Jacek

“But unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you), you are made of robots—or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people”
― Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire

“Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.”
― Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land