Recent Quotes - page 31
[I]t appeared to him that to prepare a "History of Trades" in which the observations and practices of different trades might be united... would draw the attention of philosophers to the interests of industry, and of artizans to the benefits promised by philosophy. ...Such a work was not written; and until a more recent period the store of facts gained in the pursuit of industrial occupations was confined to the acquaintance of those who were occupied therein.
Robert Boyle
The individual selectionist would admit that groups do indeed die out, and that whether or not a group goes extinct may be influenced by the behaviour of the individuals in that group. He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restraining their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group. How many times must this have been said in recent years to the working people of Britain? But group extinction is a slow process compared with the rapid cut and thrust of individual competition. Even while the group is going slowly and inexorably downhill, selfish individuals prosper in the short term at the expense of altruists. The citizens of Britain may or may not be blessed with foresight, but evolution is blind to the future.
Richard Dawkins
[S]ince fear is ubiquitous, every civilization has devised ways to manage it. That has typically been accomplished in the context of religious culture. Dangers are easier to cope with for most people when they are seen as something other than completely random and meaningless, when they are integrated into shared narratives that make a certain kind of emotional sense. When traditional religious templates erode, as they have in most Western societies in recent times, the frameworks that control the psycho-social impact of fear erode with them. They have been replaced, in a manner of speaking, with the pseudo-religion of the therapeutic, whose obsession with absolute security has only served to make nearly everyone more anxious, not less.
Adam Garfinkle
The whole train of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, then, to be regarded as a series of advances of the principle of development, which have depended upon external physical circumstances, to which the resulting animals are appropriate.
Robert Chambers (publisher born 1802)
Amongst those [works] of the tenth century, of which fragments are now extant, is a system of mineralogy by Avicenna, a physician in whose arrangement there is considerable merit. In the same century also, Omar, surnamed 'El Aalem,' or 'the Learned,' wrote a work on 'the Retreat of the Sea.' It appears that on comparing the charts of his own time with those made by the Indian and Persian astronomers two thousand years before, he had satisfied himself that important changes had taken place since the times of history in the form of the coasts of Asia, and that the extension of the sea had been greater at some former periods. He was confirmed in this opinion by the numerous salt springs and marshes in the interior of Asia,-a phenomenon from which Pallas, in more recent times, has drawn the same inference.
Charles Lyell
In his recent book, 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real', famed Slovenian socialist intellectual Slavoj Zizek tackles the Palestinian question in a most unoriginal manner. What concerns him most is not the foundational racism of Zionism and its concrete offspring, a racist Jewish state, nor the racist curricula of Israeli Jewish schools, the racist Israeli Jewish media representations of Palestinians, the racist declarations of Israeli Jewish leaders on the right and on the left, or the Jewish supremacist rights and privileges guiding Zionism and Israeli state laws and policies -- all of which seem of little concern to him -- but rather Arab 'anti-Semitism' which should not be 'tolerated'. Arabs are in fact reacting to Zionist Jewish colonialism and its commitment to European white supremacy in Jewish guise.
Joseph Massad
And it is like -50 degrees in that Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today? Alright. What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just poofed on the coldest in recent memory and it wasn't in our power whether or not to turn them back on? What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely as the act of a foreign power on the same that the temperature matched the temperature in Antarctica? What would you and your family do?
Rachel Maddow
The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between members of the same species and even between members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being based upon benefits to whole groups. Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin's theory is more valid.
Robert Axelrod
In our time, it's about recognizing that for much too long we've allowed a narrowed and cramped view of the promise of America - a view that America is a zero-sum game, particularly of the recent past. "If you succeed, I fail.” "If you get ahead, I fall behind.” And maybe worst of all, "If I can hold you down, I lift myself up.”
Instead of what it should be - and it's just self-evident - "If you do well, we all do well.” That's keeping the promise of America.
Joe Biden
This is a young team and one of the advantages of working with youngsters is they're eager to learn and they're good students. They're willing to accept advice. We don't have too many power hitters on the Pirates and naturally it isn't my aim to develop the singles hitters into home run hitters. I feel if they'll just meet the ball solidly, they'll fill the bill. I think the averages have declined in recent years because most players are looking for the home run every time at bat. But we'll be satisfied with a good, consistent performance. Virdon and Clemente hit only 17 home runs between them but they ran two-three in the National League batting race.
Roberto Clemente
I think James Brown has made a lot of good records (in recent years)...But it was that purist James Brown thing that he was doing in the beginning and people won't let him do that anymore because time marches on...That stuff is classic to me, but other people get bored with it. The challenge is to present something that is him, yet sounds fresh to listeners. That's usually hard for (a veteran artist) to do. It helps to have someone step in from outside...I am proud of what we did on the album. I think it does present a contemporary James Brown. It's not candy-coated. It has a lot of statement and a lot of heart.
Dan Hartman
Born... into a Jewish-Catholic family as the second, and only boy, of three children in Glasgow, Creme - by his own account-early on attracted the attention of the "Hierarchy” and, in particular, his later unnamed Master... The existing scholarship on Creme is scarce. Scattered encyclopaedic or otherwise relatively terse mentions aside (see, e.g., Hammer 2015: 356; Kranenborg 1994; Melton 2001: 352), I am only aware of two very recent papers thoroughly addressing Creme's teachings (cf. Poller 2019; Pokorny 2021).
Benjamin Creme
The notion of individualism that has emerged in the West is a relatively recent development even though it is often claimed to be derived from classical antiquity and Abrahamic theological tenets. This revisionist claim of being the exclusive and defining feature of the West – in contradistinction to the putative Oriental lack of individuality – is the result of myth-making.
Rajiv Malhotra
One of my recent analyses contains more than 140 examples of when Tucker Carlson has relied on white nationalists and anti-Semitic tropes in his programming. One of the most prominent ways this manifests is an obsession with racial demographics, and how they are changing in the United States. Tucker Carlson is obsessed with "cultural preservation." There is an entire international far-right movement that echoes such sentiments. Carlson is also constantly fear-mongering about immigrants and blaming every possible problem on the individual choices of immigrants, as opposed to systemic institutions that perpetuate poverty and racism and which impact all people in the United States.
Tucker Carlson
Incidentally, US politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable "empire of lies" has been created inside the United States in recent years. It is hard to disagree with this – it is really so. But one should not be modest about it: the United States is still a great country and a system-forming power. All its satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behaviour and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them. Therefore, one can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same "empire of lies".
Vladimir Putin
I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him [Thomas Cromwell] to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times.
Geoffrey Elton
On recent and contemporary literature [students'] need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.
C. S. Lewis
I think that it came as a surprise, if not a shock, to most people, when that notorious advertisement appeared in The Times in 1967, to find that there is a lobby in favour of legalising cannabis. ... The existence of this lobby is something that the House and public opinion should take into account and be ready to combat, as I am. It is another aspect of the so-called permissive society, and I am glad if my decision has enabled the House to call a halt in the advancing tide of so-called permissiveness. I regard it as one of the most unlikeable words that has been invented in recent years.
James Callaghan
There are genes that have not changed much since the very first single-celled creatures populated the primeval ooze. There are genes that were developed when our ancestors were worm-like. There are genes that must have first appeared when our ancestors were fish. There are genes that exist in their present form only because of recent epidemics of disease. And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of autobiography for our species, recording the important events as they occurred.
Matt Ridley
Wal-Mart will not be able to profitably run its "warehouse on wheels” when the price of oil fluctuates chronically. [...] We will never again experience the explosion of products, choices, and nonstop marketing that characterized the... twentieth century. The public may look back on the big-box shopping era with deep and mournful nostalgia, but we are apt to discover that happiness is still possible without the extraordinary advertising-driven compulsive materialism of recent decades. We will still have commerce. We will have [a] trade. There will be shopping. We will have... medium of exchange. But we are not going to live in a perpetual blue-light special sale of cornucopian wretched excess.
James Howard Kunstler
