Reproducing Quotes

Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked generation after generation; give them 3000 calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anything. Give them some ameliorative drugs and you had a working class, reified and coglike. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

When we really want to master anything, we must enter into the spirit of it. And when we enter into the spirit of something, what we're really doing is reproducing in ourselves the same qualities that whoever created it had. ~ Wayne Dyer

These coupling certainly do not fit with the mainstream idea that genes, or at least organisms, are hell-bent on reproducing themselves. They do fit, however, with the idea of a social role for sex, and they fit with the idea that sexual reproduction is a spandrel, a by-product of some other phenomenon. If Roughgarden is on to something, she believes it could have cultural as well as scientific implications. The orthodoxy of biology has corroded our culture like battery acid, she says, In general, we play out the roles prescribed for us by that culture - aggressive male and coy female - because deviation from its "norm" results in emotional and physical violence, bigotry, personal guilt, and criminalized behaviors. If biology has been getting it wrong though, the new orthodoxy could trigger an infusion of tolerance; perhaps the anomalous prevalence of sexual reproduction will end up having deeper repercussions outside of science than within it. ~ Michael Brooks

God is not just saving individuals and preparing them for heaven; rather, He is creating a people among whom He can live and who in their life together will reproduce God's life and character. ~ Gordon Fee

Nevertheless, if you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well ... everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The new breed of reporter doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't have sex beyond reproducing, and most importantly - doesn't believe. They don't believe they are there to question everything. They are there to print whatever is told to them. The news is dead, my friend. Buried under a mountain of full color advertising, and six-digit deposit slips. ~ Greg Crites

Aren't you, uh ... " Clary searched for the right word. "Reproducing? ~ Cassandra Clare

I hate dialect. It gets in the way. If there is a need for dialect, you can render it quite easily by reproducing the rythm of that form of speech. Then you don't need to bother with silly spellings ~ Diana Wynne Jones

Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them incapable of reproducing within their own species. But do extraterrestrial infants toddle through your neighborhood? ~ Seth Shostak

She had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality. ~ Henry James

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. ~ Claude Shannon

For at least 2,000,000 years men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated spaceship called earth. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praise-worthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

I couldn't help overhearing," he went on. "Grrr," said Emerson. (I assure you, there is really no other way of reproducing this sound.) "Honestly. ~ Elizabeth Peters

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. ~ Rustin Cohle

The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. ~ Karl Marx

Why bother with clubs?

"Because you might get a shag," is the usual response. Really? If that's the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn't be attempting to breed in the first place. What's your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You're a moron, and so is that haircut you're trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn't it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who'll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o'clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It'll be more fun than a club. ~ Charlie Brooker

For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Every individual," wrote another enormously perceptive portrayer of ordinary life, Harriet Beecher Stowe, "is part and parcel of a great picture of the society in which he lives and acts, and his life cannot be painted without reproducing the picture of the world he lived in. ~ Jack Larkin

Get a microscope and some spit. Put the spit on a glass slide and put it under the microscope lens. Now look through the eyepiece. You'll notice, if you look closely, that you can't see anything, because you have no idea how to operate a microscope. But while you're looking, billions of germs, left on the eyepiece by the previous microscope user, will swarm into your eyeball - which to them is a regular Club Med - and start reproducing like crazy via wild bacterial sex. You'll probably need surgery. ~ Dave Barry

If your mind is at work, we're in danger of reproducing another cliche. If we can keep our minds out of it and our thoughts out of it, maybe we'll come up with something original. ~ Peter Falk

Drawing is never reproducing - in order to see, you have to know how to look, and you have to know what you're looking at. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

would react with violent seizures. Because of the rudimentary working conditions, and the difficulty of correctly reproducing body parts in miniature, this body had been built using only parts from the biggest and fittest of cadavers. The straps were not sufficient to hold me. I tore free. Lightning was cascading through copper rods buried in my chest. I ripped them out. Elixir and blood were being pumped into my body by a machine. I smashed it. I roared like an animal as I began destroying the very tools that had brought me to life. The bellows were manned by one of Dippel's assistants. I remember him looking at me with an expression of terror as I picked him up by the neck. I killed my first man only ten seconds after I had been born. With blood and Elixir pouring from my self-inflicted wounds, I ~ Larry Correia

That's why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you'd never forget it. ~ Stephen Fry

She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point.
And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. ~ Padgett Powell

A typical city dog is neutered and doesn't have much interest in reproducing. However, that's not true of its owner, who will use the dog as an integral part of the pickup process. (Humans are the only animals that use other animals to facilitate mating. Have you ever seen a monkey use a squirrel to pick up another monkey?) ~ BikeSnobNYC

If you can imagine a thing, conjure it up in space then you can make it ... The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Then you can be realistic about reproducing it. ~ Alexander Calder

The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.

