Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Centuries ago people didn’t think that the world was changing at all. Their grandparents had the same lives that they did, and they expected their grandchildren would do the same,…
TotD: Suggested Rules for Democratic Discourse
Sidney Hook, suggested rules for democratic discourse, from “The Ethics of Controversy,” Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays: Nothing and no one is immune from criticism. Everyone involved in a controversy has an intellectual responsibility to…
ToTD: Fran Lebowitz
Take away a man’s actual sense of manhood–which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children–and you’ve got to give them something else. And they did. This hideous religion that’s…
TotD: Doris Lessing on Education
Doris Lessing, Introduction to The Golden Notebook Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: “You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a…
TotD: Emma Goldman on Love
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an…
TotD: Carter Heyward on Love
Carter Heyward: Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being “drawn toward.” Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial…
TotD: Eating and Drinking
This passage reminded me of Sam: People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do? They ask it…
TotD: Freya Stark on Beauty
From Perseus in the Wind by Freya Stark: If loveliness is so engaged, as I believe, in the skein of our universe, it is sad that it should be little cared for in our schools. The whole of the industrial…
TotD: Thomas Szasz on Language
Religion and the jargon of the helping/hindering professions are comprised largely of literalized metaphors. That is why they are the perfect tools for legitimizing and illegitimizing ideas, behaviors, and persons. Ordinary language combines all of these qualities. It can be…
TotD: Written On the Body
I’d never heard of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (or of the author, at all) until I was browsing through some of the quotations at Gaia a while back. This bit is too long for my quotations file,…