Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand. – Kurt Vonnegut

“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.” — Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom

All law which is based on punishment, that is to say, not on the knowledge that the collective itself is a party to the guilt of every evil‐doer, is nothing but lynch law, under another name. – Erich Neumann

The more laws, the less justice. – Cicero

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. - Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ 1891

‘It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks about that proposition, it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards.’ ~ Søren Kierkegaard

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, inter-being, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is conjunction, ‘and. . . and. . . and. . . ‘…The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

‘In the beginning was the Word’. Why now, I’m stuck already. I must change that: how? ……….. The Spirit speaks! I see how it must read: And boldly write, ‘In the beginning was the Deed.’ - Goethe, Faust

The planning fallacy is only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias. Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases. Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic. - Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow.

Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere. – Hannah Arendt

I discovered that I was living out of a formula.….The formula is how ALL of money is made in strategy, not tactic: Ax + Bi = Sum { C e^G) which reads: ‘ money for basic expenses plus money from big imagination equals the sum of your business machines of the form C capital e Euler’s number 2.718, and G is your good fortune exponent expressing offering price, market conditions, effect of advertising, and how hard you work it, luck too. – Anonymous

Ah yes, the longing for the tribe. We never quite get there, the people are concealed behind their routines and subroutines. – Anonymous

Give my ideas to others, they are Nietzschean thunderbolts coming from the sky to light our minds afire: We came from a mixture of proteins and water that formed a cell, from 37 trillion cells that made a body, and we are now at the 7.4 billion minds on the planet, with a new IDEA SHARING mechanism called the Internet.We are a new organism by sharing of ideas, by improving lives based on statistics, collaboration, best practices, and social evolution. However, I ask myself: Where is everybody? – Anonymous

Upon entering the wormhole: Alien 1: ‘You picked up the Reality Connection Machine, didn’t you?’ Alien 2: ‘No! I thought you had!’ Alien 1: ‘Did you at least pick up the automatic data collectors?‘ – Anonymous

Humans have determined that humans and apes have about the same DNA. The apes, however, want a re-count. – Anonymous

How many alternative realities are there? If I am not dreaming, why am I wearing my pajamas in the store? – Anonymous

From now on forward, we count backward. – Anonymous

The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. – Glenn Gould, 1962.

Fascism attempts to organize the proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. – Walter Benjamin

We arrive, then, at the following formulation of values in the new ethic: whatever leads to wholeness is ‘good’; whatever leads to splitting is ‘evil’. Integration is good, disintegration is evil. Our estimate of ethical values is no longer concerned with contents, qualities or actions considered as ‘entities’; it is related functionally to the whole. Whatever helps that wholeness which is centered on the Self towards integration is ‘good’, irrespective of the nature of this helping factor. And, vice versa, whatever leads to disintegration is ‘evil’ ‐ even if it is ‘good will’, ‘collectively sanctioned values” or anything else ‘intrinsically good’. Erich Neumann – A New Ethic

We are not cave people; we are box people!

Social existence today conceals the person. It is part of that 6-card poker: two cards face up: appearance and social status, 3 cards you hold: physicality, money, heart of hearts. One card is on your forehead, and everyone can see it but you. – Anonymous

‘Nothing that is has a nature, ‘But only mixing and parting of the mixed, ‘And nature is but a name given them by men. ‘– Empedocles, quoted by: Aristotle, Metaphysics.

Titanium combines readily with oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. all of which have an adverse effect on its mechanical properties. As a result, titanium must be processed in their absence. (Illustrated World of Science Encyclopedia)

Since the good, according to Plato, is that which furthers a person's real interests, it follows that in any given case when the good is known, men will seek it. (Avrum Stroll and Richard Popkin, philosophy and the Hannan Spirit)

As the denial or perversion of justice by the sentences of courts, as well as in any other manner, is with reason classed among the just causes of war, it will follow that the federal judiciary ought to have cognizance of all causes in which the citizens of other countries are concerned. (Alexander Hamilton, Federalist papers, No. 80b

When individuals voluntarily abandon property, they forfeit any expectation Of privacy in it that they might have had. Therefore, a warrantless search or seizure of abandoned property is not unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment. (Judge Stephanie Kulp Seymour, United States v. Jones)

Artists and poets look at the world and seek relationships and order. But they translate their ideas to canvas, or to marble, or into poetic images. Scientists try to find relationships between different objects and events. To express the order they find, they create hypotheses and theories. Thus the great scientific theories arc easily compared to great art and great literature. (Douglas C. Giancoli. The Ideas of Physics. 3rd edition)

The fact that there was never a land bridge between Australia and mainland Asia is evidenced by the fact that the animal species in the two areas are very different. Asian placental mammals and Australian marsupial mammals have not been in contact in the last several million years. (T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman, Images Of the Past)

Cuba's record on disaster prevention is impressive. After October 1963, when Hurricane Flora devastated the island and killed more than a thousand people, the Cuban government overhauled its civil defense system. It was so successful that when six powerful hurricanes thumped Cuba between 1996 and 2002 only 16 people died. And when Hurricane Ivan struck Cuba in 2004 there was not a single casualty, but the same storm killed at least 70 people in other Caribbean countries. (Newspaper clipping)

The classroom teacher is crucial to the development and academic success of the average student, and administrators simply are ancillary to this effort. For this reason, classroom teachers ought to be paid at least the equivalent of administrators at all levels, including the superintendent. (Peter F. Falstrup, Letter to the Editor)

An agreement cannot bind unless both parties to the agreement know what they are doing and freely choose to do it. This implies that the seller who intends to enter a contract with a customer has a duty to disclose exactly what the customer is buying and what the terms of the sale are. (Manuel G. Velasquez, "The Ethics of Consumer Production")

Punishment, when speedy and specific, may suppress undesirable behavior, but it cannot teach or encourage desirable alternatives. Therefore, it is crucial to use positive techniques to model and reinforce appropriate behavior that the person can use in place of the unacceptable response that has to be suppressed. (Walter Mischel and Harriet Mischel, Essentials of Psychology)