“Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.”

“Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.”

“We held the coastline
They held the highlands
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of our motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive.
And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together.”

“It is all connected Dominick," she said. "Life is not a series of isolated ponds & puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on it's way to the future.”

“Don't you know that the principal business of women, all down the ages, has been to go along after the men and clear up the everlasting muss they made? Well, we are still at the same task. Our politics are no more corrupt than our housekeeping would be if we let you run it alone.”

“With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.”

“The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along.”

“I believe that I've made good judgments in the past, and I think I've made good judgments in the future.”

“The sweat—great slithering streams of it—pours down you. It runs down your legs, down the leg that is pedalling the sostenuto pedal, down the other leg. It oozes out all over your chest, flows down the binding around your middle where your full-dress pants soak it up. It flows everywhere, down your arms, down your hands.”

“Apparently we’re now in a state where most ads are full of people looking at us in a way that would heat us up down to our toes if it happened in real life, and we don’t think anything of it.”