Youssef Gamil > Youssef's Quotes

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”
― Hypatia

“I don't believe in people just hoping. We work for what we want. I always say that one has no right to hope without endeavor, so we work to try and bring about the situation that is necessary for the country, and we are confident that we will get to the negotiation table at one time or another.”
― Aung San Suu Kyi

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
― Marie Curie

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
― Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

“Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“It is relatively easy to accept that money is an intersubjective reality. Most people are also happy to acknowledge that ancient Greek gods, evil empires and the values of alien cultures exist only in the imagination. Yet we don't want to accept that our God, our nation or our values are mere fictions, because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“We aren't born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. if we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“After all, when ‘the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become’ He resolved to ‘wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created – and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground – for I regret that I have made them’ (Genesis 6:7). The Bible thinks it is perfectly all right to destroy all animals as punishment for the crimes of Homo sapiens, as if the existence of giraffes, pelicans and ladybirds has lost all purpose if humans misbehave. The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God repents having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors.3”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Those enigmas drew me into new territories, including the nature of rumor, folk wisdom, and conspiratorial thinking; the contrast between rationality within an individual and in a community; and the distinction between two modes of believing: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.”
― Carl Sagan

“When you have half of Caironese in slums, when you don't have clean water, when you don't have a sewer system, when you don't have electricity, and on top of that you live under one of the most repressive regimes right now... Well, put all that together, and it's a ticking bomb. It's not of a question of threat; it is question of looking around at the present environment and making a rational prognosis.”
― Mohamed ElBaradei

“دعونا نتخيل كيف سيكون حال العالم لو أن دول العالم خصصت لأغراض التنمية نفس الميزانية التى تخصصها لآلات الحرب؟! ولو أننا كنا نعيش فى عالم يتمتع فيه كل إنسان بالحرية والكرامة؟! تخيلوا لو أننا نعيش فى عالم يشعر فيه الناس بنفس القدر من الحزن لوفاة طفل فى دارفور أو فى فانكوفر! تخيلوا لو أننا نعيش فى عالم تتم فيه تسوية الخلافات والمشكلات بالحوار والأساليب الدبلوماسية لا بالقنابل وإطلاق الرصاص! تخيلوا لو أن العالم تخلّى عن الأسلحة النووية فلم يبق منها إلا آثار تعرض فى المتاحف! أى عالم سيكون هذا الذى يمكننا أن نجعله حقيقة واقعة نتركها لأبنائنا؟!”
― Mohamed ElBaradei, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times

“To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force... Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.”
― Hypatia

“He who influences the thinking of his time, influences all the moments that follow him. Leave your opinion for eternity.”
― Hypatia

“Life is growth, and the more we travel, the more truth we can understand. Understanding the things that surround us is the best preparation to understand the things that lie beyond.”
― Hypatia

“If you are creative, you must be dissident.”
― Nawal El Saadawi

“Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives. They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Walking through Fire: The Later Years of Nawal El Saadawi, In Her Own Words

“The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.”
― Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

“No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.”
― Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

“By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.”
― Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

“Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

[Remarks on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, 13 March 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe”
― Carl Sagan