#evolution

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows. ↗

— George Orwell

#money #religion #revolution #symbolic #money

The best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is the imagination. ↗

— Homer W. Smith

#evolution #science #imagination

Creativity sparks originality which then manifests itself into what we call evolution. To depreciate imagination is to depreciate life. ↗

— Alecia Stone

#evolution #philosophy #thought #imagination

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#confessions-of-the-darwinists #conjecture #darwin #darwinism #darwinist-confessions

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time. ↗

— Loren Eiseley

#life #imagination

We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business. ↗

— Matt Ridley

#love #red-queen #sex #business

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. ↗

— Arnold Joseph Toynbee

#inspirational #social-evolution #death

This is a revolution, damnit! We're going to have to offend somebody! ↗

— Peter Stone

#offend #revolution #somebody

A woman has many faces as she goes through her life. It's like we need more than one hair-do. We have many, many changes in the evolution of our lives. We have, we learn, and we grow; we view life differently, and life views us differently. ↗

— Sharon Stone

#differently #evolution #faces #goes #grow

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. ↗

— Tom Stoppard

#revolution #shift #suffering #trivial