“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“To make a contented slave,’ [Frederick] Bailey later wrote, ‘it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.’ This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Epictetus
“I am the totem of the Earth, the Phallus raised to pierce the sky; - this is the altar of the stars. But they are mere flowers of the garden; harvest them and adorn thyself.
Tear at the void and the lights therein; feast on infinities.”
“The enemies of living life; outdated little liberals, afraid of their own independence; lackeys of thought, enemies of the person and freedom, decrepit preachers of carrion and rot! What do they have: gray heads, the golden mean, the most abject and philistine giftlessness, envious equality, equality without personal dignity, equality as understood by a lackey or a Frenchman of the year ninety-three…And scoundrells, above all, scoundrels, scoundrels everywhere!”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Demons)
„Ich bin ein Teil von jener Kraft, // Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft. // … Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! // Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, // ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht; // Drum besser wärs, daß nichts entstünde. // So ist denn alles, was ihr Sünde, // Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt, // Mein eigentliches Element.“ - Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe, Faust (I), 1790 / 1808, S. 64-67. **
Translation:
„I am Part of that Power which would // The Evil ever do, and ever does the Good. // … I am the Spirit that denies! // And rightly too; for all that doth begin // Should rightly to destruction run; // 'Twere better then that nothing were begun. // Thus everything that you call Sin, // Destruction - in a word, as Evil represent- // That is my own, real element. “ - Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe, Faust (I), 1790 / 1808, p. 64-67.
K: I am learning German by Reading Faust. I have Walter Kaufmann’s translation which is English on
one side and the German on the other side. Interesting way to learn a Language.
My quote by the way is “back at the ranch” by me, which is my way of saying getting back to the point.