Lewis Thomas
Quotations
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“Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.” -Lewis Thomas
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“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.” -Lewis Thomas
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“The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.” -Lewis Thomas
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“I won’t compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.” -Lewis Thomas
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“If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.” -Lewis Thomas
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“We’re as clever as we think we are, but we’ll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We’re at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time –…
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“The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.” -Lewis Thomas
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“Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.” -Lewis Thomas
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“Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.” -Lewis Thomas
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“The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves most things, in fact, are better in the morning.” -Lewis Thomas
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“The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.” -Lewis Thomas
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“Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.” -Lewis Thomas
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“The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves most things, in fact, are better in the morning.” -Lewis Thomas
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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.”…
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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“I don’t want to be reincarnated, that’s for sure. When you’ve had rewarding experiences in your life – a loving family, friends – you don’t need additional reassurances that you’re going to do something with a new cast of characters. I’d just as soon pass.” -Lewis Thomas
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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“The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.” -Lewis Thomas
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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“Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow.” -Lewis Thomas
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“I won’t compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.” -Lewis Thomas
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“A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun’s position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.” -Lewis Thomas
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“A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I’ve seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I’ve never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That’s amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that’s being taken…
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