Quotes from Howard Bloom

Pericles' Golden Age produced the flowering which would lead to Athens' place in history and would crest in the marble-columned buildings and literary works which cornerstone the civilization of the West.

one of the first assemblies of smart molecules had been the crew of that ingenious unit called the gene.† An even grander molecular fusion had been the chromosome—a knottily twisted rope of genes which not only worked together,* but fused so tightly that they formed a massive mega-molecule.

Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods.

During epidemics, the rich have nearly always outsurvived the poor. In some cases they've even benefited

When memory appeared, the effect was dramatic. A multicelled creature could quickly store experience in a nervous system's circuitry. This opened the way for a swift reprogrammer zoologist Richard Dawkins calls the meme*—a habit, a technique, a twist of feeling, a sense of things, which easily flips from brain to brain.

The horizons toward which we can soar are within us, anxious to break free, to emerge from our imaginings, then to beckon us forward into fresh realities. We have a mission to create, for we are evolution incarnate. We are her self-awareness, her frontal lobes and fingertips. We are second generation star stuff come alive. We are parts of something 3.5 billions years old, but pubertal in cosmic time. We are neurons of this planet's interspecies mind.

As they multiplied, they split their tracts amongst their sons.13 These lots (named because each son picked a lot to see which swatch of terra firma would be his) grew smaller, so small that their owners were gradually impoverished.

Pythagoras turned his budding cult into exactly what flock-seeking introverts most need—the haven of a tyranny. Ambiguity is a tension-provoker68—and the sheep among introverts go bonkers at the strain. Indecisive grays savage the flockers' limbic systems, so they desperately need the tranquilizer of a world spelled out in black and white.

I'm a stone-cold atheist.