“Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.”

— Stephen Jay Gould, book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 351
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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Stephen Jay Gould274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"War of the Worldviews", p. 351
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason”

Robert Harris Pompeii

Source: Pompeii

“We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history can impart to words that degree of precision which we need in order to understand them well.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 112 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962:16).

“Bulgaria visit is a signal that Austria will support any country affected by the alternative routes of refugees”

Johanna Mikl-Leitner (1964) Austrian politician (ÖVP), former Member of National Council of Austria and former Federal Interior Minister of …

Austrian Federal Minister of the Interior Johanna Mikl-Leitner will come (as of March 12, 2016) on a short visit to Bulgaria on Saturday, accompanied by Hans Peter Doskozil, Austria's Federal Minister of Defence, quoted on Focus-fen.net, "Austria Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner: Bulgaria visit is a signal that Austria will support any country affected by the alternative routes of refugees" http://www.focus-fen.net/news/2016/03/12/400278/austria-interior-minister-johanna-mikl-leitner-bulgaria-visit-is-a-signal-that-austria-will-support-any-country-affected-by-the-alternative-routes-of-refugees.html, March 12, 2016.

“A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible.
Societies, as well as individuals, have always contemplated deep questions relating to their being and becoming, and to the being and becoming of the world. The configuration of answers to these questions forms their world view. Research on world views, although we are convinced of its practical value and necessity, will always be primarily an expression of a theoretical interest. It reflects the unlimited openness of the human mind to reality as a whole. Even if this research would not appear to be of any immediate value or necessity – quod non – we still should promote and encourage it energetically, because it also expresses the most unselfish striving of humanity “the desire to know,” a property of “Homo sapiens sapiens.””

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: World views. From Fragmentation to Integration (1994), p. 8

“On our present course, this may eventually stand as the ultimate achievement of Homo sapiens sapiens. We should take a bow. We are obviously planet killers. The question is, can we also be planet saviors? I'd say that seems unlikely. Happy Earth Day.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

(22 April 2004)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

“With environmental progress continuing, environmental consciousness high among the American people and the environmental movement increasingly viewed as an obstacle to further environmental progress, both Earth Day and the environmental movement may have run their course.”

David A. Ridenour

David A. Ridenour, "Earth Day May No Longer Be Needed," National Policy Analysis #191,March 1998.

“The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.”

George Sand (1804–1876) French novelist and memoirist; pseudonym of Lucile Aurore Dupin

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.
Letter to Armand Barbès, (12 May 1867), published in Georges Lubin (ed.) Correspondance (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964-95) vol. 20, p. 412; Bruce Kajewski Traveling with Hermes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) p. 32

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

“A country of our size, with its focus on exports and thus reliance on foreign trade, must be aware that … military deployments are necessary in an emergency to protect our interests -- for example when it comes to trade routes, for example when it comes to preventing regional instabilities that could negatively influence our trade, jobs and incomes.”

Horst Köhler (1943) German politician (CDU); president of Germany, 2004-2010

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/controversy-over-afghanistan-remarks-german-president-horst-koehler-resigns-a-697785.html

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Stephen Jay Gould274

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