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"The big journals and Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Congressional leaders in science journalism."
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"Human psychology is the most mysterious thing in the world."

"The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence."

"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.-Why then do you try to 'enlarge' your mind? Subtilize it."

"In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous."

"I have detected disturbances in the wash.''The wash?''The space-time wash.''Are we talking about some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?''Eddies in the space-time continuum.''Ah...is he. Is he.''What?''Er, who is Eddy, then, exactly?"

"Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature."

"One glance and I knew exactly who and what he was. The classic alpha male, the kind who had spurred evolution forward about five million years ago by nailing every female in sight. They charmed, seduced, and behaved like bastards, and yet women were biologically incapable of resisting their magic DNA."

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

"In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind."
Explore more quotes by Michael Pollan

"My work has also motivated me to put a lot of time into seeking out good food and to spend more money on it."

"The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on, rather than to their supposed antagonisms."

"Every major food company now has an organic division. There's more capital going into organic agriculture than ever before."

"In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn."

"Today it [high fructose corn syrup] is the most valuable food product refined from corn, accounting for 530 million bushels every year. (A bushel of corn yields 33 pounds of fructose)"

"French cooking is really the result of peasants figuring out how to extract flavor from pedestrian ingredients. So most of the food that we think of as elite didn't start out that way."

"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."

"A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals."
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