Thought is the measure of life.
I used to own an ant farm but had to give it up. I couldn't find tractors small enough to fit it.
Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring. . . 'How to Build a Boat. '
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted, cowboys deranged, models deposed, tree surgeons debarked, and dry cleaners depressed?
For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier. . . I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.
I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.
When one makes sculptures of horses, one remembers all of that great relationship that humans had with them. . . . . Even today one raises horses only for dressage, the races, for the pleasure of horseback riding. It has become an animal of romance, an animal of pleasure which has lost its utility in the West.
I began to think of war, even so-called "good wars" like World War II, as corrupting everybody. Violence begetting violence. The good guys beginning to act like the bad guys. And when I studied the history of wars, it seemed to me that that was the case. Athens vs. Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians presumably the democratic state. The Spartans the totalitarian state. But as the war went on, the Athenians began to act like the Spartans. They began committing atrocities and cruelties. So I saw this as a characteristic of war, even so-called "good wars. "
It's much tougher to be a restaurant critic now. You have to take a subway out to Brooklyn. I wouldn't want to do it.
I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.