As I look at the human story I see two stories. They run parallel and never meet. One is of people who live, as they can or must, ...the events that arrive; the other is of people who live, as they intend, the events they create.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe wh...ich modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the brain consists of "wires"; a single unit may have thousands of connections with other units and with itself. That is n...ot the case in a standard computer, where a chip usually has less than six connections. Moreover, neurons are much, much slower than the switching elements of the computer. It seems likely that the brain can accomplish its complex feats of perception and thought by means of millions of connections acting in parallel. The connections as a whole define the information content of the system. In this way a vast amount of knowledge can be brought to bear on a decision all at once. The brain seems to be able to perform as many as two hundred trillion operations in a second; not serially, but simultaneously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a parallel between the twos and the tens. Tens are trying to test their abilities again, sizing up and experimenting to d...iscover how to fit in. They don't mean everything they do and say. They are just testing. . . . Take a good deal of your daughter's behavior with a grain of salt. Try to handle the really outrageous as matter-of-factly as you would a mistake in grammar or spelling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface le...vel and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What Marxism was to the society of Economic Man, Calvinism was to that of Intellectual Man: the final, messianic exaggeration of i...ts creed. In both, the belief in the attainment of freedom and equality could only be maintained by sacrificing actual freedom. The doctrine of determination through predestination in Calvinism is parallel to that of determination through the class situation in Marxism. Both abolished actual freedom in existing society to maintain the belief in the reality and imminence of freedom in the coming society. And both collapsed as orders when it was proved that the only society which they could realize was an unfree society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.... There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is curious to speculate why pornography is considered especially likely to stimulate its readers into performing the activities... described. The literature of murder is a vast one, particularly in the English language; enormous ingenuity is expended by writers in devising techniques for killing people, and these techniques are described with the greatest possible realism. The motives which would make murder desirable or profitable are so elaborated that they could easily persuade a reader into whose hands these books would be likely to fall that their case was parallel with that described in the book so that their problems could be solved in the same way. But I have never seen it seriously suggested that the literature of murder--detective stories or crime stories--tended to deprave and corrupt, or would incite weak-minded or immature readers into carrying out in reality the activities described in the fantasies. On the contrary, the literature of murder is considered particularly "healthy" and desirable; and in England representatives of all the most respected professions have stated that detective stories are among their favorite reading. Musing about murder is apparently "healthy"; musing about sexual enjoyment is not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »