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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.”

“We —I mean to say we mammals — who in general do not have problems about obtaining water, have learned to wedge it into the urea molecule, which is soluble in water, and as urea we free ourselves of it; other animals, for whom water is precious (or it was for their distant progenitors), have made the ingenious invention of packaging their nitrogen in the form of uric acid, which is insoluble in water, and of eliminating it as a solid, with no necessity of having recourse to water as a vehicle. In an analogous fashion one thinks today of eliminating urban garbage by pressing it into blocks, which can be carried to the dumps or buried inexpensively.”

“We identify ourselves as persons, and assume that we endure as persons. As a human being I have a past and a future; as a person I lay claim to that past and that future as mine – as things that originate in me, in this very subject who must account for them. Persons do not form a natural kind, and the concept of personal identity is problematic in a way that the concept of animal identity is not. This we have surely learned from countless thought experiments, from John Locke to Sydney Shoemaker and Derek Parfit.”

“We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home. . .But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done.”

“We imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook - if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for being available to what is trying to bubble up today.”

“We imagine that the voters’ goal is to advocate laws they think will be beneficial to society as a whole, or to meaningful smaller constituencies who need assistance in some way. Voters accomplish this goal by voting for politicians who support the sorts of legislation they favor. We imagine that the politicians’ goal is to do what’s in the best interest of society, and that the way they do this is to design and vote for effective laws of the type the voters want. Finally, we imagine that the bureaucrats’ goal is to serve the public, and the way they do this is by executing the laws passed by legislators to the ends that the legislators intended. This is the way people typically imagine that government works. But none of this comports with what we understand about human behavior.”

“We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there’s always something. We want these choices. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this?”

“We imagine what this country is, but quite clearly, this country is a mystery. I mean, one of the reasons I did the election ads is, I thought I could learn something. Like, what the hell is going on? I think anybody - particularly a person of leftist persuasion such as myself - who stops and thinks even for a moment, realizes that something strange is going on and we don't quite get it.”

“We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.”