#volution

We live in the Age of the Higher Brain, the cerebral cortex that has grown enormously over the last few millennia, overshadowing the ancient, instinctive lower brain. The cortex is often called the new brain, yet the old brain held sway in humans for millions of years, as it does today in most living things. The old brain can’t conjure up ideas or read. But it does possess the power to feel and, above all, to be. It was the old brain that caused our forebears to sense the closeness of a mysterious presence everywhere in Nature. ↗

— Deepak Chopra

#spirituality #age

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#age

One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. ↗

— Marshall Sahlins

#culture #evolution #hunger #hunters #starvation

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#anachronisms #death #permanence #revolution #sociology

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#revolution #age

I’ll give you a theory: Man’s closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog. ↗

— Garth Stein

#dog #evolution #art

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#french-revolution #ya-novel #beauty

Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away. ↗

— Jennifer Donnelly

#class-struggle #excess #french-revolution #grandeur #louis-xiv

A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans. ↗

— David Rains Wallace

#evolution #wilderness #beauty

A little rebellion is a good thing. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#rebellion #revolution #change