That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world. . . . . . . but showing that, of course, was a very big job. . . .

That's the classical mind at work, runs fine inside but looks dingy on the surface.

The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

It's not the 'nice' guy who brings about real social change. 'Nice' guys look nice because they're conforming. It's the 'bad' guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.