User:Mikker/Quotes


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"Our greatest glory lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall" — Confucius, The Analects

"Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them." — Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

"William James used to preach "the will to believe". For my part, I should wish to preach "the will to doubt". What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite." — Bertrand Russell, attributed

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be" — Thomas Jefferson, attributed

"He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you" — Friederick Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

"Fundamentalist ignorance is many things, but irony is one of of its most obvious properties. But another property, and its most insidious, is its infection rate. The only cure for this sort of thing is knowledge. Arm yourself." — Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy blog

"Sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago" [Without learning, life is but the image of death] — Dionysius Cato, Distichs of Cato

"Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

"You will never understand what others are saying until you humble yourself to the idea that the truth is more important than your desire to be right." — User:146.244.137.239, Talk:Evolution

"One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals - justice or progress or the happiness of future generations, or the sacred mission or the emancipation of a nation or a race or class or even liberty itself... This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of a uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another." — Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty"

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." — Albert Einstein, attributed

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

"You cannot reason someone out of a belief they did not reason their way into in the first place." — Steven Novella, interview

"Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things" — Hippocrates, attributed

"Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion." — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" — Epicurus

"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right." - Robert Park