George Leonard Quotes

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and who has to wait.

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which you see, and out of their substance will make other things and again other things... in order that the world may be ever new.

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.

We wait for things to be different in order to feel okay with life. As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we’ll always be left waiting for it.

And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

Challenge the person you think you are in order to unveil the person you are capable of becoming

She had been living like a hermit herself, in a cramped, seedy apartment in Somerville, spending long hours in the lab. All-nighters had become a regular thing. She didn't have any close friends, didn't go out on dates, didn't even go to the movies by herself. She had sacrificed a normal life in order to get a PhD, and become a scientist.

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.

there isn't enough of anything as long as we live. But at intervals a sweetness appears and, given a chance prevails.

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

International order is not an evolution; it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others- in this case, the domination of liberal free market principles of economics, democratic principles of politics, and a peaceful international system over other visions that other nations and peoples may have. It will last only as long as those who favor it retain the capacity to defend it.

The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria.