In terms of the class structure that you see so much in European portraiture, I don't think one feels that in America in the 21st century. But we have these other kinds of social structures now, like celebrity, who establish new hierarchies.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segre...
Story was that human civilization started to develop with first social network. Emerged where population concentration was high. Helped propel to where we are now. Facebook is next step of creating a huge human brain to embrace hundreds of million, p...
The fundamental flaw in Social Security and Medicare is that they violate the 'welfare principle' in economics. The welfare principle forms the fundamental basis of all charitable work in churches and other private organizations: assist those who nee...
When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school, so I didn't have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here, I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me.
It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it ...
Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence — legitimately — our choice of basic values in the first pl...
Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpowe...
As part of an effort to prod college seniors to get tetanus shots, a group of students was given a lecture meant to educate them about the dangers of tetanus and the importance of getting inoculated against it. A large majority of those students repo...
Santosh Patel: Piscine, you cannot follow three different religions at the same time. Pi Patel (11: Why not? Santosh Patel: Because, believing in everything at once is the same thing as believing in nothing. Gita Patel: He is young, Santosh. He is st...
Another night then,' Mom said. 'Maybe on the weekend we can have a barbecue and invite your sister.' 'Or,' I said turning to Rafe, 'if you want to skip the whole awkward meet-the-family social event you could just submit your life story including you...
Gage: Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention? Mark Zuckerberg: [stares out the window] No. Gage: Do you think I deserve it? Mark Zuckerberg: [looks at Gage] What? Gage: Do you think I deserve your full attention? Mark Zuckerberg: I had to swea...
Mark Zuckerberg: Your date looks so familiar to me. Sean Parker: She looks familiar to a lot of people. Mark Zuckerberg: What do you mean? Sean Parker: A Stanford MBA named Roy Raymond wants to buy his wife some lingerie but he's too embarrassed to s...
Je suis la haine de tout ordre religieux et social que l’homme n'a pas établi et dans lequel il n'est pas roi et Dieu tout ensemble ; je suis la proclamation des droits de l'homme contre les droits de Dieu ; je suis la philosophie de la révolte, ...
Relatively speaking, science can provide reliable standards to verify truth in a physical, material sense, but values are not its strength. What one generation takes to be true is debunked and made obsolete by new discoveries.
The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once s...
If no one ever deviated from currently accepted mainstream Science - we would still have the Flat Earth Society!
For in the sciences the authority of thousands of opinions is not worth as much as one tiny spark of reason in an individual man. Besides, the modern observations deprive all former writers of any authority, since if they had seen what we see, they w...
I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.
The only reason you need me at all, John, is because Magick actually . If it were all just smoke and mirrors and stage magic, if the world worked the way religion or science says it works, then we wouldn’t have Vampyres in the first place. I’d be...
If, as Max Weber contended, science, modernity and rationalism have disenchanted the world and swept it clean of gods, spirits and magic (or, at least, problematised believing in them), then psychedelics offer a potential way out of the ensuing exist...
