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Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Conversation
Policemen
Control
Biological
Society
Biology
Words
Instrument
Social
Soldier
Always
Gun
Patterns
Instruments
Policeman

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If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
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If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
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Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.
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A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not.
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What I am is a heretic who's recanted, and thereby in everyone's eyes saved his soul. Everyone's eyes but one, who knows deep down inside that all he has saved is his skin.
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Education should not be fun. You are being brought up into society and society has a way of doing things. It may not be pleasant but sooner or later you are going to have to do it anyway.
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
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The only zen thoughts you can find on a mountain summit are those you brought yourself.
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Quality... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is.
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No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow.
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The more you look, the more you see.
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The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
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We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on good rather than on time.
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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.
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When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
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It's nice to start journeys pleasantly, even when you know they won't end that way.
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Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
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Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
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We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
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The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
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