Rawan > Rawan's Quotes

“لقد كانت الدولة والأمة في خدمة هذا الدين ومبادئه الإنسانية، ثم آل هذا الخطاب -كما في الخطاب المبدّل- إلى خطاب يجعل من السلطان إلهاً أو نصف إله لا يسأل عما يفعل وهم يسألون؟ يأمر فيطاع، ويقول فتسمع الأمة كلها قوله؟ ويستبد فلا يرد؟ ويقتل فلا يقتص منه؟ ويأخذ ما شاء ويترك ما شاء، ثم لا يكتفي بذلك حتى نصب له مفتياً يوظف الدين في خدمة السلطة وأهوائها، ويضفي الشرعية على كل تجاوزاته، فإذا بالأمة الإسلامية تحذو حذو أوربا المسيحية في عصورها الوسطى، حذو القذة بالقذة، كما جاء في الحديث: ((لتتبعن سَنَنَ من كان قبلكم)). فقام بين ظهراني المسلمين قيصر كما كان لهم قيصر، وبابا يوظف الدين في خدمة الدولة كما كان لهم بابا، وتم تبديل الشريعة بالقوانين الوضعية باسم الدين، وشاع الاستبداد السياسي، وانتهاك حقوق الإنسان باسم طاعة ولي الأمر والسلطان؟”
― حاكم المطيري, الحرية أو الطوفان: دراسة موضوعية للخطاب السياسي الشرعي ومراحله التاريخية

“In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.”
― Isaac Newton

“Opposite to [Godliness] is atheism in profession, and idolatry in practise. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds, beasts, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes and no more on either side of the face, and just two ears on either side of the head, and a nose with two holes and no more between the eyes, and one mouth under the nose, and either two fore legs or two wings or two arms on the sholders and two legs on the hips, one on either side and no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel and contrivance of an author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom and the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, and within transparent juices with a crystalline lens in the middle and a pupil before the lens, all of them so truly shaped and fitted for vision that no artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light and what was its refraction, and fit the eyes of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These and such like considerations always have and ever will prevail with mankind to believe that there is a being who made all things and has all things in his power, and who is therefore to be feared.”
― Isaac Newton

“considerable intellectual achievement. In particular, we should take note that this attitude enabled Newton to explore the conjectured consequences of philosophic questions as a form of “dreaming,” without thereby necessarily undermining in any way the results of the Principia, without thereby producing a “philosophical romance” in the way that Descartes was said to have done. I repeat what Newton said in the last paragraph of that preface: “And although the whole of philosophy is not immediately evident, still it is better to add something to our knowledge day by day than to fill up men’s minds in advance with the preconceptions of hypotheses.” Certain fundamental truths, such as the universality of the force of gravity acting according to the inverse-square law, were derived directly from mathematics; but in Newton’s mind even such a law—once found—had to be fitted into his general scheme of thought, and he came to believe that certain aspects of this law had been known to the ancient sages. Following the reorientation of Newton’s philosophy of nature, he came to believe that interparticle forces of attraction and repulsion exist. Such forces, according to Newton, are sufficiently short-range in their action (as he makes quite explicit in query 31 of the Opticks) that they do not raise a major problem of understanding their mode of action. They do not, in other words, fall into the category of the forces acting at a distance. His studies of matter, and in particular of alchemy, had made the existence of these forces seem reasonable. But does the reasonableness of such short-range forces provide a warrant for belief in the existence of long-range forces acting over huge distances? Consider the gravitational force between the sun and the earth: this force must act through a distance of about one hundred million miles. Even worse from the conceptual point of view is the force between the sun and Saturn, some thousands of millions of miles. Eventually Newton was to conclude that comets are a sort of planet, with the result that the solar gravitational force must extend”
― Isaac Newton, The Principia: The Authoritative Translation and Guide: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy

“ولا تغني الكتب عن تجارب الحياة , ولا تغني تجارب الحياة عن الكتب , لأننا نحتاج إلى قسط من التجربة لكي نفهم حق الفهم , أما أن التجارب لا تغني عن الكتب , فذلك لأن الكتب هي تجارب آلاف السنين في مختلف الأمم و العصور ولا يمكن أن تبلغ تجربة الفرد الواحد أكثر من عشرات السنين”
― عباس محمود العقاد