Earl Killian’s Short Thoughts

Elsewhere I have collected quotations from others. Still elsewhere I have written down my own thoughts in short essay or commentary form. Here I make a collection of my own attempts at aphorisms.

We are lambs heading out to graze each day, arguing over which corner of the fenced pasture is best, but not noticing that the fence is shifting ever closer to the slaughterhouse.

How much more painful must the modern world be, for we now have many more opiates to distract the people: to religion add television, spectator sports, celebrity worship, and fashion.

Gods are failures of the imagination.

Individuals are how societies reproduce themselves.

Even reasonable people can differ in how they resolve shades of grey to black or white. The problem lies in demanding binary thinking in an analog world.

Picture Democracy as a racehorse. Then Plutocracy is the jockey, the reins are the corporate media, and the whip is fear.

Ideas and memes are best spread by seed. Transplanting something fully grown into someone else’s garden may be met with indignation. Seed scattered to such a garden, should it be allowed to take root out of curiosity, becomes as much the gardener’s as the seeder’s, as the gardener participates in its growth, and thereby becomes invested in it.

Current U.S. Republicans are like twentieth century Communists; they both affect an ideology as an excuse for power.

Predictions usually say more about the seer than the future.

Mankind’s problem is short-term thinking practiced over the long-term.

The debate over human greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is analogous to the players of Russian Roulette debating how many chambers are loaded between trigger pulls.

The U.S. political system is a soccer game in which the citizens are the ball, the players are the politicians, and the winners are the team owners, regardless of the score. We are kicked, headed, and thrown, and play only a minor role in determining the outcome.

Occam’s razor is valuable not because it gives the truth (it doesn’t), but because it usually puts our foot upon one of the shorter paths to the truth.