Top 15 Howard Bloom Quotes

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.

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

Aristotle and Heraclitus were both right. A equals A. But A does not equal A.

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.

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

The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything.

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>...

Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem... They work together in teams.

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.

The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory.

One plus one does not equal two.

When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as a trillion, trillion, trillion (10³⁶) microorganisms, animals and plants have died before us. ...A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is... He is a God who must be stopped.

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.

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.