“To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved in to Michelangelo’s David. Speech is what man pays homage to in every moment he can imagine.”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“Folks, it's time to evolve. That's why we're troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything's failing? It's because they're no longer relevant. We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?”— Bill Hicks, theunboundedspirit.com
“Language, like human reasoning itself, emerges at the nexus of our biological endowment and our environmental existence.”— Daniel L. Everett, amazon.com
“Soon speech will be recognized as the Fourth Kingdom of Earth. We have regnum animalia, regnum vegetabile, regnum lapideum (animal, vegetable, mineral)— and now regnum loquax, the kingdom of speech, inhabited solely by Homo loquax. Or is ‘kingdom’ too small a word for the eminence of speech, which c…”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“Today mnemonics is not thought of as anything more practical than a memory device for remembering ingredients, lists, and in some cases formulas. Virtually all the sciences depend upon mnemonics, typically in the form of sentences or phrases in which the first letter of each word stands for a differ…”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“Subscribing to Darwinism showed that one was part of a bright, enlightened minority who shone far above the mooing herd down below.”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“Darwin's students wanted to know some small but fundamental details about the moment Evolution got under way and how exactly, physically, it started up— and from what? Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause… and finally, ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘probably from four or fi…”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“In Germany, on the other hand, The Origin of Species was an immediate sensation. By 1874 Nietzsche had paid Darwin and his theory the highest praise with the most famous declaration in modern philosophy: ‘God is dead.’ Without mentioning Darwin by name, he said the ‘doctrine that there is no cardina…”— Tom Wolfe, amazon.com
“In Roman Catholic theology, it has long been customary to refer to God’s transcendence. Surely God’s transcendence makes God the God of evolution.”— Thomas J. Farrell, d-commons.d.umn.edu
“Travel across great distances in outer space may not be the only way to reach worlds that are different from our own, seemingly remote in time and space. Moreover, it may be unnecessary to restrict this search using methods based upon a view of reality limited to what is physical and measurable. It…”— Rick Strassman, amazon.com
“Nature has been far more clever at connectionism than have we. Her mechanisms for information swapping, data processing, and collective creation are more intricate and agile than anything the finest computer theoreticians have yet foreseen.”— Howard Bloom, amazon.com
“People— once they became metropolitan, once they developed cities, and once they developed a high degree of trade between cities— began to gather together, not on the basis of tribal loyalties, but on the basis of mental loyalties. People who shared a common idea or people who shared a common emotio…”— Howard Bloom, amazon.com
“Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.”— Steven Pinker, amazon.com
“Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong.”— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com
“If such religion had been maintained by the princes of the Christian republic as was ordered by its giver, the Christian states and republics would be more united, much happier than they are. Nor can one make any better conjecture as to its decline than to see that those peoples who are closest to t…”— Niccolò Machiavelli, amazon.com
“Do not deny history. American culture is based on novelty, on difference; Europeans are not interested in new ways as much as they are interested in refining a concept which has existed through the centuries. It is a continuing evolution, not a revolution.”— Massimo Vignelli, amazon.com
“We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob. We are messing with our source code, including the code that grows our brains and makes our minds. Gene splicing, genetic engineering, and gene therapy have given our minds direct control of our genes, ending a four-billion-year hegemo…”— Kevin Kelly, amazon.com
“The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!”— Noam Chomsky, theguardian.com
“If in the evolution of consciousness we include the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, it is evidently impossible completely, or even significantly, to plan what the next stage of consciousness will be. Consciously developed plans may affect the next stage of consciousness but they them…”— Walter Ong, amazon.com