Passion
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Harold Whitman
Answer me this: If I’m so “crazy,” then why did they choose me to be their spokesperson to the people of Earth?
The best evidence for the existence of intelligent life in the universe lies in the fact that they have steadfastly refused to contact us.
— Richard Boyd
I saw this quote as a letter-to-the-editor in one of the San Francisco Bay Area papers several years ago. I love the twisted logic and the inherent presumptions that it contains. Some attempts at logical arguments for the existence of God share these logical fallacies.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
— Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)
The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements but moral acts:
— Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin