Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement … Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus … thereby it becomes its enemies."--Philip K. Dick

"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity."----William S. Burroughs

"To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror."----Frank Herbert

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.”
— William Gibson

“Practice in everything a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought.”
― Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier

"The best way to travel, after all, is to feel,
To feel everything in every way,
To feel everything excessively,
Because all things are, in truth, excessive
And all reality is an excess, a violence,
An extraordinarily vivid hallucination."
— Fernando Pessoa

"I am often asked whether there is life after death. Certainly, there is.

There is also death after life, and life before death, and death before life. It goes on forever. There’s no stopping it. You will live forever and die forever. In fact, you already have."---Tom Robbins