Isac > Isac's Quotes

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion: A Study of Religious Belief and Skepticism

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
― Albert Einstein

“We must be careful not to discourage our twelve-year-olds by making them waste the best years of their lives preparing for examinations.”
― Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions

“The conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly. The same convictions can make us reluctant to take advice from others who cannot know our private thoughts, feelings, interpretations of events, or motives, but all too willing to give advice to others based on our views of their past behavior, without adequate attention to their thoughts, feelings, interpretations, and motives. Indeed, the biases documented here may create a barrier to the type of exchanges of information, and especially to the type of careful and respectful listening, that can go a long way to attenuating the feelings of frustration and resentment that accompany interpersonal and intergroup conflict.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Sometimes the heart is so heavy that we turn away from it and forget that its throbbing is the wisest message of life, a wordless message that says, "Live, be, move, rejoice -- you are alive!" Without the heart's wise rhythm, we could not exist.”
― Michael Jackson, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections

“A star can never die. It just turns into a smile and melts back into the cosmic music, the dance of life.”
― Michael Jackson, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections

“When I step out on stage in front of thousands of people, I don't feel that I'm being brave. It can take much more courage to express true feelings to one person. [...] In spite of the risks, the courage to be honest and intimate opens the way to self-discovery. It offers what we all want, the promise of love. ”
― Michael Jackson, Dancing the Dream: Poems and Reflections

“No matter how you care to define it, I do not identify with the local group. Planet, species, race, nation, state, religion, party, union, club, association, neighborhood improvement committee; I have no interest in any of it. I love and treasure individuals as I meet them, I loathe and despise the groups they identify with and belong to.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.”
― George Carlin, Brain Droppings

“When the carnivorous animal finds prey, he boldly seizes the prey and greedily laps the jetting blood. On the contrary, the herbivorous animal refuses his natural food, leaving it untouched, if it is sprinkled with a little blood.

In men we find they cannot bear even the sight of [animal] killings. Slaughterhouses are always recommended to be removed far from the towns. Can flesh then be considered the natural food of man, when both his eyes and his nose are so much against it, unless deceived by flavors of spices, salt and sugar?”
― Yukteswar Giri, The Holy Science

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
― John Dewey

“We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates

“When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!”
― Slavoj Zizek

“Suffering just means you’re having a bad dream. Happiness means you’re having a good dream. Enlightenment means getting out of the dream altogether.”
― Jed McKenna

“The point is to wake up, not to earn a Ph.D. In waking up.”
― Jed McKenna

“It is your show.

It is your universe.
There is no one else here, just you,
and nothing is being withheld from you.
You are completely on your own.
Everything is available for direct knowing.
No one else has anything you need.
No one else can lead you, pull you, push you or carry you.”
― Jed McKenna

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.”
― Bertrand Russell

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”
― Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.”
― Bertrand Russell

“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
― Betrand Russell

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”
― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction