I am lonely without measure; that is to say, I am alone with my doubles, phantasms in whom I realize specific dreams, ideas, inclinations, and so on. I rip three other people out of my inner life, give them names, and believe in them myself. Gradually three clearly defined types have emerged: *1: Grosz. *2: Count Ehrenfried, the nonchalant aristocrat with the well-manicured fingernails, concerned only with cultivating himself; in a word, the detached, aristocratic individualist. *3: The physician. Dr. William King Thomas, the more American, practical counterweight to Grosz the mother figure.
George GroszRelated topics
american aristocrat believe count figure inner king life measure mother people physician practical rip say specific three word doubles counterweight individualist thomas names grosz williamRelated quotes
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. ... It is very hard to realise that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg
It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. [...] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. [...] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions-for these are our issues, not nature's.
Stephen Jay Gould
The first attempts to consider the behavior of so-called "random neural nets" in a systematic way have led to a series of problems concerned with relations between the "structure" and the "function" of such nets. The "structure" of a random net is not a clearly defined topological manifold such as could be used to describe a circuit with explicitly given connections. In a random neural net, one does not speak of "this" neuron synapsing on "that" one, but rather in terms of tendencies and probabilities associated with points or regions in the net.
Anatol Rapoport
We must resist the temptation to be "normal,” because those who are now considered normal accept the values and practices of an insane world. In modern society, for example, normal people strive to accumulate as many commodities as possible, because they believe that their success and personal worth are linked to the number of possessions they have acquired. As the joke goes, "The one who dies with the most toys, wins.” If we espouse this viewpoint, the toys we have to play with form the measure of our personal worth. Unfortunately, this notion confuses acquired material worth with our inherent worth as spiritual beings.
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? To this manly spirit, posterity will be indebted for the possession, and the world for the example, of the numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre, in favor of private rights and public happiness.
James Madison
