Mjaballah > Mjaballah's Quotes

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you'll die of a misprint.”
― Markus Herz

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

“Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,
With too much spirit to be e'er at ease,
With too much quickness ever to be taught,
With too much thinking to have common thought:
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live.”
― Alexander Pope, Moral Essays

“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
― Rumi

“You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.”
― Alexander Pope, Moral Essays

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The written word endures, the spoken word disappears”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
― Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the news

“ولعل أقسى ما جرى على المرأة هو عزلها من المجتمع , فجعل ظهورها كله كشف عورة حتى الصوت ,وسمى وجودها حيث يوجد الرجال إختلاطا حراما . وأمسكت في البيت بذات الوجه الذي لم يشرعه الدين إلا عقابا لأتيان الفاحشة”
― حسن الترابي, المرأة بين الأصول والتقاليد

“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
― Alexander Pope

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."

[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005]”
― Steve Jobs

“If you want to know what God thinks about money just look at the people He gives it to.”
― Alexander Pope

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
― Steve Jobs

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
― Albert Einstein

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“We try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory.”
― Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Our actions may be impeded...
But there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

The impeding to action advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“Adults discourage children from asking philosophical questions, first by being patronizing to them and then by directing their inquiring minds towards more "useful" questions. Most adults aren't themselves interested in philosophical questions. They may be threatened by some of them. Moreover, it doesn't occur to most adults that there are questions that a child can ask that they can't provide a definitive answer to and that aren't answered in a standard dictionary or encyclopedia either.”
― Gareth B. Matthews, Philosophy and the Young Child