#ect

It is amazing to think after all that has happened in this country in the last few years, the last few decades, that so many people have this blind faith that government is our friend and therefore, so we don't need protections against it. ↗

— James Bovard

#against #amazing #blind #blind faith #country

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

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#also #binary #choices #coded #depending

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#along #around #back #bees #dancing

We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#brain #brains #clever #collectively #endeavors

Maybe... there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for unlawfully detaining 120 people. Maybe they just got carried away with last year's idea of pre-emptive strikes and thought, 'Let's not wait for an actual crime to occur. Let's get the innocent. ↗

— Mark Thomas

#away #carried #crime #detaining #explanation

We tend to think of politicians as time-servers and slackers. But on those committees they usually have an interest in the subject. And they're quite clever. I've seen them pick people apart. ↗

— Mark Thomas

#clever #committees #i #interest #people

In my work, there's a tremendous amount of rejection and waves of fertile and fallow times. ↗

— Marlo Thomas

#fallow #fertile #rejection #times #tremendous

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#contact #direct #direct contact #feel #i

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#being #coach #conductor #director #editor