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Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity's governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of creation, we began to mechanize both the creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.
 
if you want to increase your chances of avoiding stress-related diseases, make sure you don’t inadvertently allow yourself to be born poor.
 
Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.
 
When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
 
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
 
The percept is the reality. It is not in propositional form. But the most immediate judgment concerning it is abstract. It is therefore essentially unlike the reality, although it must be accepted as true to that reality. Its truth consists in the fact that it is impossible to correct it, and in the fact that it only professes to consider one aspect of the percept.
 
Without deviation, progress is not possible.
 
We argue so much today about 'democracy' versus 'totalitarianism'. Democracy presupposes intelligence of the masses;* totalitarianism does not to the same degree. But a 'democracy' without intelligence of the masses under modern conditions can be a worse human mess than any dictatorship could be.
 
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.
 
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
 
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
 
The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.
 
DARLING: The popular form of address used in speaking to a member of the opposite sex whose name you cannot at the moment remember.
 
Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
 
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
 
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
 
Failures are divided into two classes--those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.
 
If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.
 
In a work of psychiatry, only the patients' remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.
 
Specialization may be a great temptation for the scientist. For the philosopher it is the mortal sin.
 
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