Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vast majority of individual termites, belonging to the most highly evolved species, never leave their crowded fortress city, c...ould not see anything if they did, spend their entire existence in the narrow chambers and narrower tunnels of a labyrinth where they were born and where they breathe perpetually the damp, carbon dioxide atmosphere and dread more than anything else being compelled to leave it, even for an instant. The lives of certain human city dwellers who spend their days in air-conditioned offices, pass from them through tunnels of the subway to narrow chambers in some housing development, may seem remotely analogous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside th...e other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in t...erms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that's the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be easy ... to regard the whole of world 3 as timeless, as Plato suggested of his world of Forms or Ideas.... I propose a... different view--one which, I have found, is surprisingly fruitful. I regard world 3 as being essentially the product of the human mind.... More precisely, I regard the world 3 of problems, theories, and critical arguments as one of the results of the evolution of human language, and as acting back on this evolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded....... He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of huma...nity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us knowledge of outward dead things--such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals--language has preserved for us the inner living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mi...nd and the development of the human consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did tha...t of species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »