The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous ...to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But, with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of th...e memory, and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man; where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligenc...e with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Macbeth. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,... Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? Doctor. Therein the patient Must minister to himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child s...ays that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids a...nd their elders' cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgro...wn, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
God sent children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race--to enlarge our hears; and to make us unselfish and full of ...kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims; to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; and to bring round our firesides bright faces, happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to for...get and to forget is to die. Everything is so much involved in and is so much a process of its opposite that, as it is almost fair to call death a process of life and life a process of death, so it is to call memory a process of forgetting and forgetting a process of remembering. There is never either absolute memory or absolute forgetfulness, absolute life or absolute death. So with light and darkness, heat and cold, you never get either all the light or all the heat out of anything. So with God and the devil; so with everything. Everything is like a door swinging backwards and forwards. Everything has a little of that from which it is most remote and to which it is most opposed and these antitheses serve to explain one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »