“
Now, let's never talk about you being related to her again. Because I'm technically still engaged to her, and that's really weird."
Cinder couldn't help laughing, even exhaustedly, even just to cover up the screaming inside, as he bound her up in his arms again. Her headache began to fade, replaced with the strength of his heartbeat and the way she felt almost delicate when she was pressed up against him like this.
Almost fragile.
Almost safe.
Almost like a princess.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
“
Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.
”
”
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
“
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
”
”
Peter Matthiessen
“
Dear God
Please take away my pain and despair of yesterday and any unpleasant memories and replace them with Your glorious promise of new hope. Show me a fresh HS-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. I ask You for the mind of Christ so I can discern Your voice from the voice of my past. I pray that former rejection and deep hurts will not color what I see and hear now.
Help me to see all the choices I have ahead of me that can alter the direction of my life. I ask You to empower me to let go of the painful events and heartaches that would keep me bound. Thank You for Your forgiveness that You have offered to me at such a great price. Pour it into my heart so I can relinquish bitterness hurts and disappointments that have no place in my life. Please set me free to forgive those who have sinned against me and caused me pain and also myself. Open my heart to receive Your complete forgiveness and amazing grace. You have promised to bind up my wounds Psa 147:3 and restore my soul Psa 23:3 .
Help me to relinquish my past surrender to You my present and move to the future You have prepared for me. I ask You to come into my heart and make me who You would have me to be so that I might do Your will here on earth. I thank You Lord for all that’s happened in my past and for all I have become through those experiences. I pray You will begin to gloriously renew my present.
”
”
Sue Augustine (When Your Past Is Hurting Your Present: Getting Beyond Fears That Hold You Back)
“
Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects; thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so lone as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant; they are interested in form only.
”
”
Henri Poincaré
“
When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.
”
”
Cathy Park Hong (Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning)
“
Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
”
”
William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch)
“
Line of control must be renamed as garden of love and the barbed wire fencing should be replaced by the garden of flowers.
”
”
Amit Ray (Nuclear Weapons Free World - Peace on the Earth)
“
Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing.
”
”
Alex Gaskarth
“
Lily had lived with the same pain for so long it felt like a part of her. The worst days, though, were when the pain was different. When it came faster, or harsher, or fiercer than she was used to. When it prickled instead of throbbed. When it attacked her right ankle instead of her left knee. When it woke her up at night instead of aching dully first thing in the morning. On those days, her standard-issue pain was replaced by something different and frightening, something that took over her body and left her without the slightest clue of when, or even if, it would release her.
Those times, her pain wasn’t a part of her anymore. Those times, she was a part of it.
”
”
Robin Talley (As I Descended)
“
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes -- the legal subordination of one sex to the other -- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
”
”
John Stuart Mill
“
State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production.
”
”
Friedrich Engels (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific)
“
Can anyone actually find a replacement for a lost loved one?
Isn't there a difference between things and human beings?
”
”
honeya
“
Our whole image of wolf packs and alphas is completely wrong. Instead, wolves live the way people do:7 in families made up of a mom, a dad, and their children. Sometimes an unrelated wolf can be adopted into a pack, or one of the mom’s or dad’s relatives is part of the pack (the “maiden aunt”), or a mom or dad who has died could be replaced by a new wolf. But mostly wolf packs are just a mom, a dad, and their pups.
”
”
Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals)
“
When everything is convertible, and when trust depends on anonymous coins and cowry shells, it corrodes local traditions, intimate relations and human values, replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?
If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.
”
”
C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite)
“
The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.
”
”
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
“
Consider an AI that has hedonism as its final goal, and which would therefore like to tile the universe with “hedonium” (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for the generation of pleasurable experience). To this end, the AI might produce computronium (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for computation) and use it to implement digital minds in states of euphoria. In order to maximize efficiency, the AI omits from the implementation any mental faculties that are not essential for the experience of pleasure, and exploits any computational shortcuts that according to its definition of pleasure do not vitiate the generation of pleasure. For instance, the AI might confine its simulation to reward circuitry, eliding faculties such as a memory, sensory perception, executive function, and language; it might simulate minds at a relatively coarse-grained level of functionality, omitting lower-level neuronal processes; it might replace commonly repeated computations with calls to a lookup table; or it might put in place some arrangement whereby multiple minds would share most parts of their underlying computational machinery (their “supervenience bases” in philosophical parlance). Such tricks could greatly increase the quantity of pleasure producible with a given amount of resources.
”
”
Nick Bostrom (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies)
“
our tragedy begins humid.
in a humid classroom.
with a humid text book. breaking into us.
stealing us from ourselves.
one poem. at a time.
it begins with shakespeare.
the hot wash.
the cool acid. of
dead white men and women. people.
each one a storm.
crashing. into our young houses.
making us islands. easy isolations.
until we are so beleaguered and
swollen
with a definition of poetry that is white skin and
not us.
that we tuck our scalding. our soreness.
behind ourselves and
learn
poetry.
as trauma. as violence. as erasure.
another place we do not exist.
another form of exile
where we should praise. honor. our own starvation.
the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley.
and
angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats.
that give us slight rest.
to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of
my own bursting
extraordinary
self.
and to have
this
be
called
education.
to take my name out of my name.
out of where my native poetry lives. in me.
and
replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot…
(what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.)
and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies.