The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in "material" but in "spiritual" things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.

Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the "age of the atom bomb. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Their wine was probably the best I'd ever had, and I was quickly coming to the conclusion that the creation of alcohol was probably an instinctual trait throughout all intelligent life.

A silly concept, I know, but it had to be more than a coincidence that every world I'd ever been to had some form of alcoholic beverage. It was as if the first thing creatures did when they achieved a level of intelligence that no longer required them spending their entire lives scavenging for food or reproducing, was look for ways to get fucked up. ~ Terra Whiteman

The gap between median black family income and median white family income hasn't changed in twenty years," he told me. "That is not a society moving toward equality. It's a society that's reproducing inequality by race."56 ~ Christopher L. Hayes

They are living, growing, reproducing, pushing and pulling in the ground all around us at all times. We accept that without even noticing. Open your eyes, people. This is amazing. If plants made sounds, it would all be different. But they communicate with color and shape and size and texture. They don't meow or bark or tweet. We think they don't have eyes, but they see the angle of the sun and the rise of the moon. They don't just feel the wind; they change directions because of it. ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

Our work is not to save souls, but to disciple them. Salvation and sanctification are the work of God's sovereign grace, and our work as His disciples is to disciple others' lives until they are totally yielded to God. One life totally devoted to God is of more value to Him than one hundred lives which have been simply awakened by His Spirit. As workers for God, we must reproduce our own kind spiritually, and those lives will be God's testimony to us as His workers. God brings us up to a standard of life through His grace, and we are responsible for reproducing that same standard in others. ~ Oswald Chambers

It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism, ~ Antony Flew

Our children, full-grown now, can never forgive us for reproducing. What a mess. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If you enter into the spirit of Life, you are really reproducing in yourself the qualities of the Creator of that which allows something to be manifested and created in the first place. ~ Wayne Dyer

The desert frightens me, I think. It looks too much like the seventh circle of hell. I'm afraid of damnation."

"Why?"

"Why?" Evelyn repeated, peering at Ann from behind her hand. She lay back again and closed her eyes. "I don't know. I've always supposed everyone is."

"Well, they're not. I, for instance, am a hell of a lot more frightened of being saved." Evelyn chuckled.

"I'm serious," Ann protested. "Virtue smells to me of rotting vegetation. Here you burn or freeze. Either way it's clean."

"Sterile," Evelyn said and felt the word a laceration of her own flesh. "I wonder. It's fertility that's a dirty word for me."

"Is it?"

"Yes, I'm terrified of giving in, of justifying my own existence by means of simple reproduction. So many people do or try to. And there are the children, so unfulfilling after all. And they grow up to do nothing but reproduce children who will reproduce, everyone so busy reproducing that there's no time to produce anything. But it's such a temptation. It seems so natural - another dirty word for me. What's the point?"

"You'd have the human race die out?"

"No. We'll multiply in spite of ourselves always. We'll populate the desert. One day there will be little houses and docks all along this shore, signs of our salvation."

"What would you have us do instead?" Evelyn asked.

"Accept damnation," Ann said. "It has its power and ~ Jane Rule

Those who merely possess the goods of fortune may be haughty and insolent; ... they try to imitate the great-souled man without being really like him, and only copy him in what they can, reproducing his contempt for others but not his virtuous conduct. For the great-souled man is justified in despising other people - his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride. ~ Aristotle.

Christian holiness is not a matter of painstaking conformity to the individual precepts of an external law code; it is rather a question of the Holy Spirit's producing His fruit in the life, reproducing those graces which were seen in perfection in the life of Christ. ~ F.F. Bruce

As a movement (rather than a preference), the goal of antinatalism is that no humans should have children. What ambassadors, then, are we to send to the Brazilian Amazonian Pirahã people to persuade them to stop reproducing? According, at least, to Professor Daniel Everett, here is a people who have no knowledge of regret, depression or suicide. Are we to enlighten them in order to appease a group of discontented intellectuals in the first world? The Pirahã would appear to be one pocket of humanity to whom the sickness unto death does not apply, and this reveals a crack, which may grow, in the antinatalist edifice. ~ Quentin S. Crisp

To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs for white people to be really nice and carry on – to smile at people of color, to go to lunch with them on occasion. To be clear, being nice is generally a better policy than being mean. But niceness does not bring racism to the table and will not keep it on the table when so many of us who are white want it off. Niceness does not break with white solidarity and white silence. In fact, naming racism is often seen as not nice, triggering white fragility. ~ Robin DiAngelo

I've learned to write by mimicking other writers. It's the way we learned to speak - reproducing sounds - and it's the way, I think, to learn how to write. ~ Adam Sexton

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate. ~ Daniel Dennett

Architecture is perhaps the most beautiful and expressive of all the arts. Painting and sculpture, noble though they are, lack the utility of architecture and strive to interpret nature rather than to originate. Architecture is not hampered by the necessity of reproducing something already in existence. It may raise its spires untrammeled by any nature model; it may fling its arches gloriously across a nave and transept with no similitude in nature to hamper by suggestion. If his genius be great enough, the architect may tell in his structure truths which may not be put in words, inspire by glories not sung in the divinest harmonies. ~ Carl H. Claudy

The American novel
claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to
his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic
French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and
recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of
recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of
reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions,
and finally by acting as if men were
entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which
explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical
peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism
in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting
a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and
of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human
beings and of the world. It would ~ Albert Camus

Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible ... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration. ~ Edward Said

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed. ~ Lawrence Clark Powell

In the wild a plant and its pests are continually coevolving, in a dance of resistance and conquest that can have no ultimate victor. But coevolution ceases in an orchard of grafted trees, since they are genetically identical from generation to generation. The problem very simply is that the apple trees no longer reproduce sexually, as they do when they're grown from seed, and sex is nature's way of creating fresh genetic combinations. At the same time the viruses, bacteria, fungi, and insects keep very much at it, reproducing sexually and continuing to evolve until eventually they hit on the precise genetic combination that allows them to overcome whatever resistance the apples may have once possessed. Suddenly total victory is in the pests' sight - unless, that is, people come to the tree's rescue, wielding the tools of modern chemistry. ~ Michael Pollan

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised. ~ Lani Guinier

Death is only relevant to "genetic adaptation" insofar as it relates to the capacity for self-reproduction (what is relevant is not that an individual died, but success in gene propagation while alive). The potentially misleading phrase "genetic adaptation" means that either because or despite an organism's adaptedness to external conditions, genes were or are successful in propagating themselves. Success in reproducing genes, in other words, is the ultimate measure of so-called "genetic adaptation". The possibility of adaptation unto extinction through individualism does not contradict the Darwinian notion of adaptation for survival. On the contrary, it is only a confirmation of it. The question here is what survives, the individual or its genes? The genes, and not the individual organism, provide the measure of survival in biological evolution. This point is illustrated by the modern corporate executive who adapts to the changing economic conditions better than any of his or her competitors, but fails to produce any children. ~ Mitchell Heisman

And then you two go and call attention to yourselves like this," Ian continued. "Holding hands in a pedalo, for Christ's sake. They must have been frothing at the mouth at the thought of you two reproducing, wondering if you'd give birth to some kind of metaphysically enhanced creature or a bottomless black hole. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

If you want to save the planet, then stop reproducing and allow humanity to go extinct. Let the animals inherit the Earth, we're not worthy. ~ Robert M. Roberts

I've seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Only thing your DNA thinks about is reproducing itself. ~ Dave Barry

A new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged. ~ Nelson Mandela

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human. ~ Man Ray

How vain is painting, which is admired for reproducing the likeness of things whose originals are not admired. ~ Blaise Pascal

I learned a lot about the images of pornography and how much they dealt with close-up, when a person is at their most vulnerable and having to reveal details about themselves. I wanted to combine the eternal in two different manners. There is the biological eternal - here is our species reproducing - and then the transparent, spiritual aspect of it. ~ Jeff Koons

Cohen and Boyer achieved a long-sought goal in molecular biology: the invention of a simple and efficient method for selecting specific genes from any imaginable organism and accurately reproducing the genetic material in pure and unlimited quantity. ~ Sally Hughes

I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better ... I have wanted the impossible ... ~ Rachilde

From Ferguson to Athens, via Mexico, it is clear that many governments are reproducing the tools that Israel uses to repress and oppress the Palestinians. The replication of those same tactics, methods, and often weapons serves as proof that the Palestinians are now used as guinea pigs for experimentation. ~ Noam Chomsky

The only answer that I can give to this problem is based on Darwin's principle of natural selection. The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce and so their pattern of behavior and thought will come to dominate. It ~ Stephen Hawking

If the nation is not capable of preserving itself and reproducing, if it loses it vital bearings and ideals, then it doesn't need foreign enemies - it will fall apart on its own. ~ Vladimir Putin

Logically, I should be attractive to a wide range of women. In the animal kingdom, I would succeed in reproducing. However, there is something about me that women find unappealing. I have never found it easy to make friends, and it seems that the deficiencies that caused this problem have also affected my attempts at romantic relationships. ~ Graeme Simsion

Aren't you, uh ... reproducing?
sure, we love reproducing it's one of our favorite things. ~ Cassandra Clare

As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying. ~ Milan Kundera

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.

This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.

