But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.

five severed fingers do not make a hand

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.

The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.

You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.