Artificial Boundaries Quotes

I have always felt that it's a little artificial to divide the sciences and the arts on college campuses.

All divisions are man-made.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.

In proportion to the love existing among men, so will be the community of property and power. Among true and real friends, all is common; and, were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friends. The only perfect and genuine republic is that which comprehends every living being. Those distinctions which have been artificially set up, of nations, societies, families, and religions, are only general names, expressing the abhorrence and contempt with which men blindly consider their fellowmen.

As you pass from sunlight into darkness and back again every hour and a half, you become startlingly aware how artificial are thousands of boundaries we've created to separate and define. And for the first time in your life you feel in your gut the precious unity of the Earth and all the living things it supports.

There was something horrifying in the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call 'civilization,' we have carved up what we claim is one world into 200 artificially created entities we call 'nations' and armed to apprehend or kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.

So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentaliz ation is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.

One would think that people who insist on being monotheistic would be the first in line to walk across the artificial boundaries created by nation states, class systems, cultures and even religions. But often they are the last!

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Everybody needs to show respect to each others' ways and the cultural life that you get on this planet. Don't get caught up on 'I'm brown, black, white, red, blue, whatever.' You gotta ask, what were you called before 1492? All these names we're using now are just an illusion made to keep us fighting each other.

Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven are divisions and distinctions we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe.