Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evol...
Women's virtue is man's greatest invention.
History resembles a guest list, in that sense, of the invited and the gate-crashers, the people, for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. Sometimes the gate-crashers prove to be the life of the party.
Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.
I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?" He snorted. "You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours." "That doesn't say much for the Lord." "It doesn't say muc...
Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet." "The time to assert one's right i...
... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural val...
My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.
Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention? The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in under...
These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud hut...
At some point, when I finished school in Zurich, I suddenly realised that I was nobody. I couldn't find a shape. Everything I was had been invented. Initially, I took it to be a fundamental conflict. But today I find pleasure in accepting that this t...
I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money fo...
I have been motivated by this idea since I was a kid that if we invented machines that were created in the way that people are - were aware, have free will, inventive machines, machines that would be geniuses - potentially, they could reinvent themse...
To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you're inventing a world, you're inventing characters. If they're interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for...
I invented the cordless extension cord.
To invent is to discern, to choose.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Men deprived of female company quickly became fearsome creatures, and Trevor believed you could argue that civilization was in fact the invention of women, or at least the invention of the men who wanted to please them. If it were not for the ladies,...
In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other...
In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize...
I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks betwee...
