reproduction

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

To some believers, being on the pill or using a condom is a nonverbal way of telling God to go to hell.

Our immediate interests are after all of but small moment. It is what we do for the future, what we add to the sum of man's knowledge, that counts most. As someone has said, 'The individual withers and the world is more and more.' Man dies at 70, 80, or 90, or at some earlier age, but through his power of physical reproduction, and with the means that he has to transmit the results of effort to those who come after him, he may be said to be immortal.

A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. ... When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

The problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to humanity is that of total annihilation within a generation or two, not the failure of mankind to breed. A woman seeking alternative modes of life is no longer morally bound to pay her debt to nature.

I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult. "It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. "Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. "I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?"That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could point your finger at. ..."Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful.

Men marry for the womb. Women marry for their tummy.

Memory loss is the key to human reproduction. If you remembered what new parenthood was actually like you wouldn__ go around lying to people about how wonderful it is, and you certainly wouldn__ ever do it twice.

Whatever I haven__ accomplished biologically obviously wasn't all that imperative.

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?

Yes, but nomes aren__ hard to make,_ said Dorcas. __ou just need other nomes._ __ou__e weird.

Homophobia is the ignorant and arrogant assumption that copulation and reproduction is all there is to a relationship.

I'm feeling full of tiny princes, bustling to get out into the world and start plotting against one another.

A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced

If human pleasure did not have both a lid and a time limit, we would not bestir ourselves to do things that were not pleasurable, such as toiling for our subsistence. And then we would not survive. By the same token, should our mass mind ever become discontented with the restricted pleasures doled out by nature, as well as disgruntled over the lack of restrictions on pain, we would omit the mandates of survival from our lives out of a stratospherically acerbic indignation. And then we would not reproduce. As a species, we do not shout into the sky, __he pleasures of this world are not enough for us._ In fact, they are just enough to drive us on like oxen pulling a cart full of our calves, which in their turn will put on the yoke. As inordinately evolved beings, though, we can postulate that it will not always be this way. __ time will come,_ we say to ourselves, __hen we will unmake this world in which we are battered between long burden and brief delight, and will live in pleasure for all our days._ The belief in the possibility of long-lasting, high-flown pleasures is a deceptive but adaptive flimflam. It seems that nature did not make us to feel too good for too long, which would be no good for the survival of the species, but only to feel good enough for long enough to keep us from complaining that we do not feel good all the time.

Millions of deaths would not have happened if it weren__ for the consumption of alcohol. The same can be said about millions of births.