(years later. the conclusion:
shakespeare is relative.
white literature is relative.
that we are force fed the meat of
an animal
that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition.
is not relative.
is inert.)
”
”
Nayyirah Waheed (Nejma)
“
Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.
”
”
Rolf Potts
“
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
”
”
John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women)
“
How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning.
”
”
Cornel West (Race Matters)
“
The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations.
”
”
Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
“
This is the pattern of gun killings in big cities. Most homicides are not professional jobs, in felonious pursuits, but are committed by relatives, friends or neighbors, in the home or nearby. They are sparked by liquor, by lust, by jealousy, or greed, or a burning sense of injustice. And most are committed by people with no previous record of violence. It is these who will be restrained by stricter gun laws, who will find it much harder to go home, pick up a gun and shoot an adversary. The liquor will pass, the lust will die, reflection will replace passion if the instrument of death is not so readily available.
”
”
Sydney J. Harris
“
The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification—if not instant, then certainly relatively immediate. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist. ... A journalist always wonders: If my byline disappears, have I disappeared as well?
”
”
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
“
Assimilation was frequently but another name for the very special brand of relations between human beings which had been imposed by colonialism. These relations demanded that the individual, torn from the context to which he owed his identity, should replace his habits of feeling, thinking, and acting by another set of habits which belonged to the strangers who dominated him.
”
”
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
“
Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (World Order)
“
The study reported a 24 percent relative increase in the risk of breast cancer among a subset of women taking HRT, and headlines all over the world condemned HRT as a dangerous, cancer-causing therapy. All of a sudden, on the basis of this one study, hormone replacement treatment became virtually taboo. This reported 24 percent risk increase sounded scary indeed. But nobody seemed to care that the absolute risk increase of breast cancer for women in the study remained minuscule. Roughly five out of every one thousand women in the HRT group developed breast cancer, versus four out of every one thousand in the control group, who received no hormones.
”
”
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
“
She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (Freedom)
“
I believe that the Big-Bang Theory and the Evolution Theory, as well as Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory which does not allow for the existence of faster-than-light (superluminal) phenomena, all have flaws in them and must be replaced by new theories that can give Mankind a more concise view of our Universe. But the fact is exceptional discoveries and theories that challenge official science have been ignored by the Establishment for decades.
”
”
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
“
Whereas penetration most often means that industry demand will level off, for durable goods, achieving penetration can lead to an abrupt drop in industry demand. After most potential customers have purchased the product, its durability implies that few will buy replacements for a number of years. If industry penetration has been rapid, this situation may translate into several very lean years for industry demand. For example, industry sales of snowmobiles, which underwent very rapid penetration, fell from 425,000 units per year in the peak year (1970-1971) to 125,000 to 200,000 units per year in 1976-1977.6 Recreational vehicles underwent a similar though not quite so dramatic decline. The relation between the growth rate after penetration and growth before penetration will be a function of how fast penetration has been reached and the average time before replacement, and this figure can be calculated.
”
”
Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
“
Global warming, in contrast, will probably have different impacts on different nations. Some countries, most notably Russia, might actually benefit from it. Because Russia has relatively few coastline assets, it is far less worried than China or Kiribati about rising sea levels. And whereas higher temperatures are likely to turn Chad into a desert, they might simultaneously turn Siberia into the breadbasket of the world. Moreover, as the ice melts in the far north, the Russian-dominated Arctic sea lanes might become the artery of global commerce, and Kamchatka might replace Singapore as the crossroad of the world.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
“
Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken.
”
”
David Abikzir (Flash Winners)
“
some people cannot be replaced no matter how many relations you create. the person with whom you share yourself and all your thoughts and ideas is irreplaceable.
”
”
umair jan
“
We destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education with social.
”
”
Kevin Swanson (Apostate - The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West)
“
The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said?
What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.
”
”
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
“
Deception is the natural defence of the weak against the strong, and the South used it for many years against its conquerors; to-day it must be prepared to see its black proletariat turn that same two-edged weapon against itself. And how natural this is! The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro the present hopelessness of physical defence. Political defence is becoming less and less available, and economic defence is still only partially effective. But there is a patent defence at hand,—the defence of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same defence which peasants of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States, is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.
”
”
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
“
Many historians have noted an interesting phenomenon in American life in the years immediately after a war. In the councils of government fierce partisanship replaces the necessary political coalitions of wartime. IN the great arena of social relations -- business, labour, the community -- violence rises, fear and recrimination dominate public discussion, passion prevails over reason. Many historians have noted this phenomenon. It is attributed to the continuance beyond the end of the war of the war hysteria. Unfortunately, the necessary emotional fever for fighting a war cannot be turned off like a water tap. Enemies must continue to be found. The mind and heart cannot be demobilised as quickly as the platoon. On the contrary, like a fiery furnace at white heat, it takes a considerable time to cool.
”
”
E.L. Doctorow (The Book of Daniel)
“
every year 98% of your atoms are replaced with the air that you breathe, the foods that you eat and the liquid that you drink [79]. This might sound slightly scary or even a surprise to you but look at it as an opportunity. An opportunity that you can take to make a new slimmer healthier body for yourself by eating well and exercising smartly, and in a years time you'll literally be looking at an almost whole new you.
”
”
Sam Feltham (Slimology: The Relatively Simple Science Of Slimming)
“
Hanging out consists of people getting together in groups and doing stuff together. The atmosphere is relaxed and relations in the group rarely rise above the level of friendship (or friendship with benefits). Dating consists of pairing off with someone in a temporary commitment so you can get to know the person better and perhaps start a long-term relationship with them. There is nothing wrong with hanging out, but it’s not a replacement for dating.
”
”
Brett McKay (The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man)
“
In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?"
I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance.
Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads?
To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations.
But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular.
So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow.
Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power.
Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city.
When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant
”
”
R.A. Salvatore (Streams of Silver (Forgotten Realms: Icewind Dale, #2; Legend of Drizzt, #5))
“
. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness.
. . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen.
The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive.
All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.
The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature.
. . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.
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Mary Midgley (Beast and Man)
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Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year—a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly 8 billion inhabitants—and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five. Both the high relative share and the scale of our dependence on fossil carbon make any rapid substitutions impossible: this is not a biased personal impression stemming from a poor understanding of the global energy system – but a realistic conclusion based on engineering and economic realities.
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Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going)
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Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.
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Naomi Wolf
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I, for one, would prefer to speak of uniqueness rather than relativity. [...] [M]an is unique in terms of both existence and essence. He is unique in that, in the final analysis, he cannot be replaced. And his life is unique in that no one can repeat it.
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Viktor E. Frankl (The Feeling of Meaninglessness: A Challenge to Psychotherapy and Philosophy)
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A consequence of this alienation of humans from their own nature is that they are also alienated from each other. Productive activity becomes ‘activity under the domination, coercion and yoke of another man’. This other man becomes an alien, hostile being. Instead of humans relating to each other co-operatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests.
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Peter Singer (Marx: A Very Short Introduction)
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Freud does at this point shift ground. He moves from an energetic to a topological model of the psyche. So that there be no contradiction, Freud assigns the pleasure principle to its own agency of the personality. “We know,” Freud reminds us, “that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that, from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous.” That is, the PP is blind. In itself, it is not a tendency but pure automaticity which, with respect to another topos undergoes a mutation by which is “is replaced by the reality principle.” A change in place obviates the contradiction but sets the places into relation by which the PP becomes the reality principle (RP.)
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Patrick McCarty (Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as Analyzed by Jacques Derrida: ICG Academic Series)
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Even if a particle could travel backward in time, information could not. Retrocausality will be replaced by something more sophisticated. There are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness everything is an approximation of something else. Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does. Spacetime is built up from approximations, not discrete ones and zeros, and the only constant may be ratios. Quantum entanglement and geometry; if we think of a particle as being at one pole of an expanding sphere that is not perfectly symmetrical, this surface would be "rippling" like the surface of the ocean (in the audio world this is called dithering), at the other pole is the entangled particle's pair and it is a property of the sphere that gives the illusion of connectivity. This is not a physical geometry, it is a computational geometry. Is spacetime a product of entanglement? Renate Loll believes that time is not perfectly symmetrical. Her computer models require causality. Possibly some form of quantum random walk in state space. If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock also, the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical.
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Rick Delmonico
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It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.
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Thomas Henry Huxley (The Evolution Of Theology: An Anthropological Study)
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This extreme treatment was among the proliferating regimens developed in response to the stunning increase in nervous disorders diagnosed around the turn of the century. Commentators and clinicians cited a number of factors related to the stresses of modern civilization: the increased speed of communication facilitated by the telegraph and railroad; the “unmelodious” clamor of city life replacing the “rhythmical” sounds of nature; and the rise of the tabloid press that exploded “local horrors” into national news. These nervous diseases became an epidemic among “the ultracompetitive businessman and the socially active woman.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism)
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By the twentieth century, when the individual had replaced the family as the primary economic unit, the tie between sexuality and reproduction weakened further. Influenced by psychology as well as by the growing power of the media, both men and women began to adopt personal happiness as a primary goal of sexual relations. Various
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John D'Emilio (Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America)
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More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.
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Chris Wright (Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States)
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Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China’s relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this.
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Michael Pillsbury (The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower)
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In their later years, each (Einstein and Schrödinger) hoped to find a unified field theory that would fill in the gaps of quantum physics and unite the forces of nature. By extending general relativity to include all of the natural forces, such a theory would replace matter with pure geometry - fulfilling the dream of the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number".
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Paul Halpern
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There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about. The students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral inten- tion. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.
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Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind)
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How do we move from a growing culture of cruelty to a culture of compassion where we not only perceive and relate to our fellow Americans with a sense of solidarity, but in which public policy reflects community, mutual kindness and concern, and where the idea of the common good is revived so as to replace the alienating, disconnected individualism that threatens to destroy us?
