I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball...
God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible sh...
What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product!...
Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans co...
On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. A...
We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man ...
Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I m...
The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the diviniti...
Logan licked a glob of strawberry jelly from her lower lip and smiled up at Odin. Only one comment seemed to perfectly fit her current situation. “I see dead people.” He leaned forward, hands on his hips. “Me, too. It’s the only explanation f...
Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical ...
I love you, more, I think, than I know, but our kind of love isn't a sword. It's a light. Not a fire. A small light, just bright enough to read love letters by and keep the animals at a growling distance. In time it will go out. All lights go out. So...
Mefistófeles: “De sol e de mundos nada sei dizer, vejo apenas como os homens se atormentam. O pequeno Deus do mundo [o homem] continua na mesma e está tão admirável assim como no primeiro dia. Um pouco melhor ele viveria, não lhe tivesses dado...
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and ...
The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breat...
What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms a...
There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops ...
Her hands slid to his shoulders, his biceps, and dug in as if to hold him here, right here. But he wasn't going anywhere. He liked her hands on him, liked her tongue in his mouth, and when she made that noise deep in her throat, the one that said she...
The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geolo...
We are social animals. We need others to survive. With rare exception, this is at the heart of many of our behaviors. We create patterns of behavior that help us to stay connected with others, even when it’s just a bare thread of a connection, or e...
... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we’ve all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful m...
I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish a...
