Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us?

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.

The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it.

A dead Christ I must do everything for

I try to go throughout my daily life just as if nothing has changed, but you don't have much anonymity anymore, which feels really good. People come up, and say hi and they enjoy your work.

For me, I really feel like a character when I look like them.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Genius or fool, you don't live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody's going to come along and screw up the works.

If you got beauty, beauty, just raise em up. Cause every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top.

I realized that this story [Shelter] is all about family, family loss, and how it influences you day to day life.

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.

So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?