The Human Race

It's a Dutch book!

Perhaps we should insist on literacy?

The president must only do things that can be explained to children by teachers.

The philosophical tradition is often presented as a series of good students who understand the ideas of great thinkers.

But you really must think for yourself.

I hope the Europeans love their children too.

Try to lose hope
one at a time.

Keep it coming.

A Western

Let poetry teach you about women
at your peril.
Let a woman teach you about poetry
at your funeral.

Learn from paintings what a woman
looks like and
let the women teach you how to draw
                  first.

The little darkness will lift by morning.

The larger darkness will pass in time.

The pangrammatical supplement (as knowledge is to power) of perception is expectation. A perception is to a fact as an expectation to an act. "We are faced with the problem of error" (Quine).

You cannot know a world you cannot change.

You cannot master a history you cannot abide.

(What we master is never the world but our history. What we know is never our history but the world.)

There is a reality
at the heart
of this thing:

a body

where the person
in the mind
becomes the ideal.

We can't just say
the silence speaks.

We have to listen.

There are no secrets in books.

Selfhood, Soulness

Similar in being
what we have
because we have it.

Atheism is a form of prayer.

You can live through any given series of events in hope or in despair. These are not alternative hypotheses to be tested; neither hope nor despair are ever proven right by how things turn out.

Our courage mystifies us; our cowardice explains us.

Substrate

Consciousness is rooted not just in the flesh but in our lives. Substrate dependence is not about "carbon" vs. "silicon" but life in a sense that applies equally to biology and biography -- to conception, if you will, and to confession. Machines are capable of neither.

History depends, not on how passionately we resist, but on how precisely we conform.

Literature teaches us to leave writers alone.