Quotes About Structure

He had given her a copy of a recently published paper that held that the power of entropy weakens near the event horizon of a vanishing black hole. The weakening of entropy, by extension, could give rise to the formation of structure, and this could suffice to furnish the unique conditions necessary for the emergence of life.

The generals commanded the colonels and the colonels commanded the majors and the majors commanded the captains and the captains commanded the private, who marched with an air of proud importance because it required so many officers to give him his orders.

The visible world is the invisible organization of energy.

Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme.

God is not about religion. Religion is a structure that should house our faith in God. Too often it is used to hurt other people in God's name.

I'm certainly not interested in religion for religion's sake or for some kind of structure or stabilizing force. Religion is supposed to be for God's sake and God is an unpredictable, wild thing.

Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.

That was the trouble with formulating a system: what could you do but repeat it?

There's an essential order you have to follow in everything. It's a way of showing respect, following everything in the correct order.

I was free again—that is, rather, I was included again in the well-constructed, infinitely stretching Assyrian rows.

Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.

Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.

every routine is an invitation for disruption, every hierarchy an invitation for revolution.

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

Geneticists claim to have isolated the genes responsible for vole monogamy. If the addition of a gene can turn a vole Don Juan into a loyal and loving husband, are we far off from being able to genetically engineer not only the individual abilities of rodents (and humans), but also their social structures?

All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable. For

La mayoría de las jerarquías sociopolíticas carecen de una base lógica o biológica: no son más que la perpetuación de acontecimientos aleatorios sostenidos por mitos.

Political, ethnic, cultural, and economic divisions endure, but they do not undermine the fundamental unity. Indeed, some divisions are made possible only by an overarching common structure. In the economy, for example, the division of labor cannot succeed unless everyone shares a single market.

In the wild, cattle roamed as they pleased in herds with a complex social structure. The castrated and domesticated ox wasted away his life under the lash and in a narrow pen, labouring alone or in pairs in a way that suited neither its body nor its social and emotional needs. When an ox could no longer pull the plough, it was slaughtered.

The imagined order is embedded in the material world.

Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

I like architecture to have some raw, vital, earthy quality

The purpose of art, including literature, is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.