Howard Bloom > Quotes

“All of us dream of being part of something greater than ourselves. All of us want to make a contribution. The greatest contribution you make isn't in the money you give to charities. It isn't in the nonprofit foundations you establish. And it isn't in the work you do as a volunteer. Your greatest contribution to something greater, to the lives of others, comes in what you do from nine to five.”
― Howard Bloom, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

“Of such rejected pieces of ourselves are our devils made.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Humans need to vigorously pursue goals, to wrestle with problems, and to master them. They need much of what has been popularly interpreted as stress.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“The individual is a cell in the social superorganism. When he feels he is no longer necessary to the larger group, he, too, begins to wither away. As”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Superorganism, ideas, and the pecking order—these are the primary forces behind much of human creativity and earthly good. They are the holy trinity of the Lucifer Principle.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Good times can be just as damaging to peace here in the United States. When the economy goes up, murders do not go down, they rise.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Progress is possible only when people believe in the possibilities of growth and change. Races or tribes die out not just when they are conquered and suppressed but when they accept their defeated condition, become despairing, and lose their excitement about the future. Norman Cousins Americans”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“The five elements of the complex adaptive system are conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner-judges, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Some of us are born with inner-judges whose verdicts are perpetually harsh. The result is depression, shyness, and heightened susceptibility to pain. Others arrive from the womb with inner-judges preset to treat us generously, endowing us with energy, few inhibitions, a deep sense of security, and little sense of guilt or shame.9 But most of us are in the middle—our inner-judges sentence us sternly or magnanimously depending on the snugness with which we fit our social network’s needs.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“An equality of nation will never exist in our lifetime. Why? Because peace, freedom, and justice are deceptive concepts. Hidden beneath their surface are the instincts of the peking order.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“The early-twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinker Carl Jung, says Kagan, originated the concept of introverted and extroverted personalities. Jung also believed that each had a slightly different brain structure.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! . . . For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . . I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High. Isaiah 14:12–14”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. Henry Adams”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“There are no righteous societies; there are simply different degrees of depravity. To”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Opposites are joined at the hip. Night and day, poisons and pleasures, innovation and destruction are usually different facets of the very same thing. [...] Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem - not tearing each other to bits or threatening to annihilate each other.”
― Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

“A = A is a simplification, one so radical that it sometimes utterly distorts reality. It skins reality alive. 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 just that - very, very simplified representations. Symbolic systems with massive powers. But symbolic systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to the richness of that which they attempt to represent. Symbol systems that sometimes do enormous injustice to science's greatest mystery, cosmic creativity.”
― Howard Bloom, The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates

“The dividing eukaryote could not aggressively seek food. Nor could it avoid predatory one-celled creatures whipping through the water in search of someone to eat. The solution: to concentrate spirochetic propellers on the outside of one cell, then to generate an attached cell whose spirochetes could stay inside directing the dance of twining and dividing chromosomes. This, according to Margulis, would start the run-up to another massive leap in the evolution of networks: multicellularity.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Introverts break down into two types—the flockbound and the Faustians. Faustians cross the boundaries of the system31 and wrestle with forbidden mysteries.32 Flockers bury themselves in a bevy of others like themselves33 and follow the certainties preached by an authority.34 Faustians take off on odysseys,35 occasionally returning with fresh visions,36 Promethean flames around which to shape subcultural societies. Flockers crowd into the warmth provided by the Faustians’ discoveries”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Sponge cells sieved apart frantically regain their hold by constructing fresh communities. Chimps and rhesus monkeys clump together on the basis of similarity. Displaced humans find common ground by rallying around a common sentiment, a shared sense of experience, a point of connection whose expression offers hope and certainty. When the formulae of the center prove powerless to save one’s soul from chaos, the new hypotheses to which men cling may be peculiar “truths” which come from the periphery.33 Often these beliefs stress the Spartan fist instead of Athenian creativity.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“one of the first assemblies of smart molecules had been the crew of that ingenious unit called the gene.† An even grander molecular fusion had been the chromosome—a knottily twisted rope of genes which not only worked together,* but fused so tightly that they formed a massive mega-molecule.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“But evidence indicates that intimate forms of organization were undergoing long and ever more intricate tests to see which ones would be among the chosen few to flourish next.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“As time went on, the meaning of “tribe” was no longer clamped entirely to birth. Newcomers to a Greek city were often assigned a tribe at random—no matter who their forefathers might have been. But once you had your tribal label, it was unchangeable. Despite vocational liberties, preordained identities still stuck to you like glue.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Memes have an ultimate ambition: taking vast chunks of the world into their possession and restructuring it according to their form.”
― Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle : A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

“Modern bacteria still shift from pioneers to colonizers and back to pioneers again, leaving ripples of concentric circles clear as a dartboard’s rings.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“a lot of evolution has gone over the dam since 3.5 billion B.C. What, if anything, has happened to the global brain since then? The story is a strange one. Paleontological dogma has it that virtually nothing of significance occurred again until the Cambrian explosion roughly 535 million years ago.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Robert Hooke was a member of another which had used the mails to go intercontinental—the British Royal Society. Hooke picked up on Galileo’s innovations, built his own telescope, used it to discover a new star in Orion and to sketch the planet Mars, then turned it on its head, transforming it into a microscope with which he could examine the invisible intricacies of snowflakes, mosquitoes, feathers, and fungi. He hit the jackpot when he pointed his lenses at a slice of cork, for here he spotted what he described in his best-selling book Micrographia as “the first microscopical pores I ever saw.” Because they reminded him of the chambers in which monks slept, Hooke called these microrooms cells.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Yes, the computerized linking of individual minds is likely to bring considerable change. But a worldwide neocortex—complete with whales—is not a gift of the silicon age. It is a phase in the ongoing evolution of a networked global brain which has existed for more than 3 billion years. This planetary mind is neither uniquely human nor a product of technology. Nor is it a result of reincarnation, or an outgrowth of telepathy. It is a product of evolution and biology. Nature has been far more clever at connectionism than have we. Her mechanisms for information swapping, data processing, and collective creation are more intricate and agile than anything the finest computer theoreticians have yet foreseen.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“The catalysts for transformation would be three: freedom to escape group boundaries; ideas; and the games subcultures were about to learn to play. We’ll see in coming chapters how this triad altered utterly the workings of mass mind.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“Pythagoras turned his budding cult into exactly what flock-seeking introverts most need—the haven of a tyranny. Ambiguity is a tension-provoker68—and the sheep among introverts go bonkers at the strain. Indecisive grays savage the flockers’ limbic systems, so they desperately need the tranquilizer of a world spelled out in black and white.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century

“At the same time, Europe’s long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion’s death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.”
― Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century