It is in the animal part of your nature to be most impressed by what you can see and hear in the present-the latest news reports and trends, the opinions and actions of the people around you, whatever seems the most dramatic. This is what makes you fall for alluring schemes that promise quick results and easy money. This is also what makes you overreact to present circumstances-becoming overly exhilarated or panicky as events turn one direction or the other. Learn to measure people by the narrowness or breadth of their vision; avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode. They will infect you with this energy. Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible. Never lose sight of your long-term goals. With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.
Robert GreeneRelated topics
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If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?...
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective - who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled - can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. ... The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley Kubrick
Doctor No said, in the same soft resonant voice, ‘You are right. Mister Bond. That is just what I am, a maniac. All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards their goal. The great scientists, the artists, the philosophers, the religious leaders – all maniacs. What else but a blind singleness of purpose could have given focus to their genius, would have kept them in the groove of their purpose? Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through - these are the vices of the herd.' Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. ‘I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac – a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That' – the black holes glittered blankly at Bond through the contact lenses – ‘is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.'
Ian Fleming
The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act ... of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. ... the moral progress of humanity - which is the foundation of every other kind of progress - is always slow; but ... the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger - viz., vegetarianism.
Leo Tolstoy
Over the last 50,000 years, modern humans have been subjected to enormous evolutionary pressures, in part from the consequences of their own social culture. They explored new ranges and climates and developed new social structures. Fast adaption, particularly to new social structures, was required as each population strove to exploit its own ecological niche and to avoid conquest by its neighbors. The genetic mechanism that made possible this rapid evolutionary change was the soft sweep, the reshaping of existing traits by quick minor adjustments in the sets of alleles that controlled them. But what began as a single experiment with the ancestral human population became a set of parallel experiments once the ancestral population had spread throughout the world. These independent evolutionary paths led inevitably to the different human populations or races that inhabit each continent.
Nicholas Wade
I'm actually kind of impressed by Iraq's patience right now... I mean, look at it objectively. They've opened their doors to un inspectors, they're being bombed by british and american troops, american forces are massing at their borders, american diplomats are actively looking to assinate [sic] Saddam Hussein, etc. It almost seems like Bush is doing everything he can to taunt Saddam Hussein. Not just if you step over this line I will hit you, but if you step over this line while I put rats on your back and put butter on the floor and make fun of your mom and move the line then I will hit you, in fact I'll hit you even if you just stand there and do nothing. It's painfully clear that iraq should not be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction. But it also seems painfully clear that the bush administration have no intention of finding a peaceful resolution to the situation in Iraq.
Moby