Cleave the Sparrow Quotes

“doubt is essential to our search for truth, because the ability to doubt is the evidence of a doubter’s true existence. Cogito, ergo sum. Doubt is the heart of the scientific method, too. Doubt is the crux of humility,”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Belief—not faith—is the enemy of doubt.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“My point is we’ve been trying violence for hundreds of thousands of years, and it hasn’t gotten us very far.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“In fact, there are numerous folks in the longtermists’ orbit, including noted rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky, who say that nuclear war might even be necessary if it helps delay “the singularity.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“If this were a dream, then the dream within the dream would puncture the illusion, like a MyPillow commercial in between jihadi execution videos, because my cheap-ass captors wouldn’t spring for YouTube Premium.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“It was a hot girl summer for mutually assured destruction.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“In 2032, Thorp campaigned for the Republican nomination from a Leavenworth prison cell, and he would have won another term—handily, given the price of eggs—if not for a catastrophic lack of campaign funds.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“He simply wanted a peek behind the curtains of this one—beneath the protective illusions concocted by our sense organs—so he could learn to better cherish and protect what’s real.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“IT’S NOT, I THINK, that there aren’t many pacifists. It’s that there aren’t many pacifists left.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“An honest mistake. None of us get it right every time. But then most of us aren’t firing Tomahawk cruise missiles when we get it wrong.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Tom, have you ever known anything to get better through human intervention?”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Belief clings, he wrote. Faith lets go.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“In and out. Again and again. Over and over. And you can know this, Tom. You can know it but divide it not asunder. For to find ourselves, we must always cleave the sparrow.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“And that’s the paradox of knowledge, isn’t it? To know a thing is to sever ourselves from it so we can see it from the outside.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Because there’s only one path for you, for any of us. And you can walk down it with your eyes closed if you want to. But you’ll bump into a lot more shit that way, and when you get to the end, you’ll have missed everything.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“The only way to kill the ego illusion is by stripping away all the things you believe about yourself that aren’t true.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“One of the Stonefish’s favorite disciples, Alan Watts, used to joke about our real decision making process. What we do, he said, is we sort of go through the motions of worrying for a bit until we get a vague sense we’ve made ourselves sufficiently miserable, and then we call it a day and do whatever we decided in the first two seconds.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“You simply don’t have the physical hardware you’d need to see the true nature of Blue 89461, and yet you’ll still agree the color of the sky today is Blue 89461, because Blue 89461 doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s just the name we all gave to whatever we saw when we looked up at the sky.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“We practiced everything in that office: How to walk, how to smile, how to sidestep tough questions by circling back to an unrelated, indignant defense of Israel—you know, the basics.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“To embrace the flow of life is, quite literally, the means and meaning of our existence. This is what mystics and philosophers have known for centuries, and where science is only just now catching up. — But what’s my role in it? — You exist, Tom, in a superposition of existence and non-existence, explains Hoffman. You are both here and not here, until you make the observation. What you observe will be the final refutation of the ego self—a new beginning for the unity of all things—a Big Bang within the boundaries of your own mind and experience. — Is it painful? — Probably, says Hoffman. Change is loss, after all. But only so long as you’re grasping to hold on. You don’t know enough to be afraid, honestly. Or to be sad. Or grateful. The”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Tom, do you know how evolution by natural selection works? — Mostly, yeah. — Then you know it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent— — It’s the one with fins. — It’s the one who’s most responsive to change. — Oh, right.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Remember this when you’re considering the odds of your own existence—meaning the chances of your precise genetic combination emerging from the primordial ooze. As calculated by biologist Ali Binazir, those odds are 1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th power. That’s a one with two million, six hundred eighty five thousand zeros. It’s a number so absurdly large, it dwarfs our mammoth estimates of planets and digital humans. In fact, it dwarfs everything, everywhere. There’s really nothing larger in this whole universe than the improbability of your own existence, and yet here you are.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Performative violence is all you troglodytes can understand. So, we’ll do it that way.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Which suggests something ominous to me. That all our self-knowledge, all our dreams and motivations, our histories even, might be nothing more than a seat-of-our-pants, ex post facto rationalization of things that were decided billions of years ago by an ancient civilization of alien slugs.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow

“Thorp had tried to build a wall between North and South Dakota for some reason. He contracted the job to his son, and the whole thing turned out to be a money laundering scheme to fund disbanded Nicaraguan Contras who were launching a tech start-up in Ireland.”
― Jonathan Katz, Cleave the Sparrow