Gordon

“Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“But the harsh reality that we have achieved quite unequal success and at times appalling failures in our quest to attain a true meritocracy does not in any way compromise the validity of the principle nor obviate the imperative to strive for its greater realization. The model of a meritocracy can still be a sacrosanct model, a goal to which all societies might strive. I cling to the ideal of a true meritocracy, not because it is the societal model most closely consistent with the French Radical Enlightenment thinkers (which it happens to be), but because I believe it is the only model that aspires to simultaneously establish a just society and preserve the American spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. It is also the model I would design if given the authority to do so while under Rawls’s compulsory “veil of ignorance.”
― Seth David Radwell, American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation

“The competition between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation