You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.
People are essentially red meat. They are.
You can get a man's attention if you got a pair of boobs and a butt. I hate to simplify them down so much, but I think it's true.
I believe there are no questions that science can't answer about a physical universe.
We live in a culture that's been hijacked by the management consultant ethos. We want everything boiled down to a Power Point slide. We want metrics and 'show me the numbers.' That runs counter to the immensely complex nature of so many social, economic and political problems. You cannot devise an algorithm to fix them.
The whole drive of western culture, the part of it which is serious, is towards an extreme objectification. It's carried to the point where the human subject is treated almost as if it's dirt in the works of a watch.
You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulae exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
Stick to primary colors.
You do not explain the tree by telling of the water it has drunk, the minerals it has absorbed, and the sunlight that strengthened it.
To frame an issue is to reduce it to a story for which there is only one possible outcome
People tend to simplify things.
As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.
In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.
To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.
The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.
All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.
Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect
Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
Too many escape into complexity these days. For it is an escape for persons to cry, when this question of the equality of peoples is raised in India or in our own South, 'Ah, but the situation is not so simple.' ... no great stride forward is ever made for the individual or for the human race unless the complex situation is reduced to one simple question and its simple answer.
You’re getting rid of the things that people used to think were essential to art. But that reduction is only incidental. I object to the whole reduction idea…if my work is reductionist it’s because it doesn’t have the elements that people thought should be there. But it has other elements I like.
