Beauregard Bottomley > Beauregard's Quotes

“Suppose I were to be honest with you as I possibly could be, fooling you no more than I fool myself. Still, you wouldn't know me and I wouldn't know you, because no matter how much we cry for light, we are all sleepwalkers fumbling in the dark. Sometimes we manage to touch for a moment, than we pass".”
― Stirling Silliphant

“I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.”
― Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape

“The reality of this election is that we can choose between a disappointing Democrat and the end of the world.”
― Wil Wheaton

“I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.”
― Isaac Asimov

“To trust immediate intuitions rather than collective examination that is rational, careful, and intelligent is not wisdom: it is the presumption of an old man who refuses to believe that the great world outside his village is any different from the one that he has always known. As”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“Books have the power to create, destroy or change civilizations.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“Each thinking mind is a political mind.”
― Zaman Ali, HUMANITY Understanding Reality and Inquiring Good

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“those who escape hell
however
never talk about
it
and nothing much
bothers them
after
that.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Among the things that can drive a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is necessary for man and that much good comes from it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“a man like me, who does not work, who does not want to work, will always be disliked.
In that house full of working people , I was the madman that, deep down, everyone wanted to be. I was the one who went without food, the cinema, warm clothes, to be free. I was the one who, without meaning to, daily reminded people of their wretched state.
people have not forgiven me for being free and for not being afraid of poverty.”
― Emmanuel Bove

“What fresh hell is this?”
― Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker

“In his critique of reason, Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as really transcending his own location.”
― Peter Sloterdijk

“The dominant question thus becomes not why religion has not died away but why it continues to persist in the face of monumental evidence to the contrary. To my mind, the answer can be summed up in one straightforward sentence: People are stupid.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“William James (1842-1910) was the first philosopher in America to gain universal celebrity. The hardheaded practical wisdom of Benjamin Franklin could hardly be termed a philosophy; from an entirely different perspective, the obfuscatory maunderings of Emerson did not count as such, either. Something with a bit more intellectual rigor of the English or German sort was needed if Americans were not to feel that they were anything but the ruthless money-grubbing barbarians they in fact were and are. James filled the bill. His younger contemporary George Santayana (1863-1952) was considerably more brilliant and scintillating, but for regular, 100 percent Americans he had considerable drawbacks. In the first place, he was a foreigner, born in Spain, even though his Boston upbringing and Harvard professorship would otherwise have given him the stamp of approval. Moreover, he was not merely suspiciously interested in art and poetry (The Sense of Beauty [1896], Three Philosophical Poets [1910]), but he actually wrote poetry himself! No, he would never do.
James, on the other hand, was just the sort of philosopher suited to the American bourgeoisie. His chief mission, expressed from one book to the next, was to protect their piety from the hostile forces of science and skepticism-an eminently laudable and American goal.”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity[.] My idea is, that every specific body strives to become lord over all of space and to expand its force (—its will to power) and to repel everything that resists its own expansion. But it perpetually collides with the equal efforts of other bodies, and ends by making an arrangement (“unifying”) with those that are closely enough related to it:—thus they conspire together to power. And the process goes on….”
― Friedrich Nietzsche