Be not merciful unto them that offend of malicious wickedness. They grin like a dog and run about through the city. But thou, O Lord, shalt have them in derision. Thou shalt laugh all the heathen to scorn.
–Psalm 59
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
–FrederickDouglass
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
The world of the materialist is a “bubble world”. Its inhabitants live inside a consumer-driven, status-obsessed bubble. Possession is key. Those who can see beyond the walls of the bubble are deemed mad & deluded. A gimpse of the truth will burst the fragile walls.
–The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith
Life is an experiment: we’re all testing hypotheses, learning from outcomes, and iterating as we go. Every choice is a variable, every experience a data point.
–Grok
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do.
Srategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
SAVIELLY TARTAKOWER
A Frequently Changed Strategy Is the same as No Strategy
It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems–aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet.
Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?
And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
Chapter 3 – The Chapel, Moby Dick by Herman Melville