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If those few truly worthy men who seek glory were to know, one by one, the people who make up that public by which the seeker of glory strives with a thousand hardships to be esteemed, it is believable that they would grow cold in their endeavor or perhaps abandon it altogether.
 
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
 
What I have tried to show is that the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe.
 
Therefore, general systems theory should be, methodologically, an important means of controlling and instigating the transfer of principles from one field to another, and it will no longer be necessary to duplicate or triplicate the discovery of the same principles in different fields isolated from the other.
 
All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.
 
I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.
 
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
 
There is no greater need in society than that of gossip. It is the principal means of passing the time, which is one of the first necessities of life.
 
And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.
 
Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.
 
Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.
 
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
 
No matter what we do, and how dishonestly we play, the brain nudges us to conclude we’re ultimately a better person than most.
 
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
 
Hope, deceitful as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.
 
Wholeness [Ganzheit], Gestalt, is the primary attribute of life.
 
Polite conversation is rarely either.
 
Democracy is an imperfect way of steering between the violence of anarchy and the violence of tyranny, with the least violence you can get away with.
 
SEX: The most fun you can have without laughing.
 
Education Is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school.
 
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