15 Quotes by Richard J. Borden

The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The “death play” of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.

Most intellectual training focuses on analytical skills. Whether in literary criticism or scientific investigation, the academic mind is best at taking things apart. The complementary arts of integration are far less well developed. This problem is at the core of human ecology. As with any interdisciplinary pursuit, it is the bridging across disparate ways of knowing that is the constant challenge.

It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a peculiar novelty: human awareness of the cycle of life and a capacity to anticipate our own, individual death.

One of the most remarkable contributions of humans to the world is our capacity for ideas.

Death is universal. The rituals associated with it, however, vary substantially—and are greatly influenced by their religious and cultural context.

Discovering the threads that constitute actual interactions is an essential means of making sense of the world. But perception of overall patterns of things that are contextually related is equally important.

The inventions of microscopy and telescopy shattered the boundaries of ordinary human perception and fueled the scientific revolution.

Sometimes, when we are far from clocks and schedules, we can still recapture a lost sense of place-based time. On a relaxing camping trip or a long day outdoors, perhaps, we can slip back into the rhythm of the sun.

The story of our human lineage is continually enlarged, almost daily, by discoveries from physical anthropology, archeology, and genetics.