Howard Bloom quotes

From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals comes our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor, murder, torture, genocide and war. (Howard Bloom)
If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. ...What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]... View quote
Howard Bloom
The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators-RNA, DNA, and genes-have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age. View quote
Howard Bloom
If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline-sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene." View quote
Howard Bloom
By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence-a penetentiary-where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease. View quote
Howard Bloom
The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory. View quote
Howard Bloom
Where did the second law of thermodynamics come from? ...The steam engine. ...The cosmos is not a steam engine. View quote
Howard Bloom
The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything. View quote
Howard Bloom
The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group. View quote
Howard Bloom
Conformity-enforcing packs of viscious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse. View quote
Howard Bloom
Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory. (Howard Bloom)
The ultimate repository of herd influence is language-a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on. View quote
Howard Bloom
When you repeat an old pattern in a new location, you sometimes make something new. View quote
Howard Bloom
Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave. View quote
Howard Bloom
Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others' weaknesses, disasters, stupiidities, and abnormalities. View quote
Howard Bloom
From a few basic rules you can generate a cosmos. View quote
Howard Bloom
Aristotle and Heraclitus were both right. A equals A. But A does not equal A. View quote
Howard Bloom
One plus one does not equal two. View quote
Howard Bloom
A does not equal A because of location. For example, location in time. View quote
Howard Bloom
Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem... They work together in teams. View quote
Howard Bloom
Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind. (Howard Bloom)
In a strange way, Marcion understood the situation better than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation. View quote
Howard Bloom
Is A=A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A=A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are... very, very simplified representations. View quote
Howard Bloom
When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"... Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds-behavioral and verbal. ...behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds. View quote
Howard Bloom
We must build a picture of the human soul that works. ...a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. ...for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her. View quote
Howard Bloom