People From Pennsylvania

"Human ignorance has never needed help."

"“You mean you just let him go?” “What did you want me to do?” I snapped. “Castrate him on the spot? Execute him?” “Both. Both is good.”"

"“It’s not going to come to that,” I said. “Nobody ever believes it will,” so the driver. “That’s why it does.”"

"You want to know if it was worth it. I can’t answer that, Isaac. We can know what was, but not what might have been."

"I knew the one thing that truly mattered. I knew it could be done."

"Hon, nobody eats fried chicken because it’s good for them."

"This would be an excellent time for you to shut up."

"You don’t do what’s right because you know it will work out. You do it because you know it’s right."

"“Hey, I’m just playing devil’s advocate.” “Since when did the devil need your help?”"

"Young Isaac had dreamed of fame. Young Isaac was an idiot."

"The nice thing about people like Jellybean Man was that I knew exactly where I stood. There was no subtlety, no subterfuge or second-guessing. It was a refreshing change from talking to politicians."

"History is the world’s most egotistical gossip."

"“That’s…that’s magic.” “Pretty cool, isn’t it? If I had more time, I’d tell you how it worked.” “He would,” Lena said. “Even if you ask him to stop.”"

"Judge not, lest ye be punched in the face for being a self-righteous prick."

"“Are you a doctor?” “Better. I’m a librarian.”"

"“Damn, Boss. See, this is why everyone likes it better when you’re away on your road trips.” “Don’t call me Boss. Also, staff meeting upstairs in the Wheeler room in 30 minutes.” “That’s cold, Boss. What did we do to deserve that?” “Keep it up, and I’ll make you sit through a PowerPoint presentation.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Cruel and unusual punishment.”"

"I wanted to bring the author back from the grave purely so Lena, Nidhi, and I could take turns punching him in the face."

"The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives."

"The mistakes of the past do not excuse the mistakes of the present."

"Copper River was a small, tightly knit town. If gossip was a competitive sport, we’d have been sending teams to the Olympics and bringing back gold."

"Change is a difficult, often violent process, both for individuals and for whole species. The more rapidly change, the uglier the conflict."

"She paused, then added, “Besides, you don’t really want to know what I think. You’ve already come to your own conclusion. You just want me to talk you out of it.” I had forgotten how annoying Nidhi could be when she was right."

"Every religion I’ve studied has laws or commandments against killing. Historically, humanity has shown tremendous creativity in finding every possible loophole, rationalization, and justification to ignore these commandments."

"Librarians: Kicking Ignorance in the Balls for Over 4000 Years."

"There were always people eager for attention who were happy to confirm whatever explanation the reporters wanted, so long as he gave them their fifteen minutes of fame."

"In the words of a coworker, my give-a-shit gauge was stuck on Empty these days."

"“Your fear is all too human. Accept it, but as you walk this path, let your hope guide you.” “And what if hope guides me off the edge of a cliff?” “I said let hope guide you. I never said stop paying attention to where you’re going.”"

"The behavior of animals does not provide moral justification for human beings to do the same."

"If there ever comes a day when I deliberately embrace ignorance, I’ll have lived one day too long."

"Logically, Jig knew he was safe. Logic, however, had only a single small voice, and was easily overwhelmed by panic."

"“Earthmaker sounds like a useful person to have around,” Jig said. “Aye. He’s one who rewards his followers. Over a hundred years I’ve offered up my sacrifices and prayed to him for guidance. Far be it from me to guess the mind of a god, but I’m thinking he’ll not repay a century of service by letting us all die here.” Ryslind strolled to the dwarf’s side. “Yet for all of your devotion, your magic is still limited to those powers your god grants you. To be so dependent on the whim of a deity would be disturbing, to say the least.” “It’s called faith,” Darnak snapped. “And it’s a far cry safer than your wizardry. When’s the last time you heard about a priest blowing himself up after trying a new spell and waving three fingers instead of four?”"

"Goblins didn’t pray. They had no use for gods, a disinterest matched only by the gods’ disdain for goblins."

"Better the lesser of two oddities."

"A wizard am I, whom many dread, With power like a God. So come with me to yonder bed, And see my mighty rod."

"The most difficult part was letting yourself ignore the lies your eyes told. Eyes were like children. If they had nothing to say, they made things up."

"“Death,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “is not an event in life.” He meant, maybe (for it’s hard to be sure—Wittgenstein was rather titanically cryptic), that being dead is not something we actually experience and that since we aren’t conscious of a nonliving state it is literally meaningless, so instead of spending our lives worrying about the future we should look at each instant as an eternity. We should live in the moment. Perhaps this is true, and wise, but in an ordinary sense Wittgenstein was completely wrong. Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we better up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here."

"The situation in biology was particularly complex. Biologists craved the sort of base principles that Newton had developed for physics. Trying to classify life-forms begged the question of what overall purpose you had in mind. The system that was still largely in effect in the early nineteenth century was the “teleological taxonomy” created by Aristotle and refined by the Scholastic philosophers: the “scale of beings” system, which the French called the série, or series, and which is popularly known as the “great chain of being.” As with the medieval system of bodily humors, it was far more complex and useful than its popular stereotype suggests, but it had a serious limitation, which was its teleological basis."

"The irony is that in shifting the focus onto the individual human mind, which everyone agrees can be a pretty flimsy and wayward organ, Descartes had arrived at the closest thing to a certain basis for knowledge. If my own thoughts are the only indubitable ground I can stand on, apparently they aren’t so flimsy after all, at least not all the time. As an earlier follower of Descartes put it, “doubt is the beginning of an undoubtable philosophy.” Therefore the mind and its “good sense”—that is to say, human reason—are the only basis for judging whether a thing is true. With the “cogito,” as philosophers abbreviate it, and with the theory of knowledge that arises from it, which Descartes outlined in the Discourse on the Method and later works, human reason supplanted received wisdom. Once Descartes had established the base, he and others could rebuild the edifice of knowledge. But it would be different from what it had been. Everything would be different."

"Modesty was not a condition from which Descartes suffered."

"If the West is heading toward some kind of crisis, it’s worth asking ourselves a few basic questions. Modern society as we normally define it—a secular culture built around tolerance, reason, and democratic values—occupies a rather small portion of the world, and there are signs that it is shrinking. Is modernity the inexorable force of progress that we tend to assume? Is it a mere moment of human history that is fast fading? If it is something to value, how can we rediscover it, separate the good and the bad in it, make it relevant and vital?"

"In these days, when the number of papers in mathematics published each year is almost without limit and the ramifications are no less perplexing in their variety, one is delighted to find here and there a digest of the work in a particular field."

"In 1869 Dini solved the problem of geodesic representation of two surfaces upon one another. In 1896 Levi-Civita extended the problem to spaces of any order."

"The layman thinks that mathematics deals with facts and that thus there can possibly be no differences of opinion among mathematicians. We know that this is not the case."

"I’ve come to realize over the past decade or so that there are a lot of phonies among the Democratic Party’s elected officials — people who purport to be progressive, only to end up in the pocket of the big banks, the big environmental exploiters, or other vested interests. Early this month I was reminded of Democratic phonies in positions of authority, this time in Colorado... Polis is a former congressman who was elected governor in 2018 as a progressive Democrat... after campaigning on the goal of 100 percent renewable energy environmentalists have been restless for evidence of any serious commitment to that goal. So on Jan. 9, minutes before Polis took to the lectern... pro-environment protestors at the Colorado State Capitol hoisted signs reading “NO MORE SACRIFICE ZONES” and began shouting, “Ban fracking now!” Within minutes, state police arrested 38 protesters and charged them with multiple misdemeanors. Most were held in jail overnight and released the next day on $750 bond. Others... spent the entire weekend in jail... It’s the hypocrisy of politicians like Jared Polis... elected as an environmentalist. But as soon as he won his race, he reached out to the oil and gas industry and the frackers."

"So how do we trust our politicians? Consistency is probably the best test. Of all the Democrats running for president, only Senator Bernie Sanders issued a statement of support for the Colorado protesters. Do we trust former Vice President Joe Biden with issues of war and peace when he supported every U.S. military intervention around the world since his election to the Senate in 1972? Do we trust Amy Klobuchar on prison reform issues when she spent so many years as a prosecutor? I wouldn’t."

"In the NFL, the injury rate is a 100 percent. It's a violent game. And so, how you respond to injury and how quickly you heal from injury is important because if you're not on the field, you're not helping the team. I was reading the research and seeing that a plant-based diet could be beneficial, specifically for recovery. And so I started incorporating it and I started seeing really good results with it. I was recovering better. I wasn't getting as sore. I was a lot less swollen. Basically, to confirm what I was feeling, I got my blood tested. Six months after being on the diet, all of my markers were down, my blood pressure, my cholesterol. But the main thing I was looking at was the inflammation marker in your blood and mine was... almost obsolete. It wasn't there anymore."

"Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it (COVID-19) was an engineered virus."

"Put simply, it states that: meditation is the fixing of the mind on an object and holding it there. What then results after prolonged practice is the merging of the mind with this object, whatever it may be... The beauty of this is that it can be practiced all day every day, in whatever one may be doing. When washing the dishes, think only of washing the dishes; when working at your job, think only of your job, and so on."

"The mantra vehicle is the most common name in Tibet for the path of meditation practice following the “Books of Kiu-te,” or the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras. This is also referred to as the quick path..."

"One of the most defining teachings of Tibetan Buddhism is the teaching of the path to Buddhahood in terms of five... is taught in the Abhisamayalankara, the single most widely studied book in Tibet. This book is said to have been received from the future Buddha, Maitreya... It was memorized by the monks of virtually all the monasteries; and most of the great Tibetan teachers wrote commentaries on it..."