Sam Harris, “Re-Evolution” Debate, 18/11/2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKWZ3a4XlQI&t=35s
2000s
Context: The truth is that religion, as we speak of it – Islam, Christianity, Judaism – is based on the claim that God dictates certain books. He doesn’t code software, he doesn’t produce films, he doesn’t score symphonies, he is an author. And this claim has achieved credibility because these books are deemed so profound they could not have possibly been written by human authors. Please consider for a moment how differently we treat scientific claims and texts and discoveries. Isaac Newton went into isolation for 18 months starting in the year 1665. When he came out of his solitude he had invented the calculus; he had discovered the laws of motion and universal gravitation; he had single-handedly created the field of optics. No one thinks this was anything but a man’s labor. And it took 200 hundred years of continuous ingenuity on the part of some of the smartest people who ever lived to substantially improve upon Newton’s work. How difficult would it be to improve the Bible? Anyone in this room could improve this supposedly inerrant text scientifically, historically, ethically, spiritually – in moments. If God loves us and wanted to guide us with a book of morality, it’s very strange to have given us a book that supports slavery, that demands that we murder people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft. The true basis for hope in our world is open-ended conversation, and religion has shattered our world into competing moral communities. What we have to convince ourselves of is – that love and curiosity is enough for us – and intellectual honesty is the guardian of that.
“Change is easy. Improvement is far more difficult.”
“It’s difficult to identify where he can still improve. He has already proven to have everything.”
Franco Baresi, 2012 http://football-italia.net/19459/baresi-thiago-silva-my-heir
From former and current footballers
“How to improve and toughen my will.”
Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living
Your Legacy on Race http://www.channels.com/episodes/13077589?page=2, Republican Candidates "All-American Presidential Forum" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=75913#axzz1hrPWCrSG (2007)
2000s, 2006-2009
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Context: I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer. We know what that means. And are we all like that? We are not like that. If you are, then it would be well to recognize that there were others before you. And, people like that are not very happy or content, until they are allowed to express, or they can express what's in them to express. It's that driving force that I think is like the process of evolution working on us, and in us, and with us, and through us. That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the problems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve.
"A Personal Credo" (1943), published in American Annual of Photography (1944), reprinted in Nathan Lyons, editor, Photographers on Photography (1966), reprinted in Vicki Goldberg, editor, Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (1988)
Major Joseph Forrest, p. 148
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)
