More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” —Robert Pirsig
A narrator pointed out that the process of natural selection once ensured that the strongest, smartest, or fastest reproduced in the greatest numbers. But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn’t reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most.
Ernest Hemingway had said, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.
“It’s like that famous quote, ‘If I would have had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.’”
Six thousand trillion tons of mass being counteracted by a tiny magnet.” “That’s how much the Earth weighs?” Jenna nodded.
In fact, the Westwood campus was so often in a state of flux, some joked UCLA actually stood for Under Construction Like Always.
Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present. —Unknown
Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.
The faster something moves through space, the slower it moves through time. If you were traveling at the speed of light, time would stop altogether.”
“It turns out that while objects can move through space and time at different rates, they all move through space-time at exactly the same rate: the speed of light. Always.”
When you’re not moving at all in space, you’re moving at the speed of light, so to speak, through time—the fastest the universe allows you to do so. When you’re moving at the speed of light through space, you stop moving through time. It stops completely. It turns out that your speed through space, combined with your speed through time, always adds up to the speed of light.”
Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.
