Fulmenius

“Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Я не "люблю" Германию, как не "люблю" самого себя. Если я и люблю какую-то страну, то - Францию. Впрочем, и любую другую страну я мог бы полюбить скорее, чем свою собственную, даже и без нацистов. У моей страны роль совсем другая - единственная в своем роде: быть моей страной - у "любимой" страны этой роли нет. Потеряв свою страну, ты уже не вправе любить какую-либо другую. Потому что ты теряешь все условия, необходимые для прекрасной игры гостеприимства народов, а это и взаимный обмен, и приглашение друг друга в гости, и взаимопонимание, и возможность щегольнуть, покрасоваться, демонстрируя друг другу свои достижения. Потеряв свою страну, ты становишься sans-patrie, человеком без тени, без почвы под ногами; в лучшем случае, тебя терпят - или, если уж ты добровольно или вынужденно отказался от фактической эмиграции и ограничиваешься внутренней, ты становишься бесприютным изгнанником в собственной стране.”
― Себастьян Хафнер, Defying Hitler

“To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality