There are nine orders of angels, to wit, angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim.
I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
Without an adequate theory, reality is irrelevant.
In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not D.N.A.
There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities-- potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry-- that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.
Evolution crawls to imperfection. It ends in extinction.
The mirror never sees itself. The reflection never is itself.
As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.
Violence is the way stupid people try to level the playing field.
Nature is not affected by finance. If someone offered you ten thousand dollars to let them touch your eyeball without blinking, you would never collect the money. At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.