#ang

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#clocks #covering #earth #endangering #evolution

Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#human #human language #language #matter #prevents

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#atlanta #audience #boston #ceremonial #dance

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#agency #any #connected #dangerous #entrusted

Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.' ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#about #amiable #arrangement #because #biology

Were British protesters, armed with little more than a frisbee and a bag of plastic toy soldiers, really in danger of being shot by the US military in Gloucestershire? ↗

— Mark Thomas

#bag #being #british #danger #frisbee

Never change a winning game; always change a losing one. ↗

— Bill Tilden

#change #game #losing #never #winning

In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#earlier #go #kid #kind #know

Even President Bush has cited the need to outlaw the practice of corporations making loans to their officers. Strangely enough, when the President was a corporate officer, he took out several loans from the company. ↗

— Bennie Thompson

#cited #company #corporate #corporations #enough

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#any #consume #control #could #daily