Stuart > Stuart's Quotes

“The House adjourned without voting on the bill, but the following year a similar bill—mandating equality in hotels and restaurants open to the public, in transportation facilities, in theaters and other public amusements and in the selection of juries—passed both chambers. The measure reached the White House about the time the two sides in Louisiana cobbled a compromise that allowed Grant to withdraw Sheridan and most of the federal troops. On March 1, 1875, the president signed the Civil Rights Act, the most ambitious affirmation of racial equality in American history until then (a distinction it would retain until the 1960s).”
― H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace

“Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born.”
― Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword” (Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51).”
― Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“Because David’s mother, Loretta, refused to sign up for that, she and Ron agreed to divorce. She continued in Scientology, rising to the summit as an OT VIII. She worked as an accountant for the law firm of Greta Van Susteren, the television commentator, and her husband, John Coale, both Scientologists, who maintain a mansion on Clearwater Beach.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“However, twelve former Sea Org members told me that Miscavige had assaulted them; twenty-one have told me or testified in court that they have witnessed one or more assaults on other church staff members by their leader.”
― Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

“If these biochemical phenomena sound similar to those of the fight-or-flight syndrome, they are, except that here we are running toward something or someone; indeed, a cynic might say toward rather than away from danger. The changes are also fully consistent with those of the early phases of addictive behavior. The Roxy Music song “Love Is the Drug” is quite accurate in describing this state (albeit the subject of the song is looking to score his next fix of love).”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Although I’m not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“And at last, becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to live, spending his time in walking about the mountains; feeding on grasses and plants, and in consequence of these habits, he was attacked by the dropsy, and so then he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle, whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather. And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow-dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him, by the warmth that this produced. And as he did himself no go good in this way, he died, having lived seventy years;”
― Diogenes, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

“The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.”
― Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI

“It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different. But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.”
― Sam Harris

“No, no – you don’t understand!” he sputtered, his face growing red not just with anger but with embarrassment, which seemed to make him angrier still. “Space is empty; it is a void in which the atoms move freely. There is no ‘notbeing;’ everything is in process of becoming. Everything is composed of atoms which are mobile and invisible, whirling in the void.” “Then the void is a place within which this takes place, where all these invisible atoms are in – what did you say? – constant motion.” “Yes, precisely,” he replied, relieved to discover that I was not quite the dunce he had begun to fear I was. “The atoms move inside space, inside the void, creating through their combination everything that is.” “Space, or void, then is not made up of atoms?” “No, because then there would be no place for them to move, as you yourself just pointed out.” “I’m still not quite sure what you mean. Everything is in process of becoming – doesn’t that mean that nothing is, that there is no being?” “No, because everything is always changing; everything that comes into being passes away.” “But how can anything ‘come into being,’ if ‘being’ does not exist?” “We define things, put them in categories, but nothing is exactly what the definition says it is.”
― D. W. Buffa, Helen

“Parmenides was then quite old, but his mind was still powerful and clear. The question was what is, what can be, how does anything come into being? And Parmenides gave a very strange answer: Nothing can come into being; only unchangeable being is. But all the accounts given by the poets, Homer and Hesiod and the others, tell how the gods were created; and we know from these and other writings that every city has its own gods. Parmenides says that the gods having come into being cannot be. He replaces the gods by the unchangeable being. There cannot be a beginning, a genesis, because coming into being means a movement from nothing to being and nothing is not. What is there if the gods do not exist? – Intelligible principles. One of them is Eros, which Parmenides called the first and oldest of all the gods.” I thought I understood, but I was not sure; and let me confess that I was so much in awe of him that my usual selfconfidence, what some no doubt thought my arrogance, had all but vanished and left me a stammering, tonguetied fool. And he knew it, knew it probably before I did; knew it as easily, as completely, as I knew how to breathe. “If the gods have not come into being,” he said, “how then can anything, even these intelligible principles, come into being? They must, like the world itself, be eternal. But then, you wonder, is it possible for Parmenides, for anyone, to say that one of these principles, Eros, is the first and oldest.”
― D. W. Buffa, Helen

“With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition. Now we are talking about a problem best solved within the humanities, and one more reason the humanities are all-important. While I’m at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust. We are doing very well in science and technology. Let’s agree to keep it up, and move both along even faster. But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the risk of tribal religious conflict very well. George Washington observed, “Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing and ought most to be deprecated.” James Madison agreed, noting the “torrents of blood” that result from religious competition. John Adams insisted that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” America has slipped a bit since then.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“In America, for example, it is possible in most places to openly debate different views on religious spirituality—including the nature and even the existence of God, providing it is in the context of theology and philosophy. But it is forbidden to question closely, if at all, the creation myth—the faith—of another person or group, no matter how absurd. To disparage anything in someone else’s sacred creation myth is “religious bigotry.” It is taken as the equivalent of a personal threat.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“I don’t believe it too harsh to say that the history of philosophy when boiled down consists mostly of failed models of the brain. A few of the modern neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel Dennett have made a splendid effort to interpret the findings of neuroscience research as these become available. They have helped others to understand, for example, the ancillary nature of morality and rational thought. Others, especially those of poststructuralist bent, are more retrograde. They doubt that the “reductionist” or “objectivist” program of the brain researchers will ever succeed in explaining the core of consciousness. Even if it has a material basis, subjectivity in this view is beyond the reach of science. To make their argument, the mysterians (as they are sometimes called) point to the qualia, the subtle, almost inexpressible feelings we experience about sensory input. For example, “red” we know from physics, but what are the deeper sensations of “redness”? So what can the scientists ever hope to tell us in larger scale about free will, or about the soul, which for religious thinkers at least is the ultimate of ineffability?”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir

“Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.”
― Hugo Wilcken, Low

“The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States