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Tim Wise (Under the Affluence: Shaming the Poor, Praising the Rich and Sacrificing the Future of America (City Lights Open Media))
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should a legislator, wishing to impose a new tax, choose that which would be theoretically the most just? By no means. In practice the most unjust may be the best for the masses. Should it at the same time be the least obvious, and apparently the least burdensome, it will be the most easily tolerated. It is for this reason that an indirect tax, however exorbitant it be, will always be accepted by the crowd, because, being paid daily in fractions of a farthing on objects of consumption, it will not interfere with the habits of the crowd, and will pass unperceived. Replace it by a proportional tax on wages or income of any other kind, to be paid in a lump sum, and were this new imposition theoretically ten times less burdensome than the other, it would give rise to unanimous protest. This arises from the fact that a sum relatively high, which will appear immense, and will in consequence strike the imagination, has been substituted for the unperceived fractions of a farthing. The new tax would only appear light had it been saved farthing by farthing, but this economic proceeding involves an amount of foresight of which the masses are incapable.
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Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind)
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Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing.
In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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Newspeak occurs whenever the primary purpose of language – which is to describe reality – is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. The fundamental speech-act is only superficially represented by the assertoric grammar. Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the futility of rational argument, and also the danger of resistance. As a result Newspeak developed its own special syntax, which – while closely related to the syntax deployed in ordinary descriptions – carefully avoids any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument. Françoise Thom has argued this in her brilliant study La langue de bois.5 The purpose of communist Newspeak, in Thom’s ironical words, has been ‘to protect ideology from the malicious attacks of real things’.
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Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left)
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A child who has been denied the experience of connecting with his own emotions is first consciously and then unconsciously (through the internal identification with the parent) dependent on his parents. Alice Miller writes: He cannot rely on his own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of his own real needs and is alienated from himself to the highest degree. Such a person cannot separate from his parents. He is fantasy bonded with them. He has an illusion (fantasy) of connection, i.e., he really thinks there is a love relationship between himself and his parents. Actually he is fused and enmeshed. This is an entrapment rather than a relationship. Later on this fantasy bond will be transferred to other relationships. This fantasy-bonded person is still dependent on affirmation from his partner, his children, his job. He is especially dependent on his children. A fantasy-bonded person never has a real connection or a real relationship with anyone. There is no real, authentic self there for another to relate to. The real parents, who only accepted the child when he pleased them, remain as introjected voices. The true self hides from these introjected voices just as the real child did. The “loneliness of the parental home” is replaced by “isolation within the self.” Grandiosity is often the result of all this. The grandiose person is admired everywhere and cannot live without admiration. If his talents fail him, it is catastrophic. He must be perfect, otherwise depression is near. Often the most gifted among us are driven in precisely this manner. Many of the most gifted people suffer from severe depression. It cannot be otherwise because depression is about the lost and abandoned child within. “One is free from depression,” writes Alice Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child, “when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.” Emotional abandonment is most often multigenerational. The child of the narcissistically deprived parent becomes an adult with a narcissistically deprived child and will use his children as he was used for his narcissistic supplies. That child then becomes an adult child and the cycle is repeated.
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John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
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Stories tell of children stolen away by faeries, replaced by inhuman look-alikes.
These look-alikes, they say, could be identified by their strange speech or silence. They cried without reason or never showed any emotion at all, and struggled to relate to a world that seemed foreign to them. Folklorists theorize that these stories were early descriptions of autistic children - proof that autistic people have always been here.
But once, they called us changelings.
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Ivelisse Housman (Unseelie (The Unseelie Duology, #1))
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All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond. For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting glances.
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George Eliot (Romola)
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By “crime” I do not mean mere illegality, but instead a category of socially proscribed acts that: (1) threaten or harm other people and (2) violate norms related to justice, personal safety, or human rights, (3) in such a manner or to such a degree as to warrant community intervention (and sometimes coercive intervention). That category would surely include a large number of things that are presently illegal (rape, murder, dropping bricks off an overpass), would certainly not include other things that are presently illegal (smoking pot, sleeping in public parks, nude sunbathing), and would likely also include some things that are not presently illegal (mass evictions, the invasion of Iraq). The point here is that the standards I want to appeal to in invoking the idea of crime are not the state’s standards, but the community’s — and, specifically, the community’s standards as they relate to justice, rights, personal safety, and perhaps especially the question of violence. (...)
Because the state uses this protective function to justify its own violence, the replacement of the police institution is not only a goal of social change, but also a means of achieving it. The challenge is to create another system that can protect us from crime, and can do so better, more justly, with a respect for human rights, and with a minimum of bullying. What is needed, in short, is a shift in the responsibility for public safety—away from the state and toward the community.
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Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
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Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.
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Henry Kissinger (World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History)
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Even amid an avalanche of meetings with aliens in the years to follow, Truman referred to the aliens as “Space Monkeys”. Truman was a very complicated man, and did not trust anybody. Behind the screen, he had developed his own plans regarding German UFOs and aliens’ technology. He replaced the OSS with the Central Intelligence Agency by the 1947 National Security Act, and gave the agency an unlimited power to investigate everything and anything related to Germany’ UFOs and the alien phenomenon.
