“If Nature were kind, She would at least make the minor concession of anesthetizing caterpillars before they were eaten alive from within. But Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquilizes gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favored by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquilizing a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so, and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death– as many of them eventually are.”
Source: River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
“Distance is the root of indifference.”
Source: Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science
“Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 1
Earth is but a bedlam,
All the beings are loonies.
We are so engrossed in prejudice,
Integration feels like blasphemy.
We still cannot live side by side,
We want it all for ourselves.
We won't even move a single inch,
When it comes to our opinion and ways.
Selfishness, thy name is Sapiens,
Upon its norm we philosophize kindness.
We invented fancy terms like altruism,
Lest we're infected with common humanness.
Humanity is too alive to be bound by ism.
Dead things can be dogmatized, not expansion.”
Source: Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
“It is nothing short of tragedy if virtues are nowhere to be found except on walls.”
Source: Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
“Democracy, civilization, society, all shall come, when we're aware of the duties of designation human.”
Source: Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
“Your responsibility does not end at the ballot.”
Source: Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence
“And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help—for it
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.”
Source: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
“To fools, vile, hypocrites
and all kinds of stupid and despicable people,
my indifference and my silence.”
“One day you show so much indifference to someone
who gets exactly what he wants: to be forgotten.”
“Backbone not used to bear the world, is a backbone wasted.”
Source: Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission