More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Gene Protection Agency
dark gene lab.
engineering ransom bioware.
Predictive Criminality Modeling.
It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.
sensory gating.
“It’s denial. Selfishness. Magical thinking. We are not rational beings. We seek comfort rather than a clear-eyed stare into reality. We consume and preen and convince ourselves that if we keep our heads in the sand, the monsters will just go away. Simply put, we refuse to help ourselves as a species. We refuse to do what must be done. Every danger we face links ultimately back to this failing.”
“Life never really goes the way you want or expect. Usually, even getting exactly what you want turns out not to have been what you really wanted. So, my son, if you ever find a sliver of happiness and peace, just be thankful and live. Don’t reach for more, because a sliver is more than most people ever find.”
Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.
In virology, the R0 (R-naught) indicates the contagion level of a given illness.
Saw myself as the inevitable solution to the equation of my existence.
a thousand small kindnesses among people who had nothing to give.
Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man.
If I lose the ability to hurt, I also lose my grasp on joy—those brief moments of contentment that make consciousness worth the voyage.
compassion fade,
We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.
If there’s a solution, it has to lie in rescuing us from our ambivalence. Our apathy.
I suspect that, if we all had perfect memory, we would all grieve the older versions of who we used to be the way we grieve departed friends.
What do you call a heart that is simultaneously full and breaking? Maybe there’s no word for it, but for some reason, it makes me think of rain falling through sunlight.