But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

After four thousand years we can’t even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer.

You can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something.

Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I’m Human again.

It seems to me that wherever religion and politics mix in one body, fascist values - and not 'family values' - rear their ugly head.

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her brest buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

It's incredible to see labor unions and environmentalists getting together to stop the corporate mentality that destroys both jobs and the environment.

There is some music that's truly dark, in that it's dark in terms of hopeless. But then again, the act of hope is just making the work of art.

If you want to lead people, you have to let them come up close.

I fill up the well of stories in my head - without ever knowing I'm doing it.

Agency used righteously allows light to dispel the darkness and enables us to live with joy and happiness.

Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned.

Harvey Weinstein is a monster. And what campus victims are talking about has a lot more gray in it - many more complexities.