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Jean-Maximillien De La Croix de Lafayette (Volume I. UFOs: MARIA ORSIC, THE WOMAN WHO ORIGINATED AND CREATED EARTH’S FIRST UFOS (Extraterrestrial and Man-Made UFOs & Flying Saucers Book 1))
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As you work to replace lost nurturance, protection, and guidance, remember that this is an ongoing process. You’re building a new brain, and like any new routine, it takes time before you feel the results. Please don’t do all this by yourself. You’ve been alone long enough. Your body is designed for well-being, but we are relational creatures and we need connection with others. Healing Mother Hunger brings you home—home to yourself—but it’s really helpful when you have a village around your home.
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Kelly McDaniel (Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance)
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Other individuals find it difficult to be authentically themselves even in the presence of their spouses, lovers, or closest friends and relatives. Such individuals, whilst not going so far as to construct a false self which entirely replaces the true self at a conscious level, have an especial need to be alone which goes beyond the occasional demand for solitude referred to above. One possibility, plausible but as yet unproven, is that this especial need to be alone in adult life is derived from, or has been enhanced by, some degree of insecure attachment in early childhood. The child who has not, in infancy, formed secure bonds of trust with attachment figures, may react to parents, and later to other people, in a variety of ways; but I suggest that these variants are founded upon two basic themes. The first is placation; the second, avoidance. I shall try to show that placation is associated with the development of a depressive personality, whilst avoidance is associated with the development of a schizoid personality.
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Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
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Colby’s resourceful, I’ll give him that.”
“You used to be good friends.”
“We were, until he started hanging around Cecily,” came the short reply. “I’m not as angry at him as I was. But it seems that he has to have a woman to prop him up.”
“Not necessarily,” Matt replied. “Sometimes a good woman can save a bad man. It’s an old saying, but fairly true from time to time. Colby was headed straight to hell until Cecily put him on the right track. It’s gratitude, but I don’t think he can see that just yet. He’s in between mourning his ex-wife and finding someone to replace her.” He leaned back again. “I feel sorry for him. He’s basically a one-woman man, but he lost the woman.”
Tate packed back to the wing chair and sat down on the edge. “He’s not getting Cecily. She’s mine, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.”
Matt stared at him. “Don’t you know anything about women in love?”
“Not a lot,” the younger man confessed. “I’ve spent the better part of my life avoiding them.”
“Especially Cecily,” Matt agreed. “She’s been like a shadow. You didn’t miss her until you couldn’t see her behind you anymore.”
“She’s grown away from me,” Tate said. “I don’t know how to close the gap. I know she still feels something for me, but she wouldn’t stay and fight for me.” He lifted his gaze to Matt’s hard face. “She’s carrying my child. I want both of them, regardless of the adjustments I have to make. Cecily’s the only woman I’ve ever truly wanted.”
Matt spread his hands helplessly. “This is one mess I can’t help you sort out,” he said at last. “If Cecily loves you, she’ll give in sooner or later. If it were me, I’d go find her and tell her how I really felt. I imagine she’ll listen.”
Tate stared at his shoes. He couldn’t find the right words to express what he felt.
“Tate,” his father said gently, “you’ve had a lot to get used to lately. Give it time. Don’t rush things. I’ve found that life sorts itself out, given the opportunity.”
Tate’s dark eyes lifted. “Maybe it does.” He searched the other man’s quiet gaze. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was, having a foot in two worlds. I’m getting used to it.”
“You still have a unique heritage,” Matt pointed out. “Not many men can claim Berber revolutionaries and Lakota warriors as relatives.
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Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
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I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom’s conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of ‘contact’ between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, and it must have been Giarian who had added it to the Station’s collection, on his own authority, since Grastrom’s pamphlet was regarded more as a curiosity than a true contribution to Solarist literature
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Stanisław Lem (Solaris)
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there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account. 18 In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of
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N. Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics)
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If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness.
This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!).
The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
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These statues have a complex history. They were not erected to honor the Confederate dead following the war or even at the end of Reconstruction. Most appeared in the early 1920s to send a message that the race-relation liberalization that happened between 1880 and 1900 would not return. The progress and normalcy would be replaced by a racist/statist/“progressive” movement rallying around new eugenic laws, zoning, white supremacy, forced exclusion, state segregation and so on—policies supported not by the people but by white elites infected with demographic fear and pseudo-science. This is when a movement started putting up these statues, not to honor history but as a symbol of intimidation and state control of association.
