As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us... is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is born with the potential ability to learn Chinese or Swahili, play a kazoo, climb a tree, make a strudel or a birdhouse,... take pleasure in finding the coordinates of a star. Genetic inheritance determines a child's abilities and weaknesses. But those who raise a child call forth from that matrix the traits and talents they consider important.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do mat...h. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.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 »
At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl.... He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline hi...gh, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child who thinks he is good at something even if he is not--soccer, math, violin--is likely to be more resilient than a child wh...o is never satisfied with his efforts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belongin...g and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not menstrual blood per se which disturbs the imagination--unstanchable as that red flood may be--but rather the albumen in ...the blood, the uterine shreds, placental jellyfish of the female sea. This is the chthonian matrix from which we rose. We have an evolutionary revulsion from slime, our site of biologic origins. Every month, it is woman's fate to face the abyss of time and being, the abyss which is herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For three hundred years the idea that nurture is the determining factor in human actions has been used to argue for a variety of s...ocial programs--if we can only change people's environments, the argument goes, we can make a better humanity; reduce crime, fight poverty, get rid of the sex difference in math. This creed is usually associated with the politics of the Left. On the other hand, if nature is responsible for much of what we are--heavily influencing such things as intelligence, personality traits, perhaps even propensity to commit crimes--then there are limits to what social programs can do to reduce the individual differences between people. This conviction is often thought to fit better with the politics of the Right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »