# Quote — Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

> April 29 - And what the hell does it mean to say that life shouldn't change too rapidly? How fast is evolution? Do you measure it in terms of lifetime? A year is more than a lifetime to many kind of animals, while seventy years is an hour in the lifetime of a sequoia. And the universe is only ten billion years old. How fast do ten billion years go? To a god they might go very fast indeed. They might all happen at once. Suppose the lifetime of your typical basic god was a hundred quintillion years. The whole lifetime of this universe would be to him no more than the amount of time it takes to watch a movie. So, from the point of view of a god or of the universe, things evolve very quickly. It's like one of those Walt Disney films where you watch a plant growing before your eyes and the whole cycle from bud to fruit takes about two minutes. To a god, life is a single organism proliferating in all directions all over the earth, and now on the moon and Mars, and the whole process from the first of the protobionts to George Dorn and fellow humans takes no longer than

- Author: [Robert Shea](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea.md)
- Book: [The Illuminatus! Trilogy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea/the-illuminatus-trilogy.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy#Quotes) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea/the-illuminatus-trilogy/april-29-and

## More from this book

> "You look blank, Joe," said Malaclypse. "Has no one explained to you that the human race is divided into two distinct genotypes - neophobes, who reject new ideas and accept only what they have known all their lives, and neophiles, who love new things, change, invention, innovation? For the first four million years of man's history, all humans were neophobes, which is why civilization did not develop. Animals are all neophobes. Only mutation can change them. Instinct is simply the natural behavior of a neophobe. The neophile mutation appeared about a hundred thousand years ago, and speeded up thirty thousand years ago. However, there has never been more than a handful of neophiles anywhere on the planet. The Illuminati themselves sprang from one of the oldest neophile-neophobe conflicts on record."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea/the-illuminatus-trilogy/you-look-blank.md)

> Only the madman is ever sure.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea/the-illuminatus-trilogy/only-the-madman.md)

> THINK FOR YOURSELF, SCHMUCK!

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-shea/the-illuminatus-trilogy/think-for-yourself.md)