“As humans we make mistakes, expect life to automatically meet all of our needs, and imagine our environment will stay wonderful without extra effort from us.”

“Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment.”

“Without pain, there would be no suffering. Without suffering, we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.”

“A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal ‘picture’ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of ‘will,’ as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination.”

“Mistakes? Well, hell, we all make mistakes. And what’s more, we are expected to learn from them. It is part of our journey. It is how we move from innocence to resounding wisdom. It is how we keep from retaining a fucking baby’s psyche well into our nineties. It is how everyone keeps from shitting themselves in public and on each other. It is our ever-learning, ever-adapting GPS for this thing called life.”

“You and I know how to stay alive in an urban community. As humans, we are genetically encoded to adapt to many environments when given proper teaching from more experienced humans. We know not to talk to strangers, not to cross on the red light, and not to leave the doors unlocked. Most of us are more or less successful and only occasionally make a life-threatening mistake. Some of us may have an additional set of survival skills, depending on our circumstances. We can live with a debilitating disease, be shot into space and live in a capsule, or survive summer camp. After summer camp, we are still the same people we were before summer camp, except now we know write our name in our underware, not chew gum found under the bed, and to stay away from things that look like sticks but are, in fact, snakes.”