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1 " We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. "
― Stephen Cave , Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization
2 " If I had free will, I would choose to be funnier. "
― Stephen Cave
3 " The mass media of film, television, radio and internet have enabled a whole new degree of instant, global stardom for those of dubious talent. As a result, our society is drowning in a flood of celebrities, products of a fame industry of lavish scale. "
4 " Almost all facets of humanity's development can be understood as expressions of the will to live forever. "
5 " Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose. "
6 " Both our immortality and our mortality present themselves to our minds with equal force. "
7 " Death is meticulous in collecting every living thing sooner or later. "
8 " ...when we moderns now look up to the stars, it is not the firmament of angels looking kindly back, but out -endlessly out- into the lonely void. "
9 " The reality of human psychology means that any community will experience conflict, dissatisfaction, frustration and, given a few billion years, boredom. "
10 " All living things seek to perpetuate themselves into the future, but humans seek to perpetuate themselves forever. "
11 " communications "
12 " No matter how great our glory, it could only ever be a postponement of oblivion. "
13 " The more we know about ourselves, the less surprising it is that we have no souls. "
14 " At a biological level we are born individuals: we are each a distinct organism. But at the symbolic level, we have to fight to carve out a distinctive identity in a space of shared words and ideas. "
15 " We cannot all be heroes; most of us accept this fact, but some choose instead to be villains. "
16 " Heroes are motivated to sacrifice their natural life by the dread of utter oblivion, and their heroic deeds grant them instead a more permanent existence as part of culture. "
17 " A long, long history of death has made possible the incredible fact that you are alive now. "
18 " A civilization of those who face up to their mortality is therefore one worth striving for. "
