She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?" This would normally have riled me... but I had comes to think of her as Dr. Spock form Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical cre...
I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity. However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of t...
[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to...
... Have you ever reflected that posterity may not be the faultless dispenser of justice that we dream of? One consoles oneself for being insulted and denied, by reyling on the equity of the centuries to come; just as the faithful endure all the abom...
Harry: She had something, that gal tonight, this quality. You know, like the girl from high school, the one that got away that - you know what I mean? - that haunts you still. Perry: Yeah, I had that. Harry: You did? Perry: Bobby Mills. Harry: Eugh. ...
Gusteau: [Remy is locked in a cage] So, we have given up. Remy: Why do you say that? Gusteau: We are in a cage, inside a car trunk, awaiting a future in frozen food products. Remy: No, I'm the one in a cage. I've given up. You... are free. Gusteau: I...
[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio] General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the ...
Mr. Strickland: Am I to understand you're still hanging around with Dr. Emmett Brown, McFly? [clicks with his mouth, gives Jennifer a tardy slip] Mr. Strickland: Tardy slip for you, Miss Parker. [gives Marty one, too] Mr. Strickland: And one for you,...
Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamen...
Live, you say, in the present; Live only in the present. But I don’t want the present, I want reality; I want things that exist, not time that measures them. What is the present? It’s something relative to the past and the future. It’s a thing ...
With all these occurrences of death facing me, I thought about issues of freedom. If government projects the idea that we, as people inhabiting this particular land mass, have freedom, the for the rest of our lives we will go out and find what appear...
And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pai...
Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians ...
Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, Sparkling armada of promises draw near. How slow they are! And how much time they waste, R...
..I met two young guys from the Oregon National Guard... The lieutenant told me about their temporary barracks in an old neighborhood high school. He told me that he was disgusted that kids ever went to school there, and that in Oregon the place woul...
An enlightened man had but one duty--to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often speculated with images ...
We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happi...
In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map: "There you are, the future patient...
Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years - I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue. My thoug...
concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pai...
On the lowest level, this loss of soul turns the man into the hen-pecked husband who lives with his wife as though she were his mother upon whom he is solely dependent in all things having to do with emotions and the inner life. But even the relative...