R. Miller > R.'s Quotes

“Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.”
― E. L. Doctorow

“One of the biggest problems with the world today is that we have large groups of people who will accept whatever they hear on the grapevine, just because it suits their worldview—not because it is actually true or because they have evidence to support it. The really striking thing is that it would not take much effort to establish validity in most of these cases… but people prefer reassurance to research.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well--they certainly are--but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed--there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.”
― David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries

“Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of
which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and
already weary of hearing what he has never heard.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“The point is: have you ever noticed how we crush a cockroach without further worry and feel no remorse in spite of being in fact terminating a life? That's it. We do so because we don't identify ourselves with a cockroach. Because it's very diffent from us. [...] Thinking from that side, I suppose some people tend to do the same towards others. I mean, they see from distance those they don't identify with on the spot, do you get me? It's as if the stranger, who doesn't belong to the same group as we do, was seen as an inferior being... Almost a cockroach!”
― Camilo Gomes Jr, Em memória

“If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.”
― George Orwell

“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over... [they] now mean the establishment point of view... Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.”
― John Pilger

“If there was one overriding element to Faraday's character, it was humility. His 'conviction of deficiency,' as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life. Thus Faraday approached both his science and his everyday conduct unhampered by ego, envy, or negative emotion. In his work, he assumed the inevitability of error and failure; whenever possible, he harnessed these as guides toward further investigation. Faraday adhered to no particular school of scientific thought. Nor did he flinch when a favored hypothesis fell to the rigors of experiment.”
― Alan Hirshfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday

“Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.”
― Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College

“Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude.

"Seen this yet?"

"No."

"Don't read it," Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. "It will only upset you, son."

"It's a wicked paper... " Claude agreed, but Mr. Harris was overspeaking him.

"It's the big black words that do it. The little grey ones don't matter very much, they're just fill-ins they take everyday from the wires. They concentrate their poison in the big black words, where it will radiate.

Of course if you read the little stories too you've got sure proof that every word they wrote above, themselves, was a fat black lie, but by then you've absorbed a thousand greyer ones, and where and how to check on those? This way the mind deteriorates. The best way you can save yourself is not to read it, son."

"No, I... "

"That's right, if you're not careful," Mr. Harris went on, blue-eyed, red-faced, "you find yourself pretty soon hating everyone but God, the Babe, and a few dead senators. That's no fun. Men aren't so bad as that."

"No."

"That's right, you begin to worry about anyone who opens his mouth except to say ho it looks like rain, let's bowl. Otherwise you wonder what the hell he's trying to prove, or undermine. If he asks what time it is, you wonder what terrible thing is scheduled to happen, where it will happen, when. You can't even stand to be asked how you feel today - he's probably looking at the bumps on you, they may have grown more noticeable overnight. Soon you feel you should apologize for standing there where he can watch you dying in front of him, he'd rather for you to carry your head around in a little plaid bag, like your bowling ball. There's no joy in that. Men aren't so very bad."

Mr. Harris paused to remove his Panama hat. Water seeped from his knobby forehead, which he mopped with a damp handkerchief. "I've offended you, son," he said.

"Not at all, I entirely agree with you."

Mr. Harris replaced his hat, folded his handkerchief.

"I shouldn't shoot off this way," he said. "I read too much."

"No, no. You're right... ”
― Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

“It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires, and who can doubt that the interest we have in admitting or denying the reality of the Judgement to come determines the faith of most men in accordance with their hopes and fears.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“This is not hyperbole. It is possible for the average professor to have been taught by leftists, grown up in a left-leaning city, read only left-leaning books, entertained by leftists in pop culture and became a professor without holding a job outside academia. How can we expect these professors to adequately explain what people who oppose them believe?”
― Lee Doren, Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoid Indoctrination at College

“Science is about recognizing patterns. [...] Everything depends on the ground rules of the observer: if someone refuses to look at obvious patterns because they consider a pattern should not be there, then they will see nothing but the reflection of their own prejudices.”
― Christopher Knight & Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon?

“I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.”
― George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.”
― Noah Cicero, The Condemned

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
― Paul Tillich

“Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, The Story of a Marriage

“Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.
Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“All that is transitory is but a metaphor.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”
― Albert Camus

“One must have at least a readiness to love the other person, broadly speaking, if one is to be able to understand him.”
― Rollo May, Existence

“It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.”
― Matthew Stover, Blade of Tyshalle

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.”
― Werner Herzog

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”
― Rollo May