#evolution

Each of us lives with a sword over his head. There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are the creators of the special myth of their time, because any myth is the creation of the very few who cannot bear reality. ↗

— Murray Kempton

#activism-inspiration #american-history #ethics #myth #revolution

That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#life #suffering #life

The material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you, including yourself. ↗

— Henry Rollins

#life #life

There are animals we haven't stopped by. Don't think they're harmless. Life will defend itself no matter how small it is. ↗

— Yann Martel

#fight #life

The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say? ↗

— Christopher Hill

#life

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? ↗

— Charles Darwin

#darwinism #evolution #human-mind #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. ↗

— Grant Morrison

#evolution #life #life

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and there is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it. ↗

— Albert von Szent-Györgyi

#philosophical #life

Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#human-nature #selfishness #dreams

Don't pour a lifetime of effort into a seasonal relationship. Not everyone from the pilot belongs in the finale. ↗

— Mandy Hale

#evolution #finale #friendships #growth #journey-of-life