Human Condition
Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go,
it's one of the best.
-- Woody Allen
I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told
thousands of things, but nobody ever told
me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
-- A New York City Detective
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. LeGuin
"Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."
--- Anne
Herbert
A smart person learns from their own mistakes, an intelligent person
also learns from the mistakes of others.
You have the capacity to learn from mistakes.
You'll learn a lot today.
--???
Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease
to be amused.
--???
Books,
like friends, should be few and well chosen.
--Samuel Paterson
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of,
he always declares that it is his duty.
--???
"Why of course the people don't want war. ...
That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the
people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or
a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same in any country."
--Hermann Goering (commander of the German Air Force and
president of the Reichstag), at the Nuremberg trials of
Nazi war criminals in 1946.
"Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning"
--Winston Churchill
"Forward the Light Brigade!
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."
--Tennyson--"The Charge of the Light Brigade"--1854
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
--Voltaire --"Candide"
"Everybody knows what going wrong with the world,
I don't even know what's going on in myself."
--Matt Johnson -- The The -- "Dusk - Slow Emotion Replay"
"Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons
released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and
enforcing tough emissions standards from man-made sources."
-- Ronald Reagan
"We don't have to protect the environment -- the Second Coming is at
hand."
-- James Watt (Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior)
"Kill them all. God will know His own." or "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset"
-- Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux - 22nd July 1209 at the siege of
Beziers during the Albegensian Crusade
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]." ....
"Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important.
We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If
there is water, there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Dan Quayle, August 11, 1989
"Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle, 11/30/88
"The United States has much to offer the third world war."
-- President Ronald Wilson Reagan, (error repeated 9 times in speech)
"The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity
that would be clearly understood."
-- Alexander Haig
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people... it
is true that most stupid people are conservative."
--John Stuart Mill/1806-1873
"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face
men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is
the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of
comprehending any save the most elemental -- men whose whole thinking
is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of
what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either
bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is,
intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre -- the man who can most
adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The
Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is
perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner
soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and
glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright
moron."
--H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)
"The weak can never forgive. Fogiveness is the attribute of the strong."
--Mahatma Ghandi
Ocean, n.:
A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for
man -- who has no gills.
"Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western
religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of
Western science."
-- Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters"
"Everyone has their own God, each persons is different from the
others." -JNB
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a
great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to
the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of
life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But
one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is
going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I
shall die of boredom."
The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that
current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the
rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!"
But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go,
and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current
lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried,
"See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the
Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current
said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us
free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this
adventure.
But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to
the rocks, making legends of a Saviour.
-- Richard Bach, "Illusions - The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are master of your fate
and captain of your soul.
"There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a
powerful group united by devout belief and purpose... If history and
science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not
the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It
did not evolve to believe in biology."
-- Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience" (Knopf)
A little heresy is good for the soul.
-- Harvey Fishman
Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.
-- Pablo Picasso
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for
me!"
-- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)
Occident, n.:
The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient. It
is largely inhabited by Christians, powerful sub-tribe of the
Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which
they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce." These, also, are the
principal industries of the Orient.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
God is an atheist.
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
"Reason is the guillotine of faith."
-- Seen on a church marqee, Miami,
1996.
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with
reality at any point."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether
she will or will not be a mother.
-- Margaret H. Sanger
''O Lord my God, Thou art great indeed. . . . Thou fixed the
Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.''
-- Psalm 103, The Bible
In 1616, the Copernican view was declared heretical because it refuted
a strict biblical teaching of the Creation that "God fixed the Earth upon
its foundation, not to be moved forever."
Legend has it that as Galileo rose from kneeling before his inquisitors, he
murmured, "e pur, si muove" -- "even so, it does move."
In fact, John Paul II said, there are two realms of knowledge, "one
which has its source in Revelation and one which reason can discover by its
own power." The two realms are distinct but compatible, he said.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens,
nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush, Feb 1989
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has
broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or
where it will end."
- Emerson: Essay, "Circles"
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer
becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered
regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of
human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural
events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural
events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this
doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge
has not yet been able to set foot.
But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives
of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which
is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will
of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human
progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion
must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is,
give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast
powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail
themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more
difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.
- Albert Einstein
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it
seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the
fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving
after rational knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called
upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really
do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the
situation.
Oliver's Law: Experience is something you don't get until just after you need
it.
"Good judgment is the result of experience. Experience is the result
of bad judgment".
quoted by Fred Brooks
Time is an excellent teacher, unfortunately it kills all its
students.
-- quoted by Vincent
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make
empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made
a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds
of Hell"
--St. Augustine, quoted by Donald W. Robinson
"Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for
every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence
of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage
of reason than that of blind faith"
-- Thomas Jefferson, 1785
"Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an Art."
--Charles McCabe, San Francisco Chronicle
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell