The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
Robert A. HeinleinRead
One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering. 'Supernatural' is a null word.
Interpretation
What one person perceives as magic, another sees as the result of engineering or science.
This quote highlights the subjective nature of perception and understanding. It suggests that phenomena we might label as 'magic' can often be explained through scientific principles and engineering, emphasizing that the distinction between what is considered supernatural and what is understood through rational thought is often arbitrary and dependent on individual perspective.
In practice
In a speech about innovation, one might use this quote to emphasize the groundbreaking nature of new technologies.
The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.
An armed society is a polite society.
Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
Let us be dreamers, thinkers, speculative philosophers, or as our spouses would have it: Idiots
Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.
We ask ourselves and each of us may wonder: Does the Lord feel truly at home in my life? Do we allow him to do a 'cleansing' in our hearts and to drive out the idols, those attitudes of greed, jealousy, worldliness, envy and hatred, that habit of gossiping and tearing down others?
Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
Crucially we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we're not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.
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