#class

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. ↗

— Jay Gould

#half #hire #i #i can #kill

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ↗

— James Gleick

#entropy #information #maxwell #organization #experience

There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress. ↗

— Mark Twain

#class #congress #criminal #distinctly #except

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. ↗

— John Marshall Harlan

#citizens #class #constitution #country #dominant

You get on TV and you become more of a star and it makes it real hard to go back to school and sit in a classroom, put your hand up if you have a question or something. ↗

— Owen Hart

#back to school #become #classroom #get #go

I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point. ↗

— Anne Hathaway

#class #class family #decadent #excess #family

Rap records don't make you feel good no more. Six months after release, it can't come back as a classic. ↗

— Wyclef Jean

#back #classic #come #feel #feel good

I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I'd love to do opera, but I'm still too young and I don't want to do it until I'm ready. I realise that when I do that it's going to be... up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right. ↗

— Katherine Jenkins

#call #called #classical #discussion #get

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head. ↗

— John Fahey

#big #classical #classical music #compose #guitar

I wasn't the best in my class at the Royal Academy. There was a really good soprano and baritone who were technically better and are doing really well in opera now. But I was definitely the best mezzo-soprano in my class, because I was the only one of those! ↗

— Katherine Jenkins

#baritone #because #best #better #class