The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In... the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the successi...on of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The matrix is God?" "In a manner of speaking, although it would be more accurate ... to say that the matrix has a God, since... this being's omniscience and omnipotence are assumed to be limited to the matrix." "If it has limits, it isn't omnipotent." "Exactly.... Cyberspace exists, insofar as it can be said to exist, by virtue of human agency."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes this aim: unless the subject were in this way even in ...the most disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action at all.... Impulse and passion are the very life- blood of all action: they are needed if the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, an inactive thing, that finds it actualizing in the agent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing stric...t causal connections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; it has made its way into the works of all our best poets, and even the mere man... of letters, who affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods. I believe that the greatest intellectual revolution mankind has yet seen is now slowly taking place by her agency. She is teaching the world that the ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment, and not authority; she is teaching it to estimate the value of evidence; she is creating a firm and living faith in the existence of immutable moral and physical laws, perfect obedience to which is the highest possible aim of a intelligent being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which--miraculously, it seems--merge into a si...gnificant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'm a copywriter for an ad agency. It involves being a total asshole. I do it for the money, it's easy and horrible. I do nothing ...good for society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »