Quote Generator Random Quotes

We go straight". I say again. "If we start making turns, we might not know what direction is what. If we keep going straight, at least we know how to get back to where we came from if we get into trouble. I know it's tiring, but walking uphill is a good thing-every step we take is a step closer to getting out." "I see shoulders droop, I hear heavy sighs. They don't want to agree with me; they want to go the easier way".

More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience-a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie novel, and the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded. It was plain that too may books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a cord. When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for "Best of Young British Novelists II" because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is...One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial's message to a particularly backward-looking critic: "You only praise the good old days We young 'uns get no mention. I don't see why I have to die To gain your kind attention.

The Lion King? It's just a kid's film. Just a kid's film?!? Yeah, just a kid's film with an IMDB rating of 8.5, 2 Academy Awards and 2 Golden Globes, that's been adapted into THE most successful West-end musical of all time, generating a gross profit of 8 million pounds and counting. "But maybe it's just a kid's film because it doesn't deal with any mature films" said fucking nobody ever. The Lion King is the greatest anthropomorphic assault upon the theme of mortality that Western culture has ever produced. It is so complex that your tiny, shriveled, and scrotum of a brain wouldn't dare to fathom it. So no, it is not just a kid's film, it is Shakespear with fur!

HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions. This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.) The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify.

Why not?" I ask, "Are we supposed to be invincible? Isn't there a price to be paid? We pillage our environment and we suffer natural disasters. The rich use the poor and we have riots. It's our history, Will. Our human history. We have [messed]-up diseases that pass on from generation to generation, repeating one too many genes or being completely absent on some random chromosome. It's not why, but when.

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.

Natural or sexual selection acts on these nonsilent mutations, slightly increasing or decreasing the offspring with that trait in each successive generation against a background of random genetic change. This random genetic change and the accumulation of heritable changes, while the other drives increases or decreases in traits based on the advantage or disadvantage they confer on the organism. Taken together, randomness and direction produce what biologist Stephen Jay Gould called the "drunkard's walk." A person stumbling from a bar and deeply inebriated might have some sense of which direction home lies, but their path would be anything but direct. They might, if the randomness predominated, even be headed in the wrong direction.

Let's look at one more quick example of modern evolution at work. In the early 1800s, light-colored lichens covered many of the trees in the English countryside. The peppered moth was a light-colored insect that blended in unnoticeably with the lichens. Predators had great difficulty distinguishing the peppered moth from its background environment, so the moths easily survived and reproduced. Then the Industrial Revolution came to the English country- side. Coal-burning factories turned the lichens a sooty black. The light-colored peppered moth became clearly visible. Most of them were eaten. But because of genetic variation and mutation, a few peppered moths displayed a slightly darker color. These darker moths were better able to blend in with the sooty lichens, and so lived to produce other darker-colored moths. In little over a hun- dred years, successive generations of peppered moths evolved from almost completely white to completely black. Natural selec- tion, rather than "random accident," guided the moth's evolution- ary progress.

In other words, the subjective perception of a copy of you in a typical parallel universe is a seemingly random sequence of wins and losses, behaving as if generated through a random process with probabilities of 50% for each outcome. This experiment can be made more rigorous if you take notes on a piece of pater, writing "1" every time you win and "0" every time you lose, and place a decimal point in front of it all. For example, if you lose, lose, win, lose, win,win,win, lose,lose and win, you'd write ".0010111001." But this is just what real numbers between zero and one look like when written out in binary, the way computers usually write them on the hard drive! If you imagine repeating the Quantum Cards experiment infinitely many times, your piece of paper would have infinitely many digits written on it, so you can match each parallel universe with a number between zero and one. Now what Borel's theorem proves is that almost all of these numbers have 50% of their decimals equal to 0 and 50% equal to 1, so this means that almost all of the parallel universes have you winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time. It's not just that the percentages come out right. The number ".010101010101..." has 50% of its digits equal to 0 but clearly isn't random, since it has a simple pattern. Borel's theorem can be generalized to show that almost all numbers have random-looking digits with no patterns whatsoever. This means that in almost all Level III parallel universes, your sequence of wins and losses will also be totally random, without any pattern, so that all that can be predicted is that you'll win 50% of the time.

Cultural evolution can proceed so quickly because it operates, as biological evolution does not, in the "Lamarckian" mode - by the inheritance of acquired characters. Whatever one generation learns, it can pass to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is an indirect process: genetic variation must first be available to construct an advantageous feature, and natural selection must then preserve it. Since genetic variation arises at random, not preferentially directed toward advantageous features, the Darwinian process works slowly. Cultural evolution is not only rapid; it is also readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes.

With it being so easy to produce such dramatically random behaviour from a few nonlinear components, it is easy to imagine how a small module of chaotic circuitry in our unconscious brain could be responsible for our random creativity and flashes of inspiration apparently appearing "out of nowhere". There is surely no need to imagine that any more exotic processes — such as random quantum processes — would need to be involved to generate our creativity and inventiveness. In the December 1986 issue of Scientific American, a major article on chaos described this possibility: "Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.

It is a combination of man’s mental acuity and self-importance to try and attach any meaning to life. Why can’t we just be an extremely fortunate life form randomly hurtling through space on an ideally-positioned rock? If life has any meaning, it is the basic biological one of passing on our genes to the next generation before we die.