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Has not the famous political Fable of the Snake, with two Heads and one Body, some useful Instruction contained in it? She was going to a Brook to drink, and in her Way was to pass thro’ a Hedge, a Twig of which opposed her direct Course; one Head chose to go on the right side of the Twig, the other on the left, so that time was spent in the Contest, and, before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died with thirst.
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Queries and Remarks Respecting Alterations in the Constitution of Pennsylvania reported in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1907), vol. 10, pp. 57–58.

 

Benjamin Franklin

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I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

 

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Look, we're both snake oil salesman to a certain extent, but we do label the show as snake oil here. Isn't there a problem selling snake oil as vitamin tonic?

 

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What a toil and trouble is my life! My existence is nothing but vain efforts; I cannot come back to myself. Whether that will ever happen in the world of time, I do not know. And if I become free so that I can integrate myself again, I may have trouble separating the alien parts of me that I nevertheless do not really want to separate. If I become free, there will still be an anxiety in my inclosed reserve that she [Regine] has been changed. So it is with a mussel that lies on the seashore; it opens its shell searching for food; a child sticks a twig in between so that it cannot close up. Finally the child gets tired of it and wants to pull out the twig, but a sliver remains. And the mussel closes up, but deep inside it suffers again and cannot get the sliver out. No one can see that there is a sliver, for of course the mussel has closed up, but that it is there the mussel knows.

 

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