In the world I lived in, the world of human people, there were ties and debts and consequences and good deeds. That was what bound people to society; maybe that was what constituted society. And I tried to live in my little niche in it the best way I...
Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
The theologian Meric Casaubon argued—in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity—that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.
In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason...
The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.
To change the world, a country, an organization, a community, a relationship, begin with the smallest seed of change: begin with yourself. That is what this book is all about.
The supposed reality of misfiring synapses, chemical imbalances, frontal lobe anomalies and the like - did not sway her desire for escape into an alternate universe - where she could discover fascinating things about her inner world - or where she co...
If no one ever deviated from currently accepted mainstream Science - we would still have the Flat Earth Society!
I’m only going say this—love is a wild creature that cannot be tamed. It’s unconditional. And although it sometimes makes you feel like one small person against this big old world, you must remember you are the world to one particular person. -...
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
There is nothing more powerful than a witch who knows how to contain her power. Standing comfortably within its mystery and allure.
...every time you make a rule you take away a choice and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.
Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.
Antislavery idealists might prefer to live in some better world, which like all such places was too good to be true. The American nation in 1790, however, was a real world, laden with legacies like slavery, and therefore too true to be good.
Thus, Marlowe posed the silent question: could aspiring Icarus be happy with a toilsome life on land managing a plough with plodding oxen having once tasted the weightless bliss of flight?
Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.
There was so much about our past that I still didn't understand, and I wasn't one to tell the future. I could only tell the way the world worked. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it wo...
We make sense of the world intentionally. Faced with chaos, we seek or make the familiar, and build up the world with it. Babies do it, we all do it; we filter out most of what our senses report.
If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
The economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to co...
