“Every question "runs in a vicious circle" because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.” ArtImportantWholeMomentsHandsRunningPoliticalLyingGivenNumbersFindingsInfinitePossessionCirclesEndlessChainsFirmGuaranteesLinksViciousPolitical LifeVicious Circles Book:What Is to Be Done? Source: What Is to Be Done?
“I don't need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost's observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person's random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the "alienated artist" cut off from everybody who isn't, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so - a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)” PeopleNeedsWellsPersonsImportantFeelingsArtistCommonCuttingNormalPerceptionEmpathyPraiseObservationChainsFrostThoughts And FeelingsHornets Author:Randall Jarrell
“In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.” IfsKnowsFirstsLooksImportantHappensEarthFormCoursesShareUniversalDiedOriginalsSpeciesLeavingChainsAssumptionPairsAncestorTraitsOrganismsExtinctionDescendantsBacteriaLineageLiving OrganismsSpecies Extinction Author:David M. Raup