Latest Commonplace Additions

Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature; now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune – it may well be our final tragedy – that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself.

— Rachel Carson, 1962

From Rachel Carson Speech at Scripps College

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.

—

I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the citty would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.

— Ross MacDonald, 1968

From the book The Instant Enemy

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

— Marcel Proust, 1919

From Within a Budding Grove

I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterward I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “Okay, I’ll send you the pages.”

Then I go down the steps and my wife calls, “Where are you going?” “Well,” I say, “I’m going to buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in the closet.” And I say, “Hush.”

So I go to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately.

I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Second Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it.

Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home.

And I’ve had a hell of a good time. I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.

— Kurt Vonnegut, 1996

From Kurt Vonnegut lecture at Western Case University

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

— Anthony M. Kennedy, 1992

From the opinion Planned Parenthood v. Casey US Supreme Court opinion

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.

As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.

— Jeff Bezos, 1999

From the letter Amazon Letter to Shareholders

We do not talk — we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

— Henry Miller, 1945

From the book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

The dullness of fact is the mother of fiction.

— Isaac Asimov, 1962

From the book Fact and Fancy

Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs, such as the welfare of family, commitment to country, or identification with a particular religion that is thought to be absolute and inviolable. Sharing of these stories demonstrates honest reliable signals that an individual values the group and its goals. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the sharing of these sacred values is essential to the formation and maintenance of group identity.

— David R. Samson, 2023

A tribe is not a race, or even a population… a tribe is a creed; it is a team that has agreed upon a set of symbols – including sacred values – that identify membership. A creed is a mechanism that glues together disparate small camps and bands of cohabitating humans into a singular identity and shared purpose. Those who know the codes have in their possession a social passport.

— David R. Samson, 2023

From the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

— Victor Frankl

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

— Greta Thunberg

At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Friendship
4. Social networks
5. Cooperation
6. Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”)
7. Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism)
8. Social learning and teaching

— Nicholas Christakis, 2019

From the book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society

The “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery – honed by millions of years of evolution – that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes.

— David R. Samson, 2023

From the book Our Tribal Future: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.

— Carl Jung, 1951

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that – however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today – once benefitted our species.

— Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, 1993

From the book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are

Education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. We have to teach young people to think. And to teach young people, in order to teach young people to think, you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn’t be something they cannot think about. If there’s something, if there’s one thing they can’t think about, then very shortly they can’t think about anything, you know. Now, there’s always something in this country, of course, one cannot think about.

— James Baldwin, 1961

From the interview 1961 Studs Terkel Interview with James Baldwin

A meaningful activity is oriented toward a goal, one that, if accomplished, would have an impact on the world – and this usually means that it has an impact on other people. This activity… has some structure – it’s the sort of thing that one can tell a story about, It connects to… spirituality and often connects to flow (leading to experience of self loss) and often brings you into close contact with other people and is often seen as morally virtuous.

— Paul Bloom

From the book The Sweet Spot

‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. . . . It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’.

— G. K. Chesterton