A reason for using public transport that I've never heard mentioned before is the added time for thinking. By driving, you, and everyone else who is driving, are wasting valuable time that could have been used for thinking. For a single person that m...
I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers an...
Knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress. It is both the key and the quest that advances mankind. The search for knowledge is what brought men to the moon; but it took knowledge already acquired to make it possible to get there...
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advanci...
...where were answers to the truly deep questions? Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don't look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and ...
One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, econo...
Religion is the most powerful entity on earth. A phenomenon that has conscripted millions to give or sacrifice their lives without so much as a minuscule query about their chosen beliefs or particular ideology. And today thousands of years on despite...
Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel const...
Hannibal Lecter: Advancement, of course. Listen carefully. Look deep within yourself, Clarice Starling. Go seek out Miss Mofet, an old patient of mine. M-o-f-e-t. Go now, I don't think Miggs could manage again quite so soon, even though he is crazy. ...
Title Card: In WW2 American tanks were outgunned and out armored by the more advanced German tanks. US tank crewmen suffered staggering losses against the superior enemy vehicles. Title Card: It is April 1945. The Allies fight deep in the heart of Na...
Michael Corleone: Fredo, you're nothing to me now. You're not a brother, you're not a friend. I don't want to know you or what you do. I don't want to see you at the hotels, I don't want you near my house. When you see our mother, I want to know a da...
[first lines] Title Card: In the near future: Corporate networks reach out to the stars, electrons and light flow throughout the universe. - The advance of computerisation, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups. Dispatcher: [on rad...
Ghost Dog: When one has made a decision to kill a person, even if it will be very difficult to succeed by advancing straight ahead, it will not do to think about doing it in a long, roundabout way. One's heart may slacken, he may miss his chance, and...
Ernie Bishop: Just a minute! Quiet everybody! Quiet, quiet. Now get this, it's from London. Ma Bailey: Oh! Ernie Bishop: [Reading the telegram in his hand] Mr. Gower cabled you need cash, stop. My office instructed to advance you up to twenty-five th...
Iron Monger: You had a great idea, Tony, but my suit is more advanced in every way! Iron Man: How'd you solve the icing problem? Iron Monger: Icing problem? [his suit begins to fail] Iron Man: Might want to look into it. [He raps his fist on Iron Mon...
Narrator: It was a perfectly admissible argument that Howard Beale advanced in the days that followed. It was, however, also a very depressing one. Nobody particularly cared to hear his life was utterly valueless. By the end of the first week in June...
James T. Kirk: [upon taking command of the Enterprise] Attention crew of the Enterprise, this is James Kirk. Mr. Spock has resigned commission and advanced me to acting captain. I know you are all expecting to regroup with the fleet, but I'm ordering...
Little Girl 143: Hello. Who are you? Storm: Professor, we're in trouble! You have to stop Cerebro now! Little Girl 143: Who are you talking to? Storm: [halting Nightcrawler from advancing towards the child] Stop! Don't get close to her. Nightcrawler:...
Rather to my surprise, I found myself genuinely indignant at the suggestion that murder was to be reintroduced as a means of political advancement for the first time since the Tudors, and even more indignant that the legal and political establishment...
Creationists argue that natural selection is only a negative process, and therefore cannot create anything. Chopra argues that skepticism is only a negative process, and therefore does not lead to knowledge. Both are wrong for the same reasons. They ...
In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal t...