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| RIP Mr. Bowie |
Civilization:
"It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." - Irish Proverb
“One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” - Lamarck (1817)
(See Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, by Jan Sapp, p. 274, fn. 14; quoting from Lamark's writings)
"Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races [Chuck was a tad-bit racist eh?] will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." - Charles Darwin (1881)
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any [extraterrestrial intelligence]. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation" - Dr. Noam Chomsky paraphrasing Dr. Ernst Mayr
"It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." -Voltaire
"History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history." - Clarence Darrow
"I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
...
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee
"One thing is for sure on the subject of global warming induced climate change: if there was ever a time to err on the safe side, it was long ago." - Dredd
"Concerning graphs of climate change and sea level change, the truth is in the trend line, not in the facts of the seesaw / sawtooth pattern." - Dredd
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi
"This latest edition of the Living Planet Report is not for the faint-hearted. One key point that jumps out and captures the overall picture is that the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another way, in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half. These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth – and the barometer of what we are doing to our own planet, our only home. We ignore their decline at our peril." - Living Planet Report 2014
"What makes a masterpiece are the following: A love of life and nature; an interest in, mingled with contempt for humanity; and a lack of belief in the idea of progress." - Cyril Connolly
"As a civilization degenerates, its wisdom becomes 'the obvious', its history becomes its vision, and finally its vision becomes revisionism." - Dredd
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." - Kurt Vonnegut
(From the Quotes Tab).
The next post in this series is here.
RIP Mr. Bowie ...
We're going to need some fresh ways of 'thinking' about what's happening and more effective ways to get the message out to even more folk. Both 'interest' and 'concern' need to rise by a lot and quickly.
ReplyDeleteNarrator ( Robt Pirsig Jr) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
1) Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist.
2)Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.