I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try. I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money,...

For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.

…we haven’t had any accidents for months now…Everything on that island is perfectly fine.

False fears are a plague, a modern plague!

You can’t get decent Mexican food in DC.

Nobody dares to solve the problems-because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world.

Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it…

This may be why Einstein once said; “Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses...

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2....

[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.”Yes? Why is that?”Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every...

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith...

Sometimes I think everyone’s an attorney.

… we have created a man with not one brain but two. … This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. … The patient’s biological brain is the peripheral terminal — the only...

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later...

There are lots of trips out there. It’s even possible to become a conference groupie, going from one seminar to another and being a Beautiful Evolved Human Being until you start making the people around...

All your life, other people will try to take your accomplishments away from you. Don’t you take it away from yourself.

Geniuses never pay attention.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence

Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it...

In any case, this was a deep human prejudice. Human beings to find a central command in any organization. States had governments. Corporations had CEOs. Schools had principals. Armies had generals. Human beings tended to...

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and...

They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.

Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say...

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.

I suspect that scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there – reality – contains a hidden order, and the scientist is trying to elucidate the hidden order in our reality. And...

It’s better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.

Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It’s the most important thing that happens, and it’s the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure...

Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.

If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.

As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect these alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have a threatening or...

All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like ‘seeking truth.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the...

You are the reason why he exists on this earth. You don’t have the right to abandon him just because he’s inconvenient or has trouble in school.

Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.

My own sense is that the acquisition of self knowledge has been made difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the...

At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything—evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing—it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind...

In a sense, he thought, all we consist of is memories. Our personalities are constructed from memories, our lives are organized around memories, our cultures are built upon the foundation of shared memories that we...

La actual preocupación casi histérica por la seguridad es en el mejor de los casos un derroche de recursos y un obstáculo para el espíritu humano, y en el peor de los casos una invitación...

All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they’ll tell you will be wrong.

Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.

Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It’s bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn...

Kids are more advanced these days. The teenage years now start at 11.

Expectation works in mysterious ways—and totally unconsciously.

Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.

Anyone who says he knows God’s intention is showing a lot of very human ego.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so.

The purpose of life is to stay alive. Watch any animal in nature–all it tries to do is stay alive. It doesn’t care about beliefs or philosophy. Whenever any animal’s behavior puts it out of...

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something – reality – that may not be...