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It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
 
In truth you owe naught to any man. You owe all to all men.
 
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
 
Everything is a game except what makes the soul better or worse.
 
I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said 'no'.
 
Forget the failures. Keep the lessons.
 
One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.
 
We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.
 
No pain can be greater than the pain of one person. [...] In other words, no suffering can be greater than that of one human being. [...} The whole planet cannot suffer more than a lone soul.
 
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
 
From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God.
 
Hope is the normal form of delirium.
 
The thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
 
Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.
 
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
 
My neighbor's poverty makes me feel poor; my own does not.
 
The rules of the universe that we think we know are buried deep in our processes of perception.
 
I was once interviewed in Italy and the headline of the interview the next day was wonderful. I saved this for my collection it was... "YES we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots" and I thought that's exactly right. Yes we have a soul, but it's mechanical. But it's still a soul, it still does the work that the soul was supposed to do. It is the seat of reason. It is the seat of moral responsibility. It's why we are appropriate objects of punishment when we do evil things, why we deserve the praise when we do good things. It's just not a mysterious lump of wonder stuff... that will out live us.
 
Because it is the last to mature, by definition the frontal cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.
 
Isn't it odd, that people like to fight for their religion but unwillingly live after its prescriptions.


 
2725 quotes