Famous Advocate Quotes

When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.

Retired general Colin Powell famously advocates collecting half of the information available, then making a decision, even though your information is clearly incomplete.

As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as humanism gained increasing social credibility and political power, it sprouted two very different offshoots: socialist humanism, which encompassed a plethora of socialist and communist movements, and evolutionary humanism, whose most famous advocates were the Nazis. Both offshoots agreed with liberalism that human experience is the ultimate source of meaning and authority.

Diomedes kept talking as if she hadn’t spoken. He kept looking at me. “You think you can get her to talk?” Before I could reply, a voice said from behind me, “I believe he can, yes.” It was Indira. I’d almost forgotten she was there. I turned around. “And in a way,” Indira said, “Alicia has begun to talk. She’s communicating through Theo—he is her advocate. It’s already happening.” Diomedes nodded. He looked pensive for a moment. I knew what was on his mind—Alicia Berenson was a famous patient, and a powerful bargaining tool with the Trust. If we could make demonstrable progress with her, we’d have a much stronger hand in saving the Grove from closure.

Finally, the cognomen, a personal surname, was particular to its holder or his branch of the family. It often had a jokey or down-to-earth ring: so, for example, “Cicero” is Latin for “chickpea” and it was supposed that some ancestor had had a wart of that shape on the end of his nose. When Marcus was about to launch his career as an advocate and politician, friends advised him to change his name to something less ridiculous. “No,” he replied firmly, “I am going to make my cognomen more famous than those of men like Scaurus and Catulus.” These were two leading Romans of the day, and the point of the remark was that “Catulus” was the Latin for “whelp” or “puppy,” and “Scaurus” meant “with large or projecting ankles.

As the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate, put it to me: “We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world’s most famous climate scientists tell us?

In famous speeches such as “Message to the Grassroots” and “Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm did not eschew politics. Rather, he suggested that Black people use their voting rights to develop an alternative power base. He remained deeply critical of the traditional Civil Rights leadership but advocated for a Black united front in which various political currents could contend. He also insisted on making self-defense a reality, not just a slogan, and held out the idea that a Black Nationalist army might eventually form if the Black masses were not given full rights.

Lewis famously advocated a metaphysical methodology based on subjecting rival hypotheses to a cost-benefit analysis. Usually there are two kinds of cost associated with accepting a metaphysical thesis. The first is accepting some kind of entity into one's ontology, for example, abstracta, possibilia, or a relation of primitive resemblance. The second is relinquishing some intuitions, for example, the intuition that causes antedate their effects, that dispositions reduce to categorical bases, or that facts about identity over time supervene on facts about instants of time. It is taken for granted that abandoning intuitions should be regarded as a cost rather than a benefit.

The Constitution did not give Americans freedom; they had been free long before it was written, and when it was put up for ratification they eyed it suspiciously, lest it infringe their freedom. The Federalists, the advocates of ratification, went to great pains to assure the people that under the Constitution they would be just as free as they ever were. Madison, in particular, stressed the point that there would be no change in their personal status in the new setup, that the contemplated government would simply be the foreign department of the several states. The Constitution itself is a testimonial to the temper of the times, for it fashioned a government so restricted in its powers as to prevent any infraction of freedom; that was the reason for the famous “checks and balances.” Any other kind of constitution could not have got by.

If this is true—if solitude is an important key to creativity—then we might all want to develop a taste for it. We’d want to teach our kids to work independently. We’d want to give employees plenty of privacy and autonomy. Yet increasingly we do just the opposite. We like to believe that we live in a grand age of creative individualism. We look back at the midcentury era in which the Berkeley researchers conducted their creativity studies, and feel superior. Unlike the starched-shirted conformists of the 1950s, we hang posters of Einstein on our walls, his tongue stuck out iconoclastically. We consume indie music and films, and generate our own online content. We “think different” (even if we got the idea from Apple Computer’s famous ad campaign). But the way we organize many of our most important institutions—our schools and our workplaces—tells a very different story. It’s the story of a contemporary phenomenon that I call the New Groupthink—a phenomenon that has the potential to stifle productivity at work and to deprive schoolchildren of the skills they’ll need to achieve excellence in an increasingly competitive world. The New Groupthink elevates teamwork above all else. It insists that creativity and intellectual achievement come from a gregarious place. It has many powerful advocates. “Innovation—the heart of the knowledge economy—is fundamentally social,” writes the prominent journalist Malcolm Gladwell. “None of us is as smart as all of us,” declares the organizational consultant Warren Bennis,

