Dixie > Dixie's Quotes

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“any individual who chooses not to have children, or who has childlessness thrust upon them, brings to an end an unbroken chain of life that stretches back four billion years.”
― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve

“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Ending is better than mending.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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

“Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“RULE 1: Look forward and reason backward.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we'll get.”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“Philosophy is the outcome of human weakness or limitation of knowledge".”
― Bhagat Singh, Why I am an Atheist

“Non-violence is backed by the theory of soul-force in which suffering is courted in the hope of ultimately winning over the opponent. But what happens when such an attempt fail to achieve the object? It is here that soul-force has to be combined with physical force so as not to remain at the mercy of tyrannical and ruthless enemy.”
― Bhagat Singh

“In 1911, the poet Morris Rosenfeld wrote the song “Where I Rest,” at a time when it was the immigrant Italians, Irish, Poles, and Jews who were exploited in the worst jobs, worked to death or burned to death in sweatshops.[*] It always brings me to tears, provides one metaphor for the lives of the unlucky:[19] Where I Rest Look not for me in nature’s greenery You will not find me there, I fear. Where lives are wasted by machinery That is where I rest, my dear. Look not for me where birds are singing Enchanting songs find not my ear. For in my slavery, chains a-ringing Is the music I do hear. Not where the streams of life are flowing I draw not from these fountains clear. But where we reap what greed is sowing Hungry teeth and falling tears. But if your heart does love me truly Join it with mine and hold me near. Then will this world of toil and cruelty Die in birth of Eden here.[*] It is the events of one second before to a million years before that determine whether your life and loves unfold next to bubbling streams or machines choking you with sooty smoke. Whether at graduation ceremonies you wear the cap and gown or bag the garbage. Whether the thing you are viewed as deserving is a long life of fulfillment or a long prison sentence. There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will