Wagoner, David. "Lost" (translation of Native American story)
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
Walker, Alice.
The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.
The Wall Street Journal, Editorial 12/1/95
Perverse incentives will produce perverse consequences.
Ward, Artemis.
I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
. . . we need first of all to have a clear conscience. Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence, and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everyone bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in such a confrontation.
Wells, H.G.. In The Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace; 1918.
Both countries have been slaves to Kruppism and Zabernism--because they were sovereign and free! So it will always be. So long as patriotic cant can keep the common man jealous of international controls over his belligerent possibilities, so long will he be the helpless slave of the foreign threat, and 'Peace' remain a mere name for the resting phase between wars.
Whitman, Walt.
I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them ... to touch any one ...
to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment ... what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight ... I swim in it as in a sea.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I contain multitudes!
Wilde, Oscar.
Williams, Tad. The Flower Wars
Wilson, Robert Anton. The New Inquisition
Do not adjust your mind-set: it is the book which is malfunctioning.
...mammals seem incapable of criticizing or examining their
neural programs. To a dog or a cat or a monkey, some act or event or thing that seemed
"bad" once will always seem "bad" and it, or anything that looks like
it, will be attacked or fled. Such programs are created by processes known as imprinting
and conditioning, which seem quite mechanical, in that observing them can yield
predictions that will be verified, as precisely in many cases, as the predictions of
Newtonian mechanics.
Domesticated primates (humans) seem also to function largely
on imprinting and conditioning, and mostly they share the mammalian
inability to criticize or examine these neurological programs. These mechanical reactions
interact with a linguistic (emic) reality-tunnel to produce a characteristic vocabulary,
from which behavior can often be predicted mechanically.
It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons,
have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own
neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted.
[Italics in the original]
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