Howard Bloom Quotes

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.

If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. ...What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher <nowiki>[</nowiki>Heraclitus<nowiki>]</nowiki>...

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

One plus one does not equal two.

The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age.

Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory.

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave.

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.

By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease.

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.

From our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to pull apart. From our devotion to higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities. From our commitment to ideals come our excuse to hate. Since the beginning of history, we have been blinded by evil's ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often lead us to the actions we most abhor—murder, torture, genocide, and war.

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.

From a few basic rules you can generate a cosmos.

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