“Most science is not credible. It’s not true; it’s not believable; it’s not useful; it’s not actionable; it’s done to inflate careers, and often [for] for-profit entities. People who are anxious and afraid and are concerned ... are likely to err in science. People who believe human beings are omnipotent, [that] we’re so powerful we can shape the natural world to our whims and desires, are much likely to make errors because the truth is the world is very complicated and we’re very small. And even though we think we’re so powerful and have a lockdown we may very modestly change human interactions in a space and we’re unlikely to sustain those interaction[s], those changes over time. So it’s very likely to be a very small effect and in the universe of things people have dreamed about for centuries, most of those things didn’t make us better off. They hurt us. They often were self-inflicted wounds.”
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield /
“He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.”
You are a man. You are something to be reckoned with.
Just another Thursday /
The desert encroaches. Woe to him whose desert lies within! /
“He can in truth find no further support from without. There no longer exist the organizations and institutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would have allowed him to realize himself wholly, to order his own existence in a clear and unambiguous way, and to defend and apply creatively in his own environment the principal values that he recognizes within himself. Thus there is no question of suggesting to him lines of action that, adequate and normative in any regular, traditional civilization, can no longer be so in an abnormal one–in an environment that is utterly different socially, psychically, intellectually, and materially; in a climate of general dissolution; in a system ruled by barely restrained disorder, and anyway lacking any legitimacy from above.”
Man does not want to choose. He wants to be chosen. /
“There is no feeling more desperate than being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility. ”