Organisms Quotes - Page 22

• So far, I've only sailed in the Caribbean. I've sailed the Virgin Island and The Grenadines. I liked all that. We charted some really crummy boats in the Grenadines. That made for an exciting sailing trip (laughs) when everything goes well. When everything goes well. When sails rip, engines freeze up and you find there are organisms growing inside the diesel, it's terrible and amazing stuff.

  Bill Murray

  Rip, Islands, Laughing

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• The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.

  Theodore Kaczynski

  Long, Suffering, Cogs

  The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (2005). “The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future”, p.5, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.

  William J. Clinton

  Communication, Looks, Growing

  President Clinton's Discussion with Students at T.C. Williams High School, Alexandria, Virginia, clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov. April 22, 1999.

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• Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.

  Michel Foucault

  Power, Desire, Trying

  "The History of Sexuality". Book by Michel Foucault, p. 97, 1984.

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• We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

  Antonin Artaud

  Believe, Men, Doe

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.13, Grove Press

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• We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently.

  Bill Mollison

  Lying, Names, Two

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• We may treat of the Soul as in the body - whether it be set above it or actually within it - since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

  Plotinus

  Men, Two, Soul

  Plotinus (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Plotinus - Complete Enneads (Illustrated)”, p.16, Delphi Classics

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• No practical biologist interested in sexual reproduction would be led to work out the detailed consequences experienced by organisms having three or more sexes; yet what else should he do if he wishes to understand why the sexes are, in fact, always two?

  Ronald Fisher

  Sex, Two, Work Out

  "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1930.

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• Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

  Karl Popper

  Men, Interesting, Events

  Karl Popper (2005). “Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography”, p.150, Routledge

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• The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Simple, Average, Atheism

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• I like the process of giving control away [at the recording]. When you give it up to people, it's another intelligent organism that digests your information completely differently from how a machine digests information. It's like you're on a sailboat, and every time you can find out how to better adjust [the sail] to make it more precise. And it's interesting to see that the musicians have their own ideas. To use their intuitive power with their knowledge that they incorporate into the music. This is the moment you give away control, you give it to someone else's intuition.

  Pantha du Prince

  Intelligent, Ideas, Giving

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• Acting on stage is a living organism you can never pin down, and I believe the audience feeds off that, too.

  Hattie Morahan

  Believe, Acting, Down And

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• Every organism exists as a vehicle for the ennoblement of water into consciousness.

  David Wolfe

  Water, Consciousness, Vehicle

  "The Importance of Water for Good Health". Interview with Kevin Gianni, www.naturalnews.com. September 06, 2008.

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• I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell

  Lewis Thomas

  Night, Thinking, Cells

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.

  Lewis Thomas

  Independent, Imagination, Would Be

  "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 13), 1979.

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• You put three facts together - that all organisms produce more offspring that can survive, that there's variation among organisms, and that at least some of that variation is inherited - and the syllogistic inference is natural selection.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Together, Three, Variation

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression. It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive. As diverse as the cries for freedom may be, basically they all express one and the same thing: The intolerability of the rigidity of the organism and of the machine-like institutions which create a sharp conflict with the natural feelings for life. Not until there is a social order in which all cries for freedom subside will man have overcome his biological and social crippling, will he have attained genuine freedom.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Freedom, Men, Order

  "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". Book by Wilhelm Reich, 1933.

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• The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Real, World, Limits

  "The Crucible of Creation". Book by Simon Conway Morris, 1998.

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• All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  People, Needs, Looks

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells in an analogous, though very diversified manner, so that it may be asserted, that there is one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of organisms, however different, and that this principle is the formation of cells.

  Theodor Schwann

  Science, Cells, Differences

  Theodor Schwann (1847). “Microscopical Researches Into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants”, p.165

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• It is difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the action ... that each of us is to rejoice that our several units are to be distinguished at death into countless millions of organisms; for such, it seems, is the latest revelation delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi.

  William E. Gladstone

  Death, Science, Action

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• An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.

  Immanuel Kant

  Mean, Science, Ends

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• An organism exists for no other reason than that it is able to... The wonderful, almost transcendent thing about life on earth is that in order to so exist, organisms must relate to each other and to the earth itself.

  Richard Mabey

  Nature, Order, Earth

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• Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.

  H. L. Mencken

  Government, Effort, Resistance

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.204, Knopf

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• Education is so much of an organic unity that, if any of the stages or elements of it be defective, the deficiency is felt throughout all the subsequent growth of the organism.

  George Trumbull Ladd

  Education, Unity, Growth

  George Trumbull Ladd (1899). “Essays on the Higher Education”

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