"Wordlessly she gestured downward, to the hidden lower limbs which seemed to hold some unearthly power over men’s minds."

David D. Levine Science See all quotes by David D. Levine →

React to this quote

More by David D. Levine

“Though you sometimes strike me as incapable of improvement, I feel honor-bound to make the attempt.”

““Flog me if you wish,” she said, though her trembling hands belied her brave words. “It will not change the fact that you were wrong, and I was right!”

“I do not pretend to understand how gears and levers can bring forth consciousness, sir, but it certainly appears that somehow they have.”

“The man could be frightfully keen...except when he was utterly obtuse.”

““And there you see the risk of automata,” Fox replied. “They are all well and good as amusements, I grant you. But when they are built to perform the work of men, surely this must result in the atrophy of the mental processes they replace.”

“That they cannot see beyond that limited horizon is the fault of society.”

Resonant Thoughts

"“One day I rode in company with ‘Alã-ul-mulk and arrived at a plain called Tarna at a distance of seven miles from the city. There I saw innumerable stone images and animals, many of which had undergo…"

— Ibn Battuta

Literature1304–1368

#time

"As long as the working-people fold hands and pray the gods in Washington to give them work, so long they will not get it. So long as they tramp the streets, whose stones they lay, whose filth they cle…"

— Voltairine de Cleyre

essay1866–1912

#work

"I suggest that the hon. gentleman may be a good corporation lawyer, but he is slipping badly in his history. The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capital…"

— Tommy Douglas

Politics1904–1986

#justice

"Art had a disquieting power of producing social embarrassment; it caused people to make silly remarks and then laugh self-consciously, as if the pictures, which knew better, could hear them. It could …"

— Mary McCarthy

Literature1912–1989

#humor