"Let's adopt each other!"
"Ha ha ha! You're my kid and I'm your kid!"
"Ha ha ha!"

Hood's experiments have focused on the importance that young children put on "attachment objects" - teddy bears and comfort blankets. His researchers convince the pre-school-age subjects that their special item will be put into a machine that can produce a copy of the object which is identical in every way. But the infants, who are offered the choice of having the original or the "perfect" copy returned to them, strongly prefer the original.

"You do not have the right to use this art form to feel inferior."
- Martin de Maat

Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.

- Keith Johnstone, Impro

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves."
- Mahatma Gandhi

I organize in order to target
Balancing awareness
I seal the input of flowering
With the rhythmic tone of equality
I am guided by my own power doubled
- This Maya Moon

The problem with innovation is that you can't predict it. That's what innovation means -- the stuff we haven't thought of yet. Great innovations are ridiculous at the time of invention, startling on implementation, and obvious in hindsight.
- Cory Doctorow, The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences

A communist was exhorting an audience of laborers: "Comes the Revolution, you'll eat strawberries and cream." One worker objected, "But I don't like strawberries and cream." The agitator glared at him. "Comes the Revolution, you'll like strawberries and cream!"
- Robert Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality

One of our dogs would like to be human. He wants to eat in a chair at the table, and sleep in a bed. We don't let him, because his habits aren't hygienic enough and too much people-food isn't good for him. But surely no one can blame him for trying. And who can blame us for also wanting more and better?
- Robert Ettinger, Man Into Superman, 1989 preface

From the shoulder,
beyond the wrist...
look out, evil!
It's my fist!

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley, Invictus

"You've taken my whole life away, chewed it up, and shat it out again. Everything is shit! You've turned everything I had into shit! What am I supposed to do with this? Tell me! What am I supposed to do with piles of shit!"

"Spread them on your flowers, Greg."

-Greg Feely & Mother Dirt, The Filth by Grant Morrison

I am French. Your money means nothing to me.
- Five good responses for telemarketers or collection agencies

In January 1905, more than a year after the Wrights had first flown, Scientific American carried an article ridiculing the 'alleged' flights that the Wrights claimed to have made. Without a trace of irony, the magazine gave as its main reason for not believing the Wrights the fact that the American press had failed to write anything about them.

Reporter comes to Kitty Hawk, NC, in 1903. He asks a local, "What's that buzzing sound coming from the sky?" Local replies, "It's those crazy Wright Brothers. They think they can fly."

In my view the most important element in uploading will be our gradual transfer of our intelligence, personality, and skills to the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. -- Althought we are likely to retain the biological portion for a period of time, it will become of increasingly little consequence. So we will have effectively uploaded ourselves, albeit gradually, never quite noticing the transfer.
- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

All useful functions in one physical body

"Aging is as undesirable as leprosy."
- Aubrey de Grey

I'd like to know if the MPAA agrees with its spokesmen who have defended the practice of prohibiting backups of DVDs by saying, "Well, you can't back up a set of crystal glasses either?" and whether, should the ability to back up a set of crystal glasses ever emerge, should the glassmakers have the right to prohibit it?
Calvin Lawson, Seattle, WA USA


The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
- Star Wars

The Moslem god insists that you lose the right to have a beer, the god of Jehovah's Witnesses forbids you to have a blood transfusion, most gods will not allow you to have any kind of sex life unless and until you get married. Let's be honest - most peoples imaginary friends are real party poopers.

Existentialism -- if life is absurd and meaningless it is so because humans fail to exercise their own reason and independence, to take charge of their own lives and create their own meanings.