#sci

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer. ↗

— John Gray

#freedom

That's Third Thoughts for you. When a huge rock is going to land on your head, they're the thoughts that think: Is that an igneous rock, such as granite, or is it sandstone? - Tiffany Aching in Wintersmith ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#geology #humor #imagination #perspicacity #science

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon’s surface, and that half the people’s right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it’s interesting again. ↗

— Rudy Rucker

#humor #science-fiction #humor

Find a printer paper and imagine a full-grown bird shaped something like a football with legs standing on it. Imagine 33,000 of these rectangles in a grid. (Broilers are never in cages, and never on multiple levels.) Now enclose the grid with windowless walls and put a ceiling on top. Run in automated (drug-laced) feed, water, heating, and ventilation systems. This is a farm. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#imagination

Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky... ↗

— John Noble Wilford

#force #imagination #mars #red #science

One nation, under God, with consciousness – the practical man serves the highest abstraction with juggling training. ↗

— Bauvard

#consciousness #funny #god #humor #juggling

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#imagination #landscape #nature #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

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne. ↗

— China Miéville

#practical-applications #practice #problem-solving #procrastination #theory

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow. ↗

— George Eliot

#procrastination #self-discipline #procrastination