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Jeffrey Tucker (Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty)
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In the 1980s and 1990s, Venezuela’s Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (widely known by its acronym, PDVSA), was one of the world’s most politically independent and well-managed national oil companies. In the early 2000s, President Hugo Chávez stripped PDVSA of its independent authority and replaced its top officials with loyal followers. He then placed PDVSA in charge of administering a new set of social programs, closely tied to his political machine. By 2004, two-thirds of PDVSA’s budget went to social programs, not petroleum-related activities. As its social programs grew, PDVSA’s transparency fell. After 2003, its financial disclosures dropped sharply, and independent observers found its activities increasingly difficult to monitor.73
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Michael L. Ross (The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations)
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The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.14 The movement denied the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy. Starting from a “clean tablecloth,” the modernists designed urban renewal projects that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture. “Mankind will be reborn,” they theorized, and “live in an ordered relation to the whole.” Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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The ‘labour theory of value’, implicit in Adam Smith and made explicit by David Ricardo, presented labour as the source of economic value, the prime mover of the market and the part of man’s nature that is inherently priced. By harnessing labour we replace the old relation between nature and need with the new relation between man and his products. The translation of use into exchange, of nature into commodities, of personal relations into the disguises assumed by human power – all these changes that mystify the world, placing a veil between human beings and their fulfilment, and surrounding them with the will-o’-the-wisps engendered by their own malleable appetites, had their origin in the trick, the deception, the ‘forging’ that had given one man the power to extract labour from another. To
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Roger Scruton (The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung)
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If secularism is to be understood as a political ideology or social-movement agenda that advocates (at least) the separation of church and state or (at most) the diminishment of religion in society, then humanism can be understood as a related and yet distinct phenomenon; it is more of an optimistic cultural expression or personal worldview, defined by what beliefs it eschews as well as what beliefs it affirms. Simply put, humanism rejects belief in heaven, hell, God, gods, and all things supernatural, while at the same time affirming belief in the positive potential for humans to do and be good, loving, and altruistic. Humanism rejects faith in favor of reason, it rejects superstition in favor of evidence-based thinking, and it replaces worship of a deity with an appreciation for and love of humankind and the natural world.
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Phil Zuckerman (Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions)
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Enigmas answered. Not only is QFT the answer to Einstein's search, it also answers or resolves his Enigmas, and in a way that can be understood by the man (or woman) on the street. In Appendix A you will see how the paradoxes of special relativity become natural and understandable consequences of the way fields behave. In Appendix B you will see that the problematic curvature of space-time in general relativity is gone; in QFT gravity is just another force field and space and time are the same space and time we intuitively believe in. Finally, in Appendix C you will see how the infamous wave-particle duality of QM is eliminated because there are no particles - only fields - and hence there is no duality. However abandoning the familiar picture of solid particles and replacing it with intangible fields is not easy. It will require a leap of imagination greater than did the atomic picture that Eddington struggled with.
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Rodney A. Brooks (Fields of Color: The theory that escaped Einstein)
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Arthur and his partner – shifting fridges is a two man job – are not employed by the delivery company directly, but rather have a contract that requires them to undertake a certain amount of deliveries while paying the company for the use of their liveried van. You read that correctly. Arthur pays for the privilege of going to work in a van owned by a company that pays him no sick pay, holiday pay or pension contributions. While technically self-employed, he is obviously unable to work for any other company or employer except over and above his already full-time schedule. Indeed, if one of them is ill or otherwise indisposed and unable to source their own replacement, the rent for the van is still due. It means that, in twenty-first-century Britain, getting sick while holding down a relatively menial job sees the sick person not just lose their wage for the days they’re off sick, but actually pay money to their employer (who’s not technically their employer) for every day they’re off the road.
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James O'Brien (How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong)
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Westcliff paused at the bedside and glanced at the two women. “This is going to be rather unpleasant,” he said. “Therefore, if anyone has a weak stomach…” His gaze lingered meaningfully on Lillian, who grimaced.
“I do, as you well know,” she admitted. “But I can overcome it if necessary.”
A sudden smile appeared on the earl’s impassive face. “We’ll spare you for now, love. Would you like to go to another room?”
“I’ll sit by the window,” Lillian said, and sped gratefully away from the bed.
Westcliff glanced at Evie, a silent question in his eyes.
“Where shall I stand?” she asked.
“On my left. We’ll need a great many towels and rags, so if you would be willing to replace the soiled ones when necessary—”
“Yes, of course.” She took her place beside him, while Cam stood on his right. As Evie looked up at Westcliff’s bold, purposeful profile, she suddenly found it hard to believe that this powerful man, whom she had always found so intimidating, was willing to go to this extent to help a friend who had betrayed him. A rush of gratitude came over her, and she could not stop herself from tugging lightly at his shirtsleeve. “My lord…before we begin, I must tell you…”
Westcliff inclined his dark head. “Yes?”
Since he wasn’t as tall as Sebastian, it was a relatively easy matter for Evie to stand on her toes and kiss his lean cheek. “Thank you for helping him,” she said, staring into his surprised black eyes. “You’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known.” Her words caused a flush to rise beneath the sun-bronzed tan of his face, and for the first time in their acquaintance the earl seemed at a loss for words.
Lillian smiled as she watched them from across the room. “His motives are not completely heroic,” she said to Evie. “I’m sure he’s relishing the opportunity to literally pour salt on St. Vincent’s wounds.” Despite the facetious remark, Lillian went deadly pale and gripped the chair arms as Westcliff took a thin, gleaming lancet in hand and proceeded to gently open and drain the wound.
