Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I don’t ordinarily find a full set of quotations someone else has gathered worth passing along, but these five all appeal to my intermittent efforts to seek political and intellectual clarity and commitment in the face of ambivalence, complexity, and comfort. They appear at the beginning of a blog entry at  Global Politician having to do with law and technology, which I will finish reading later, but so far these are worth repeating:

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make it its home for life.  For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system.  When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.  (its rather like getting tenure).”
Daniel Dennet - Quoted in Paul Thagard’s Mind - An Introduction to Cognitive Science Test

“Everything in nature, in the inanimate as well as the animate world, happens according to rules, although we do not always know these rules.”
Immanuel Kant, Logic

“The fuzzy principle states that everything is a matter of degree.”
Bart Kosko, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic

“When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also add that some things are more nearly certain than others.”
Bertrand Russell, “Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?”

“Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.”
William James