Chris Armstrong > Chris's Quotes

“Too vast is Man and too imponderable his nature. Too varied are his talents, and too inexhaustible his strength. Beware of those who attempt to set him boundaries.”
― Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: The strange story of a monastery which was once called The Ark

“The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”
― Terence McKenna

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”
― Aristotle, Politics

“Francis Bacon: Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Chris T. Armstrong: Nature, to be transcended, must be amended.

Transhumanism: Using science and technology to transcend our biological limitations.

Biology is just too fragile. Onward to post-biological durability.”
― Chris T. Armstrong

“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern

“Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law”
― Douglas Hofstadter

“Meaning lies as much
in the mind of the reader
as in the Haiku.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life's wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it's a necessary folly, born of lovers' belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“You will see, as time goes by", said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“Man is not born free, but everywhere in biological chains. People of the world, unite! - you have nothing to lose but your biological chains.”
― Simon Young, Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto

“We are starting to direct the evolution of our biology and of our minds ourselves...As we begin to liberate our thoughts, our memes, our consciousness from the biological constraints that we presently have, this will allow us to evolve far faster and ever faster.”
― Peter H. Diamandis

“I am a 21st century person who was accidentally launched in the 20th. I have a deep nostalgia for the future”
― FM-2030

“Too many of our preferences reflect nasty behaviours and states of mind that were genetically adaptive in the ancestral environment. Instead, wouldn't it be better if we rewrote our own corrupt code?”
― David Pearce

“It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.”
― Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

“Conventional names define a person's past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years”
― FM-2030

“Until such time as duplications of individual nervous systems can be grown in tissue cultures (at this point no one knows "whose" consciousness they would have), our special identities will always be subject to being hit by a truck or dying in a plane crash. A sudden virus or heart seizure, even in the body's youth, may carry us off. Statistically, looking ahead thousands of years, the chances are that every human and even inanimate form will be broken sooner or later. But the distress felt by men and women today does not arise from the fear of such hazards. Rather, it comes from the certainty of aging and physical degeneration leading to death. It is the fear of losing our powers and being left alone, or in the hands of indifferent nurses, and knowing that the moment must come when we will not see the people we love any more, and everything will go black.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

“We must never forget that we are cosmic revolutionaries, not stooges conscripted to advance a natural order that kills everybody.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist

“The immortalist thesis is that the time has come for the race to get rid of the intimidating gods in its own head -- grow up out of our cosmic inferiority complex (no more "dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return..."), bring our disguised desire into the open, and go after what we want, the only state of being we will settle for, which is divinity.”
― Alan Harrington, The Immortalist