We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to ~ Cullen Thomas

When we lose our waged jobs we are not freed from work! We are supposed to go on doing the work of reproducing labour power and to make the labour market function by looking for waged jobs. Part of our effort must be to make these dynamics clear so that we can struggle for what we really want, which is a secure income and less work-for-capital so that we have more time to re-craft our lives. Thus, instead of demanding "full employment" and strenuously searching for new jobs, we can demand less restrictive and more unemployment compensation or even "citizen wages" independent of jobs. ~ Harry Cleaver

It is dreadful to see actors reproducing the same image constantly. ~ Emmanuelle Riva

I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim ... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti. ~ Ezra Pound

In the Game of Life, as in our world, self-reproducing patterns are complex objects. One estimate, based on the earlier work of mathematician John von Neumann, places the minimum size of a self-replicating pattern in the Game of Life at ten trillion squares - roughly the number of molecules in a single human cell. ~ Stephen Hawking

For the rest of the earth's organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death - and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying - and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering - slowly or quickly - as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we "enjoy" as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. ~ Thomas Ligotti

As a science fiction writer who began as a fan, I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to criticize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality. I've always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights and novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked in cold equations that most do not know how to read.

The creation myths of the various peoples and religions of the world pale when compared to the glory of the big bang. The three-billion-year history of life's evolution from self-reproducing molecules to civilization contains twists and romances that cannot be matched by any myth or epic. There is also the poetic vision of space and time in relativity, the weird subatomic world of quantum mechanics … these wondrous stories of science all possess an irresistible attraction. Through the medium of science fiction, I seek only to create my own worlds using the power of imagination, and to make known the poetry of Nature in those worlds, to tell the romantic legends that have unfolded between Man and Universe. ~ Liu Cixin

After all, looking around, we see bodies, not naked genes. Bodies, bodies everywhere: eating, sleeping, being eaten, growing, reproducing, laughing, lounging, walking, running, swimming, hopping and slithering their way to...what? To either success or failure, as measured by how well they project their component genes into the future. ~ Nanelle Barash

Unlike many, I was not intent on reproducing myself, deliberately or accidentally, since one of myself was more than enough for me to handle. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

The artist creates something out of nothing! Without the thoughts and feelings of the artist, there would be no art. It's their particular creative mind in contemplation that links to intention to give birth to what we call an artistic creation. This is how the power of intention worked in creating you, someone new, entirely unique, someone out of nothing. Reproducing this in yourself means encountering the creative impulse and knowing that the power of intention is reaching for the realization of all that it feels, and that it is expressing itself as you. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To follow, while reclining on a summer's noon, the outline of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, which casts its shadow on the observer until the moment or the hour partakes of their presence - this is to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch. Today, people have as passionate an inclination to bring things close to themselves or even more to the masses, as to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. Every day the need grows more urgent to possess an object in the closest proximity, through a picture or, better, a reproduction. And the reproduction, as the illustrated newspaper and weekly readily prove, distinguishes itself unmistakably from the picture. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely intertwined in the latter as transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. ~ Walter Benjamin

A further aspect I should like to discuss is what I call the practice of infinite escape clauses. I believe we developed this practice to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of self-reproducing state is zero. This is what we must conclude from classical quantum mechanical principles as Wigner demonstrated ~ Sidney W. Fox

The more completely the machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it. Enlightenment thereby regresses to the mythology it has never been able to escape. For mythology had reflected in its forms the essence of the existing order - cyclical motion, fate, domination of the world as truth - and had renounced hope. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

Photography is the typical means of expression of a society founded on a civilization of technicians, conscious of the aims it has set for itself ... Its power of exactly reproducing external reality, a power inherent in its technique, lends it a documentary character and makes it appear as the most faithful and impartial process for the reproduction of social life. ~ Gisele Freund

Scientists say that ... gender bending may keep fish from reproducing because, with so many in sexual limbo, there's just no real push to procreate.
Oh, if only deer, squirrels, and Kardashians would acquire this particular affliction. I'm just kidding. I don't really have anything against deer. Or squirrels. ~ Celia Rivenbark

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories. ~ Seth Shostak

I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years - and I wonder what the child care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there's been some secret division of the world's women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fake nails and tarty little outfits - to show she's advanced to the breeder caste and can't be sent out to clean anymore. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore ... they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation. ~ Julian Huxley

For example, from 1968 to 1992 (with the exception of the Carter presidency), the voters selected a fairly conservative president and a fairly liberal Congress, creating what might be seen as a Strict Father executive and a Nurturant Mother Congress, thus reproducing a classic family model in the government, with strictness at the top and caring right below. Thus, ~ George Lakoff

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along. ~ Leslie Fiedler

Standing before him, the blight of idyllic thought and aspiration--rotting souls reproducing like fleas. ~ Glen R. Krisch