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There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body.
 
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. 
 
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
 
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
 
One of the greatest challenges facing civilization in the twenty-first century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns-about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering-in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more that the respect we accord religious faith.
 
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder."
 
The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.
 
In my end is my beginning.
 
Management problems are not respecters of the company organization, nor of the talents of the people appointed to solve them.
 
Love me when I least deserve it, because it's when I need it most.
 
Neurons that fire together wire together.
 
Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.
 
Time is just memory mixed in with Desire.
 
It is better to be hated for what one is, than loved for what one is not.
 
Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.
 
A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
 
...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product—predictable if not indispensable—of the evolution of the universe.
 
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
 
It is the 'zoomorphic' or 'rattomorphic' fallacy - the expressed or implicit contention that there is no essential difference between rat and man - which makes American psychology so profoundly disturbing.
 
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
 
2718 quotes