Fire and Knowledge

Good taste confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor. This is the primary reason that, in our society, people from different social classes do not freely interact with one another. They cannot stand each other’s taste. More specifically, the people who are higher up in the social hierarchy are utterly contemptuous of everything that the people beneath them enjoy (movies, sports, television shows, music, etc.).

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125

There are several ways to perform almost any act – an efficient, workable, artistic way and a careless, indifferent, sloppy way. Care and artistry are worth the trouble. They can be a satisfaction to the practitioner and a joy to all beholders.

–Scott and Helen Nearing, The Good Life, p. 314

Obviously, we can work on a gigantic scale, but just as obviously we cannot foresee the gigantic catastrophes to which gigantic works are vulnerable, any more than we can foresee the natural and human consequences of such work. We can develop a global economy, but only on the conditions that it will not be loving in its effects on its human and natural sources, and that it will risk global economic collapse. We can build gigantic works of architecture too, but only with the likelihood that the gathering of the economic means to do so will generate somewhere the will to destroy what we have built.

–Wendell Berry, “Two Minds” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 105

Anthropologists estimate that typical hunter-gatherers worked at feeding themselves no more than seventeen hours a week, and were far more robust and long-lived than agriculturists, who have only in the last century or two regained the physical stature and longevity of their Paleolithic ancestors.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 279

Strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterations that weaken the strength of a sentence.

–William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 8.

From the NYT:

This year a new weapon against smog was introduced in the United States: cement. Called TX Active, it was developed by the Italian company Italcementi. Enrico Borgarello, Italcementi’s head of research and development, says the product can literally “kill” pollution.

The cement’s chemical composition is enhanced with titanium dioxide, which under the right conditions can neutralize some harmful pollutants. When exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide is “activated,” Borgarello says, and pollutants that come in contact with the surface of the cement are oxidized. Hazardous nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides, for example, are transformed into harmless nitrates or sulfates, which simply rinse off the building with rainwater. This also keeps it especially clean.

Titanium dioxide, commonly used to make paints bright white, was added to the standard cement’s mix. It was only later that Italcementi realized that TX Active had pollution-busting properties. For instance, in Bergamo, where Italcementi is based, a stretch of road downtown was coated with a layer of TX Active. Borgarello says that residents reported better-smelling air within 4.5 square miles. The company says their research shows that if 15 percent of the surface area of Milan were covered in TX Active, air pollution would be reduced by 50 percent.

In order to defend God against the challenge they see from evolution, [creationists] have had to make Him into a schemer, a trickster, even a charlatan. Their version of God is one who intentionally plants misleading clues beneath our feet and in the heavens themselves. Their version of God is one who has filled the universe with so much bogus evidence that the tools of science can give us nothing more than a phony version of reality. In other words, their God has negated science by rigging the universe with fiction and deception. To embrace that God, we must reject science and worship deception itself.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 80

Modern human beings are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom.

–E. F. Schumacher in Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books: 2006), p. 313