Words&Dirt

“‘There is no time to talk,’ Arlanc said.  ‘But know that the men they have sent you are very dangerous: murderers, conspiracists, phanatiques, looters of bakeries, outragers of women, and locksmiths gone bad.'”

––The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 212

“Natural selection creates by discarding, and it doesn’t discard gently.  Tennyson, in a poem that was a favorite of Darwin’s wife, Emma, wrote of Mother Nature: ‘So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life.’  In biological as in cultural evolution, breathtaking creations come at a horrible cost.”

––Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright, pg. 264