#now

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#early #evolution #future #growing #growing up

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#around #beast #begin #bits #calculating

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 most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#i #ignorant #know #most #nature

There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#agony #attach #body #cells #death

I do love the idea of being able to take an MP to court for lying. There are ways and means of taking an MP to court just now, but it is very difficult. ↗

— Mark Thomas

#being #court #difficult #i #i do

I realize now that I was a feminist and the minute I heard the word I certainly knew it meant me, but at that time I don't think we had the label yet. But there's no doubt about it that I was born a feminist. ↗

— Marlo Thomas

#born #certainly #doubt #feminist #had

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#architecture #classical #classical music #does #each

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile. ↗

— Michael Tilson Thomas

#art #art world #collect #comes #contemporary

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