Studs Terkel, via The Writer’s Almanac:

“With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, ‘Studs, you’re an optimist.’ I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what’s the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.”

Michael Pollan, in the New York Times:

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural — as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being.

I remember when I first made this realization too. It was in August 2012, when I read this, from Carl Sagan:

Each of our cells contains dozens of tiny factories called mitochondria, which combine our food with molecular oxygen in order to extract energy in convenient form. Recent evidence suggests that billions of years ago, the mitochondria were free organisms which have slowly evolved into a mutually dependent relation with the cell. When many-celled organisms arose, the arrangement was retained. In a very real sense, then, we are not a single organism, but an array of about ten trillion beings and not all of the same kind.

Lefsetz:

You can deny the future, but it’s gonna happen anyway.