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, and that expectation was largely fulfilled. Today it’s an axiom that life is changing and […]
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 inform himself of the available facts. Criticism should be directed first to policies, and against persons […]
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 all over the country–these huge church-malls–that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a […]
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 system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is […]
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 all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage? Free love? […]
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 relation with one’s friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To […]
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 accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft. The easiest answer is […]
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 world proclaims its unimportance, and millions and millions of people spend their lives looking almost exclusively […]
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 used literally and precisely, to convey meaning; metaphorically or poetically, to move people; or ‘religiously,’ […]
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 Gaia1 a while back. This bit is too long for my quotations file, but I love it too much to just delete it. “You’ll get over it…” It’s […]