”
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Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
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Einstein substituted events for particles; each event had to each other a relation called 'interval', which could be analysed in various ways into a time-element and a space-element. The choice between these various ways was arbitrary, and no one of them was theoretically preferable to any other. Given two events A and B, in different regions, it might happen that according to one convention they were simultaneous, according to another A was earlier than B, and according to yet another B was earlier than A. No physical facts correspond to these different conventions. From all this it seems to follow that events, not particles, must be the 'stuff' of physics. What has been thought of as a particle will have to be thought of as a series of events. The series of events that replaces a particle has certain important physical properties, and therefore demands our attention; but it has no more substantiality than any other series of events that we might arbitrarily single out. Thus 'matter' is not part of the ultimate material of the world, but merely a convenient way of collecting events into bundles.
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Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
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The process of simplifying man's environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and social standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity.
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Murray Bookchin (Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Working Classics))
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Did you ever consider how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm—to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut. This principle is also true, ultimately, in human behavior, in human relationships. They, too, are natural systems based on the law of the harvest. In the short run, in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to “play the game.” In most one-shot or short-lived human interactions, you can use the Personality Ethic to get by and to make favorable impressions through charm and skill and pretending to be interested in other people’s hobbies. You can pick up quick, easy techniques that may work in short-term situations. But secondary traits alone have no permanent worth in long-term relationships. Eventually, if there isn’t deep integrity and fundamental character strength, the challenges of life will cause true motives to surface and human relationship failure will replace short-term success. Many people with secondary greatness—that is, social recognition for their talents—lack primary greatness or goodness in their character. Sooner or later, you’ll see this in every long-term relationship they have, whether it is with a business associate, a spouse, a friend, or a teenage child going through an identity crisis. It is character that communicates most eloquently. As Emerson once put it, “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears I cannot hear what you say.” There are, of course, situations where people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well. But the effects are still secondary. In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. We all know it. There are people we trust absolutely because we know their character. Whether they’re eloquent or not, whether they have the human relations techniques or not, we trust them, and we work successfully with them. In the words of William George Jordan, “Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
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The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individually and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individually. But at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered. They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one's fellow man—or at least with the members of one's own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as "objects" to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one's own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, an insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual's relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often portrayed. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophical writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy.
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Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
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In addition to depoliticization as a mode of dispossessing the constitutive histories and powers organizing contemporary problems and contemporary political subjects—that is, depoliticization of sources of political problems—there is a second and related meaning of depoliticization with which this book is concerned: namely, that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to “difference” or to a medium of “offense,” when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an “improvement in manners.” A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one.
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Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire)
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Space Rockets as Power Symbols
The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead.
Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because
of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their
children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants.
As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents.
Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.
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Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
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Once again, he was deducing a theory from principles and postulates, not trying to explain the empirical data that experimental physicists studying cathode rays had begun to gather about the relation of mass to the velocity of particles. Coupling Maxwell’s theory with the relativity theory, he began (not surprisingly) with a thought experiment. He calculated the properties of two light pulses emitted in opposite directions by a body at rest. He then calculated the properties of these light pulses when observed from a moving frame of reference. From this he came up with equations regarding the relationship between speed and mass. The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” The formula he used to describe this relationship was also strikingly simple: “If a body emits the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V 2.” Or, to express the same equation in a different manner: L=mV 2. Einstein used the letter L to represent energy until 1912, when he crossed it out in a manuscript and replaced it with the more common E. He also used V to represent the velocity of light, before changing to the more common c. So, using the letters that soon became standard, Einstein had come up with his memorable equation: E=mc2
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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Here we immediately face the danger of slipping into another but equally untenable romanticism, namely a call for humans to be humble and come to terms with or appreciate their finitude. The acknowledgement of the inherent lack of unity in the metabolism of humans and the rest of nature should not lead us to conceive of humans as fragile, vulnerable and ontologically homeless creatures destined to remain caught in opaque mediations. Such a way of thinking amounts to a secularisation of the religious demand for humans to display their submissiveness and obedience to God. One finds examples of this in existentialist philosophies of the Heideggerian variant or in Arnold Gehlen's conservative philosophical anthropology, according to which the natural incompleteness of human beings justify the call for stable social institutions (i.e., the shepherd-God is replaced with the shepherd-State). The key to avoid such an ideology of finitude is to recall that it is the very fragility and porosity of the human metabolism which has made humans so evolutionarily successful. Human corporeal organisation is the source of an immense flexibility and has enabled this animal to "break out of a narrow ecological niche". Far from being the sign of an inherent finitude of the human being, the loss of immediacy at the centre of its being is rather a sign of its infinity in the sense that it enables humans to socially mediate their relation to the rest of nature in an infinite number of ways.
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Søren Mau (Mute Compulsion. A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital)
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In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia.
One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War.
The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets.
Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened.
To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses:
Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types.
On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge.
Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.
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Jonathan Glover (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)
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Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Graeco-Latin genius.
What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity!
I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians ! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding-bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains : one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation.
I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else.
For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect.
By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable.
If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors !
