When I was extremely young and shockingly stupid, I thought you weren't supposed to ever get angry at anybody you cared about (lest you suspect I'm exaggerating the "shockingly stupid" part, I also thought Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomenon). I ...
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. E...
And now, while he didn't particularly think any of these stories was a bit truer, he did realize that he didn't really know his wife at all; and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person--of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself-...
To understand antiquity’s idea of man, we must examine its gods and heroes, myths and legends. In these we find the classical prototype of genuine man. ... the will to greatness, wealth, power and fame. Anything opposed to it falls short of the aut...
Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so do...
Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in roo...
The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generati...
He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of...
Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally differe...
A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they mea...
When God introduced man to the angels, Satan became the first racist. Satan belonged to a race of beings called angels, man to a new race of beings called humans. In Satan’s mind, angels, particularly he himself, were far greater than mankind simpl...
Why aren’t you asking a hundred other guys why they don’t write strong women characters? I believe that what I’m doing should not be remarked upon, let alone honoured… Because equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striv...
Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized furt...
I think that, generally, people of the world typify a "free and wild" person as someone who's uprooted, detached and uninhibited. But I don't believe in that kind of freedom. I think that's an infantile concept. Freedom means something when it has es...
In most people's minds, fossils and Evolution go hand in hand. In reality, fossils are a great embarrassment to Evolutionary theory and offer strong support for the concept of Creation. If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fos...
There is a very good organization called "Make a Wish Foundation" that helps make a dying child's wishes come true. People go out of their way and work together to create an unbelievable lasting memory for a deserving person. What just dawned on me w...
All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and ...
The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for wh...
J. Edgar Hoover: We're too generous. We're too open. Now if we don't watch out, if we don't take steps now, impose some new discipline, some decency, then we're in trouble, deep trouble. And I know it's not fashionable to say this. We're celebrating,...
Colonel Rolland: [dictating a letter] The plot describes above constitutes, in my view, the most dangerous single conception that the terrorists could possibly have devised to endanger the life of President De Gaulle. If the plot exists as described,...
Batman: Beautiful, isn't it? Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone. Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver. Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every ph...
