mind

"Superstitions... are nothing but persistent errors, foolish beliefs, and irrational fears. Superstitions are infinite in number and scope... It would not do to ignore them altogether, only if we shoul…"

"What was this hold she had upon me? Was I bewitched, that my mind refused to function sanely, and that judgment and reason were dethroned by some mad sentiment which I steadfastly refused to believe w…"

"When such a complete convulsion has shaken the State, and hardly left any thing whatsoever, either in civil arrangements, or in the Characters and disposition of men's minds, exactly where it was, wha…"

"It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction … in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the …"

"I couldn’t really read all the words because I was crying and sobbing, but my eyes focused on, 'We have chosen to excommunicate you.' I guess I'm a delusional optimist because to the end I thought the…"

"You know, I'm going to start thanking the woman who cleans the restroom in the building I work in. I'm going to start thinking of her as a human being."

"Ten per cent of our neighbours survive on charity. 10 per cent of Canadians eat through charity. 10 per cent. Surely if you were prime minister or minister of trade or of industry, you would wake up e…"

"I think we're both deeper than normal people. What they think and how they feel."

"I love having my conscious brain deactivated by a mindless repetitive task and the rest of it drifting off into the wonderful lands of make believe."

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'."

"There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked."

"I never shot a deer. I've never shot anything in my life. I never hunted. I'm just not that type of guy. But there's no doubt in my mind that I would have killed to win. That really scares me sometime…"

"The worst thing about this modern world is that people think you get killed on television with zero pain and zero blood. It must enter into kids' heads that it's not very messy to kill somebody, and i…"

"There slowly grew up in me an unshakable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature unless there is some unavoidable necessity for it, and that we ought…"

"There is some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what's in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that to…"

"Faith healers have gotten one thing right: the human body can detect and defeat all types of diseases including cancer—the second leading cause of death in America. Our mind and body are closely conne…"

"Let's step back and think about the likely outcome of a scenario that involves the words "James Nicoll", "a box of sharp needles" and "possibly without ever having achieved full consciousness" for a m…"

"Science is a special kind of explanation of the things we see around us. It starts with a problem and curiosity. Something strikes the scientist as odd. It doesn’t fit in with the usual explanation. M…"

"Words, words, words," he writes, "are the stumbling-blocks in the way of truth. Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words prod…"

"You ever date a chick with a hunch-fucking-back? I did. I’m in a grocery store with this chick, the security guards were all over her, because they thought she was trying to smuggle a turkey under the…"