XOX

“Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation”
― Carlo M. Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

“I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless. It is not a flippant assertion. I think it’s absurd, the idea of seeking ‘meaning’ in the set of circumstances that happens to exist after 13.8 billion years’ worth of unguided events. Leave it to humans to think the universe has a purpose for them. However, I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance: You will soon be dead.”
― Tim Minchin, You Don't Have To Have A Dream: Advice for the Incrementally Ambitious

“Plato and Aristotle were comfortable in a slave society. They offered justification for oppression. They served tyrants. They taught the alienation of the body from the mind (a natural enough ideal in a slave society); they separated matter from thought; they divorced the Earth from the heavens - divisions that were to dominate Western thinking for more than twenty centuries. Plato, who believed that 'all things are full of gods,' actually used the metaphor of slavery to connect his politics with his cosmology. He is said to have urged the burning of all of the books of Democritus (he had a similar recommendation for the books of Homer), perhaps because Democritus did not acknowledge immortal souls or immortal gods or Pythagorean mysticism, or because he believed in an infinite number of worlds. Of the seventy-three books Democritus is said to have written, covering all of human knowledge, not a single work survives. All we know is from fragments, chiefly on ethics, and secondhand accounts. The same is true of almost all the other ancient Ionian scientists.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity. That's not enough for its victims. No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past. Perhaps it is true that to save one life is to save the world. But the converse is not true: saving the world does not restore a single lost life.”
― Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning