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“And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning. It’s a holy feeling, and our task in this world is to do everything we can to foster it. And one way to do that is to spread life everywhere. To aid it into existence where it was not before, as here on Mars.”
Max Planck once said that a new paradigm takes over not when it convinces its opponents, but when its opponents eventually die.”
Black space, blue world, just like the pictures, but with the startling high resolution of reality. Art stared down at West Africa and a great wave of nausea rolled through every cell of him.
A feeling of discomfort at the shrinking ancestral home of our species.
What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it.
“But childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.”
And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.
it gave Maya the greatest of pleasure to interrupt her. “The demonstration’s off.” “What do you mean?” Jackie said, startled and annoyed. “Why?” “Because we’re having a revolution instead.”
It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
