
Nobody wants to feel they’re not a rebel.
The extreme positions of the Crossfire Syndrome require extreme simplification – framing the debate in terms which ignore the real issues.
Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.
The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.