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O Quotes

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All O Quotes

“Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.”

“Ord ultimately concludes that human civilization has a good chance to survive even at double that temperature rise. "I looked at these models up to about 20 degrees of warming, and it still seems like there would be substantial habitable areas," he said. "But, it's something where it'd be very bad, just to be clear to the audience," Ord hastened to add. Climate science suggests that "very bad" is a gross understatement. "A temperature rise of 10 degrees [Celsius] would be a mass extinction event in the long term," says Luke Kemp, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and an expert on climate-induced civilizational collapse.”

“Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life.”

“Order can arise from chaos without anyone or anything directing the process when unstable combinations of atoms perish and others persist. In the 17th century, Descartes applied this insight to cosmology, and long before Darwin presented his more rigorous ideas about variation and selection, people began to speculate more openly about the origins of life and the species in Epicurean terms.”

“Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.”

“Order gives birth to constants, and constants yield expectations. When two people have unprotected sex and both are fertile, and the sperm reaches the egg, the woman gets pregnant and a baby is born. There is an order to things and thus, a reasonable expectation can be made. That’s what two decades of school teach you. Do things a certain way, and you’ll get the results you want.” She gulped her beer and sighed. “But life is different. It doesn’t work that way. And dating is the stupidest mechanism of life.” “Why is it the stupidest?” “Because the rules are all fucked up. You do one thing, supposedly the ‘right’ thing, and you get a different result, which is usually no result.”