Howard Bloom Quotes

Is A=A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A=A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are... very, very simplified representations.

Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others' weaknesses, disasters, stupiidities, and abnormalities.

In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism's exploits.

Where did the second law of thermodynamics come from? ...The steam engine. ...The cosmos is not a steam engine.

Conformity-enforcing packs of viscious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse.

If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene."

The first two rules of science are: 1. The truth at any price including the price of your life. 2. Look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there.

A does not equal A because of location. For example, location in time.

The particles of this cosmos rock and roll to their own self-generated beat. They defy the rules of arithmetic. Protons plus neutrons... equals music. Is this harmony... entropy? ...No. ...it's social behavior ...riddled with form. And it's so antientropic that those in the scientific world who are trying desparately to rescue entropy... call it "negentropy." …Entropy is a very big assumption.

In a strange way, Marcion understood the situation better than the more conventional followers of the church, for Lucifer is merely one of the faces of a larger force. Evil is a by-product, a component, of creation.

Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity.

One plus one does not equal two.

When you repeat an old pattern in a new location, you sometimes make something new.

The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group.

Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first.