Quotes from Douglas E. Richards

In the early days of our ascent, being a prolific liar would have gotten you shunned from the tribe.

Struggle, purpose, accomplishment, and challenge are what truly brings meaning to existence. The ASI's war with the Androms helped bring this into proper focus. Winning

Partially true. But a large part of aging is due to a form of planned obsolescence.

THE ENIGMA CUBE Douglas E. Richards

Worse, the Nazis turned the blitzkrieg soldiers into an army of supermen, plying them liberally with crystal meth—speed—in pill form, shipping thirty-five million tablets to their three million troops. This drug allowed soldiers to advance for days without sleep, dulled their sense of empathy, made them feel euphoric and invincible, and turned them into aggressive, reckless killing machines.

A narrator pointed out that the process of natural selection once ensured that the strongest, smartest, or fastest reproduced in the greatest numbers. But now, in the case of human society, with no natural predators to thin the herd, evolution didn't reward those with the most intelligence, but simply those who reproduced the most.

There's another million upon success.

a chilled bottle of red wine.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling

He just said the powers that be had trouble making up their minds, the terrorists were even more despicable than civilians could comprehend, which most would be surprised was possible, and that he had lost his two closest friends.

Bring us together. Instead of turning us into their puppets, they'll teach us how to tame our destructive impulses, the demons of our nature, as they learned to do.

Mom was an MD/PhD who worked as a genetic engineer. Dad was a Navy SEAL for four years before leaving to get a PhD in marine biology.

This is awesome," he announced. "No more endless chatter. No more vicious, ugly thoughts from kids and parents and bosses and employees. No more disturbing sexual fantasies.

It has to do with the number of possible four-dimensional positions a quantum particle can take between two locations. As your own mathematicians have learned, some infinities are larger than others.

the propaganda. The US isn't perfect, by any means, but it's still a bastion of liberty that continues to be a positive force in the world.

Margaret Thatcher: 'Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people's money.

sure they'll leave us alone.'" "I

The road to hell is paved with good intentions," said Boyd. "So is the road to heaven," she countered. "Which road we might be on is in the eye of the beholder.

Let's just say I hope the soul is inherent in the complexity of the infinitely grand workings of the human brain. And that no matter where the mind is housed, the soul will follow.

A seventeenth-century English politician once famously said, 'a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.

The Dictator's Handbook, written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and Alastair Smith,

the only people qualified to help govern are those who have no interest in doing so.

POLITICS (noun): Poly, meaning "many" plus Tics, meaning "blood-sucking parasites." —Larry Hardiman

Human evolution favors anxiety over happiness.