There are two famous quips of Stalin which are both grounded in this logic. When Stalin answered the question "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?" by "They are both worse!", the underlying premise is that the Leftist deviation is REALLY ("objectively," as Stalinists liked to put it) not leftist at all, but a concealed Rightist one! When Stalin wrote, in a report on a party congress, that the delegates, with the majority of votes, unanimously approved the CC resolution, the underlying premise is, again, that there was really no minority within the party: those who voted against thereby excluded themselves from the party... In all these cases, the genus repeatedly overlaps (fully coincides) with one of its species. This is also what allows Stalin to read history retroactively, so that things "become clear" retroactively: it was not that Trotsky was first fighting for the revolution with Lenin and Stalin and then, at a certain stage, opted for a different strategy than the one advocated by Stalin; this last opposition (Trotsky/Stalin) "makes it clear" how, "objectively," Trotsky was against revolution all the time back. We find the same procedure in the classificatory impasse the Stalinist ideologists and political activists faced in their struggle for collectivization in the years 1928-1933. In their attempt to account for their effort to crush the peasants' resistance in "scientific" Marxist terms, they divided peasants into three categories (classes): the poor peasants (no land or minimal land, working for others), natural allies of the workers; the autonomous middle peasants, oscillating between the exploited and exploiters; the rich peasants, "kulaks" (employing other workers, lending them money or seeds, etc.), the exploiting "class enemy" which, as such, has to be "liquidated." However, in practice, this classification became more and more blurred and inoperative: in the generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied, and other two categories often joined kulaks in their resistance to forced collectivization. An additional category was thus introduced, that of a subkulak, a peasant who, although, with regard to his economic situation, was to poor to be considered a kulak proper, nonetheless shared the kulak "counter-revolutionary" attitude.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

† Bastiat (1801–1850) was a strikingly clear-minded early advocate of what came to be known as liberal economics, whose central idea is that the state should get out of the way of free trade. He would be a lot more famous if he wasn’t French, since the French are highly distrustful of the whole notion of liberal economics and tend to see it as an Anglo-Saxon cross between a conspiracy and a mistake.

Bastiat (1801–1850) was a strikingly clear-minded early advocate of what came to be known as liberal economics, whose central idea is that the state should get out of the way of free trade. He would be a lot more famous if he wasn’t French, since the French are highly distrustful of the whole notion of liberal economics and tend to see it as an Anglo-Saxon cross between a conspiracy and a mistake.

More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.

On the one hand, they must develop virtuous habits of behavior; and on the other, they must develop their mental powers through the study of such disciplines as mathematics and philosophy. Both of these types of instruction are necessary. To begin with, some people may not have the intellectual capacity to acquire knowledge; they will not be able to understand what the “good life” is, just as others do not have the intellectual power to apprehend higher mathematics. But if they imitate and are guided by those people who have knowledge of the good and who accordingly act virtuously, they, too, will act virtuously even though they do not understand the essential nature of the good life. On the basis of this sort of reasoning, Plato goes on to advocate the necessity of censorship in what he calls an “ideal society”—the society that is portrayed in his most famous book, the Republic. Plato feels that it is necessary to prevent young people from being exposed to certain sorts of experiences if they are to develop virtuous habits and thus lead a good life. ========== Philosophy Made Simple (Richard H. Popkin;Avrum Stroll)

The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true. The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.

Ever Since I Can Remember, I Have Always Been a Huge Advocate for Women and Children.

Several Top Secret recommendations were made by Dr. Aurelio Peccei of the  Club of Rome. He advocated that a plague be introduced that would have same effect as the famous Black Death of history. The chief recommendation was to develop a microbe which would attack the autoimmune system and thus render the development of a vaccine impossible.

Another key philosopher was the ever-popular Voltaire (1694-1778) who used his literary skill to write plays, poems, novels, essays, and reams of letters that expressed his philosophical beliefs to the masses. Voltaire was extremely critical of the dogmatic nature of the Catholic Church and constantly campaigned for the separation of the French state and church. An advocate of freedom of expression and critic of all religious institutions, Voltaire’s work was frequently censored, but in his writing, he often used satire to mask his true beliefs, as in his most famous work, Candide.

In the mid-1950s, Governor Luther Hodges cited Aycock’s “march of progress” in his defense of Jim Crow as a system that both ensured political tranquility and enabled racial uplift. His successor in the state house, Terry Sanford, noted that Aycock famously proclaimed “as a white man, I am afraid of but one thing for my race and that is we shall become afraid to give the Negro a fair chance. The white man in the South can never attain to his fullest growth until he does absolute justice to the Negro race.” This framing enabled Hodges, Sanford, and, later, Governor Dan Moore to define the “North Carolina way” in sharp contrast with the racially charged massive resistance rhetoric that defined the approaches of Alabama under George Wallace and Mississippi under Ross Barnett. This moderate course caused early observers like V. O. Key to view the state as “an inspiring exception to southern racism.” Crucially, it operated hand-in-hand with North Carolina’s anti-labor stance to advance the state’s economic interests. Hodges, Sanford, and Moore approached racial policy by emphasizing tranquility, and thus an intolerance for political contention. These officials placed a high value on law and order, condemning as “extremists” those who threatened North Carolina’s “harmonious” race relations by advocating either civil rights or staunch segregation. While racial distinctions could not be elided in the Jim Crow South, where the social fabric was shot through with racial disparity, an Aycock-style progressivist stance emphasized the maintenance of racial separation alongside white elites’ moral and civic interest in the well-being of black residents. This interest generally took the form of a pronounced paternalism, which typically enabled powerful white residents to serve as benefactors to their black neighbors, in a sort of patron-client relationship. “It was white people doing something for blacks—not with them,” explained Charlotte-based Reverend Colemon William Kerry Jr. While often framed as gestures of beneficence and closeness, such acts reproduced inequity and distance. More broadly, this racial order served dominant economic and political interests, as it preserved segregation with a progressive sheen that favored industrial expansion.12

Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.

rarely do the advocates of cleanses explain what is meant by toxins. It is one of those nebulous pseudoscientific terms rolled out by people deliberately avoiding the specificity required for a science-based analysis. It’s the modern-day equivalent of “evil spirits,” vague enough to mean just about anything while retaining the ring of scientific legitimacy.

Like so many, he felt that his primary obligation was to Virginia. He had hoped for a political resolution, hoping to avoid war, having witnessed the atrocities of war in Mexico, and he believed both sides took the notion of war too lightly. He confided in his pastor that he had seen enough of war to look upon it as the “sum of all evils,” and was aware of the safety from which the advocates of war spoke, claiming, “They do not know its horrors.”[6]

It’s not that it’s impossible to discipline with reward. In fact, rewarding good behaviour can be very effective. The most famous of all behavioural psychologists, B.F. Skinner, was a great advocate of this approach. He was expert at it. He taught pigeons to play ping-pong, although they only rolled the ball back and forth by pecking it with their beaks.101 But they were pigeons. So even though they played badly, it was still pretty good. Skinner even taught his birds to pilot missiles during the Second World War, in Project Pigeon (later Orcon).102 He got a long way, before the invention of electronic guidance systems rendered his efforts obsolete.

The activist bell hooks famously noted that the absence of structural critique was very revealing: Sandberg’s definition of feminism begins and ends with the notion that it’s all about gender equality within the existing social system. From this perspective, the structures of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy need not be challenged.… No matter their standpoint, anyone who advocates feminist politics needs to understand the work does not end with the fight for equality of opportunity within the existing patriarchal structure. We must understand that challenging and dismantling patriarchy is at the core of contemporary feminist struggle—this is essential and necessary if women and men are to be truly liberated from outmoded sexist thinking and actions.20

The famous 20th-century writer and theologian C. S. Lewis was an ardent believer and advocate of the theosis perspective of God and humanity. As he said: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship . . . There are no ordinary people.

Satya famously said he wants to move away from having a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” culture. He's a big advocate of diversity and inclusion, collaboration instead of ruthless competition, being open minded, encouraging other perspectives and ideas, and of doing good. Instead of the constant infighting that Microsoft was known for, Satya wanted to create a culture based on empathy. One of his first acts as CEO was to ask his employees to read the book “Nonviolent Communication.

The Sedition Act of 1918 went even further, prohibiting anyone to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the armed forces. More than a thousand people were convicted under these two acts, including Eugene Debs, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for advocating resistance to conscription. Such convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States (1919), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously declared that the doctrine of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting “fire” in a theater or in other incidents in which such speech presents a “clear and present danger.” Did Wilson overreact?

The Sedition Act of 1918 went even further, prohibiting anyone to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, the Constitution, or the armed forces. More than a thousand people were convicted under these two acts, including Eugene Debs, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for advocating resistance to conscription. Such convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States (1919), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously declared that the doctrine of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting “fire” in a theater or in other incidents in which such speech presents a “clear and present danger.

It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Today, Adam Smith is famous as the father of capitalism and an advocate of a central tenet of free market thought: that greed is supposedly good and it drives markets. This was an idea pushed by neoliberal economists, inspired by Friedrich Hayeck and Milton Friedman, who had no knowledge of the history of moral philosophy, or of Scotland. What they missed is that no gentleman of his time could ever espouse greed, least of all a professor of moral philosophy. Indeed, Adam Smith recognized greed as an economic driver, and saw it as necessary, but also realized that it was a problem for society. His work was not an espousal of greed, but rather a response to it. His work was an attempt to find a way to reign in commercial greed to support the agrarian order, which he believed to be inherently more productive than business.

Everyone knows that the Puritans, powerful advocates of frugal simplicity, were suspicious of pleasure. But this strain in Christianity had some philosophical pedigree since it echoes a sentiment voiced by Plato. In several dialogues Plato argues against those who view pleasure as the ultimate good for human beings. In the Gorgias, for instance, Socrates and Callicles, an aspiring politician, go head-to-head on precisely this question. Callicles identifies the good with pleasure and understands pleasure as the gratification of desire. This is the axiom underlying his defense of oratory, since through oratory one can gain power, and with power one can gratify one’s desires. Against this, Socrates defends philosophy, which aims at truth (as opposed to mere persuasion), and likens the person who continually seeks pleasure to someone who is continually trying (and failing) to fill up a leaky pitcher. (Callicles responds by comparing the Socratic ideal of serenity to the experience of a stone.) In other works too, Plato’s distrust of pleasure is evident. He sees it as an attractive force that pulls us away from what really matters: namely, truth and virtue. In the Republic, Socrates’s initial vision of an ideal city is one in which the citizens spend their days sitting around discussing philosophy, undistracted by desires for anything beyond the satisfaction of basic needs.24 (His interlocutors reject this vision as being insufficiently civilized.) In the Phaedo philosophy is famously described as a preparation for death, in part because it helps the soul to detach itself from the body with all its sensual appetites and cravings.

At the heart of the mystery of Bigfoot is a paradox: many people see Sasquatches, but no one can find one. This is an extremely uncomfortable dilemma for Bigfoot advocates. Either Sasquatches are too rare to locate, in which case they should also be too rare to see; or the common and widespread sighting reports are by and large accurate, in which case science should long ago have located a specimen.

In recent years, Eric Ries famously adapted Lean to solve the wicked problem of software startups: what if we build something nobody wants?[ 41] He advocates use of a minimum viable product (“ MVP”) as the hub of a Build-Measure-Learn loop that allows for the least expensive experiment. By selling an early version of a product or feature, we can get feedback from customers, not just about how it’s designed, but about what the market actually wants. Lean helps us find the goal. Figure 1-7. The Lean Model. Agile is a similar mindset that arose in response to frustration with the waterfall model in software development. Agilistas argue that while Big Design Up Front may be required in the contexts of manufacturing and construction where it’s costly if not impossible to make changes during or after execution, it makes no sense for software. Since requirements often change and code can be edited, the Agile Manifesto endorses flexibility. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.

In 1802, he famously advocated “a wall of separation between Church & State,” a phrase often cited in later decisions of the United States Supreme Court. A true religion, he argued, had no need of a government to defend it: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

The genocide, which was immortalized in a poem by the famous Soviet poet Yevtushenko, may have set a world record for deliberately concentrated mass murder.

Experiments published in 1983 clearly showed that subjects could choose not to perform a movement that was on the cusp of occurring (that is, that their brain was preparing to make) and that was preceded by a large readiness potential. In this view, although the physical sensation of an urge to move is initiated unconsciously, will can still control the outcome by vetoing the action. Later researchers, in fact, reported readiness potentials that precede a planned foot movement not by mere milliseconds but by almost two full seconds, leaving free won’t an even larger window of opportunity. “Conscious will could thus affect the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes,” Libet says. “Conscious will might block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.” Everyone, Libet continues, has had the experience of “vetoing a spontaneous urge to perform some act. This often occurs when the urge to act involves some socially unacceptable consequence, like an urge to shout some obscenity at the professor.” Volunteers report something quite consistent with this view of the will as wielding veto power. Sometimes, they told Libet, a conscious urge to move seemed to bubble up from somewhere, but they suppressed it. Although the possibility of moving gets under way some 350 milliseconds before the subject experiences the will to move, that sense of will nevertheless kicks in 150 to 200 milliseconds before the muscle moves—and with it the power to call a halt to the proceedings. Libet’s findings suggest that free will operates not to initiate a voluntary act but to allow or suppress it. “We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as ‘bubbling up’ in the brain,” he explains. “The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort…. This kind of role for free will is actually in accord with religious and ethical strictures. These commonly advocate that you ‘control yourself.’ Most of the Ten Commandments are ‘do not’ orders.” And all five of the basic moral precepts of Buddhism are restraints: refraining from killing, from lying, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from intoxicants. In the Buddha’s famous dictum, “Restraint everywhere is excellent.

The elephants in our heads—our reflexive reactions—perceive anything unfamiliar as just plain wrong. Familiar things feel right, right, RIGHT! This is the sensation comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed “truthiness.” It’s like being drunk or high: delicious in the short term, ultimately toxic. The righteous mind can temporarily overwhelm our sense of truth, including our allegiance to justice and fairness. When our righteous mind is in control, we lose the way of integrity and become weirdly, obviously self-contradictory, like proponents of world peace who advocate war against anyone who disagrees with them. Because violence and the righteous mind are closely linked, I don’t call destructive actions sins of violence, as Dante does. I think of them as “errors of righteousness.” They are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking.