Quotes from John Brockman

People are sheep—cowardly, deplorable sheep.

an individual's moral obligation in the situation is to 'call it as he sees it' without consideration of what others say.

This is the tome that guides haruspication—I mean, psychiatry.)

optimization under constraints," and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality

people readily accept credit when told they have succeeded, attributing it to their ability and effort. Yet they attribute failure to such external factors as bad luck or the problem's "impossibility." When we win at Scrabble, it's because of our verbal dexterity. When we lose, it's because "I was stuck with a Q but no U.

commitment to spooky, nonempirical entities ranging from human rights to the Word of God to the coming proletarian Utopia.

Impatience is a contagion spread from gadget to gadget.

It's simply not the case that secular liberalism, grounded in materialist utilitarianism, is the inevitable and default worldview of anyone who isn't stupid, brainwashed, or uneducated;

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it," Albert Einstein

Worry descends upon the worrier like a fever. Without appropriate treatment, that febrile anxiety burns away at the soul. With such treatment, the fever may break. Only then can the worried become well.

The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.

If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we could implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don't bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us.

WEIRD people (people in cultures that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)

WEIRD people, they argue, are "the weirdest people in the world.

Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin: "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down").

I have come to believe that an individual consciousness represents an entity so personal and ontologically unique that it qualifies as something we might as well call a soul.

Max Planck observed, revolutions in science sometimes have to wait for funerals.

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Choice is simply a fanciful shorthand for biological processes we do not yet apprehend.

Can the fundamental insight—the destructive, creative virtue of simplicity—be transposed from the realm of scientific explanation into culture or onto the level of conscious experience? What kind of formal simplicity would make our culture a deeper, more beautiful culture? And what is an elegant mind?

The black expanse over our heads promise places where our industries can use resource extraction, zero-gravity manufacturing, better communications, perhaps even energy harvested in great solar farms and sent down to Earth. Companies are already planning to do so: Bigelow Aerospace (orbital hotels), Virgin Galactic (low Earth orbit tourism), Orbital Technologies (a commercial manufacturing space station), and Planetary Resources, whose goal is to develop a robotic asteroid mining industry.

Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.

Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.

By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.