In my view, H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level.
Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own rôle. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea : let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the highest honours.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides.
But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers‘ pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.
Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsidies and loopholes that collectively do more harm than good. But when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa as a Democratic presidential candidate back in 1992, he ―spoke to some farmers‖ and suddenly found it in his heart to support tax breaks for ethanol. In short, he realized that ethanol is crucial to Iowa voters, and Iowa is crucial to the presidential race.
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Charles Wheelan (Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated))
“
That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.
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Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
“
Gray helped himself to more toast, taking the opportunity to slide an extra slice onto Miss Turner’s plate.
She glanced up at him, her expression a mixture of shock and reproach.
And this was his reward for generosity.
He gave a tense shrug by way of excuse, then replaced the knife and fork and busied himself with his own food. He felt her staring at him.
That was it. If she was entitled to stare at him, he was damned well going to stare back. And if this governess was going to reprimand him like an incorrigible charge…well, then Gray was going to misbehave.
Letting his silver clatter to the china, he balled his hands into fists and plunked them down on either side of his plate. “You say you miss your family, Miss Turner? I wonder at it.
Her glare was cold. “You do?”
“You told me in Gravesend you’d nowhere to turn.”
“I spoke the truth.” Her chin lifted. “I’ve been missing my family since long before I felt England.”
“So they’re dead?”
She fidgeted with her fork. “Some.”
“But not all?”
He leaned toward her and spoke in a low voice, though anyone who cared to listen might hear. “What sort of relations allow a young woman to cross an ocean unaccompanied, to labor as a plantation governess? I should think you’d be glad to be free of them.”
She blinked.
He picked up his fork and jabbed at a hunk of meat. His voice a low murmur, he directed the next question at his plate. “Or perhaps they’re glad to be free of you?”
Something crushed his foot under the table. A pointy-heeled boot. Then, just as quickly, the pressure eased. But her foot remained atop his. The gesture was infuriating, and somehow wildly erotic.
He met her gaze, and this time found no coldness, no reproach. Instead, her eyes were wide, beseeching. They called to something deep inside him he hadn’t known was there.
Please, she mouthed. Don’t.
She bit her lip, and he felt it as a visceral tug. That unused part of him stretched and ached. And at that instant, Gray would have sworn they were the only two souls in the room. In the world.
Until Wiggins spoke again, confound the man.
”
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Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
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Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
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gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.
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Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: FROM THE WINNERS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
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Experiment: To replace negative character labels, try the following steps:
1. Pick a new, positive character label that you would prefer. For example, if your old belief is “I’m incompetent,” you would likely pick “I’m competent.”
2. Rate how much you currently believe the old negative character label on a scale of 0 (= I don’t believe it at all) to 100 (= I believe it completely). Do the same for the new positive belief. For example, you might say you believe “I’m incompetent” at level 95 and believe “I’m competent” at level 10 (the numbers don’t need to add up to 100).
3. Create a Positive Data Log and a Historical Data Log. Strengthening your new, positive character label is often a more helpful approach than attempting to hack away at the old, negative one. I’m going to give you two experiments that will help you do this.
Positive Data Log. For two weeks, commit to writing down evidence that supports your new, positive character belief. For example, if you are trying to boost your belief in the thought “I’m competent” and you show up to an appointment on time, you can write that down as evidence.
Don’t fall into the cognitive trap of discounting some of the evidence. For example, if you make a mistake and then sort it out, it’s evidence of competence, not incompetence, so you could put that in your Positive Data Log.
Historical Data Log. This log looks back at periods of your life and finds evidence from those time periods that supports your positive character belief. This experiment helps people believe that the positive character quality represents part of their enduring nature. To do this experiment, split your life into whatever size chunks you want to split it into, such as four- to six-year periods. If you’re only in your 20s, then you might choose three- or four-year periods.
To continue the prior example, if you’re working on the belief “I’m competent,” then evidence from childhood might be things like learning to walk, talk, or make friends. You figured these things out. From your teen years, your evidence of general competency at life might be getting your driver’s license (yes, on the third try still counts). Evidence from your early college years could be things like successfully choosing a major and passing your courses. Evidence for after you finished your formal education might be related to finding work to support yourself and finding housing. You should include evidence in the social domain, like finding someone you wanted to date or figuring out how to break up with someone when you realized that relationship wasn’t the right fit for you. The general idea is to prove to yourself that “I’m competent” is more true than “I’m incompetent.”
Other positive character beliefs you might try to strengthen could be things like “I’m strong” (not weak), “I’m worthy of love” (not unlovable), and “I’m worthy of respect” (not worthless). Sometimes the flipside of a negative character belief is obvious, as in the case of strong/weak, but sometimes there are a couple of possible options that could be considered opposites; in this case, you can choose.
4. Rerate how much you believe the negative and positive character labels. There should have been a little bit of change as a result of doing the data logs. For example, you might bow believe “I’m incompetent” at only 50 instead of 95, and believe “I’m competent” at 60 instead of 10. You’ve probably had your negative character belief for a long time, so changing it isn’t like making a pack of instant noodles.
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Alice Boyes (The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points)