What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits t...o arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Loving a baby is a circular business, a kind of feedback loop. The more you give the more you get and the more you get the more yo...u feel like giving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parenthood always comes as a shock. Postpartum blues? Postpartum panic is more like it. We set out to have a baby; what we get is ...a total take-over of our lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All adults who care about a baby will naturally be in competition for that baby.... Each adult wishes that he or she could do each... job a bit more skillfully for the infant or small child than the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Attachment to a baby is a long-term process, not a single, magical moment. The opportunity for bonding at birth may be compared to... falling in love--staying in love takes longer and demands more work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of... expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities--otherwise it would not be ...able to learn--but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have a low threshold for distraction. They are delicate. They are made nervous by having to do more than one thing at a time. ...They feel frazzled and angry if they have to answer three phone calls, and have a hard time settling back to work after the trauma. Women, on the other hand, develop the skill of doing many things at once. They tuck the phone in between their shoulders and their ears, hold a baby on one hip, stir a pot on the stove, all the while thinking about an idea for a story. They don't think it's unfair to have to do this. They think it's normal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, wer...e to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »