No man is obliged to be what he might have been.

At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.

Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism but I think it's certainly a necessary one.

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

Some philosophers see into themselves, and some into their times; still others forge an alliance with the future.

More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends.