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It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
 
First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.
 
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
 
The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.
 
Melancholy: when we have sorrows without a name.
 
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn...and change.
 
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. 
 
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've propbably misunderstood what I've said.
 
Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
 
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
 
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
 
There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.
 
Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
 
Our initial sensory data are always "first derivatives," statements about differences which exist among external objects or statements about changes which occur either in them or in our relationship to them. Objects and circumstances which remain absolutely constant relative to the observer, unchanged either by his own movement or by external events, are in general difficult and perhaps always impossible to perceive. What we perceive easily is difference and change and difference is a relationship.
 
Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.
 
Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?
 
The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
 
...mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics. Every other science, even logic, especially in its early stages, is in danger of evaporating into airy nothingness, degenerating, as the Germans say, into an arachnoid film, spun from the stuff that dreams are made of. There is no such danger for pure mathematics; for that is precisely what mathematics ought to be.
 
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
 
When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.
 
2718 quotes