Notable Quotable 186

Jan 16, 2024

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.

To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

- Aldous Huxley

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter.

- William Lloyd Garrison

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

- Joseph Campbell

Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent.

- John Dee

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

- Adrienne Rich

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Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the vain and traditional boast of each "modern" generation? Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends - the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed art and mythology rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.

- Will Durant

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

- Helen Keller

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood -- a truly free society.

- Emma Goldman

Don't waste your time with explanations people only hear what they want to hear.

- Paulo Coelho