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Current time: March 29, 2024, 1:03 am

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Daily quotes
#1
Daily quotes
So I'm going to post a quote a day from various philosophers, writers, and historical figures as a sort of "thought of the day" albeit in quote form that, usually, pertains to everyone's favorite topic; religion. However, I will also post quotes relating to politics, current events, history...anything that seems to strike my fancy at the time.

I have to limit myself to one quote per day, but I also have to post one quote per day. A bit of an exercise in self-discipline, I suppose.

Feel free to post your own quotes of the day, if you'd like! :]

And I'm going to start this off with one of the few, rare, precious good memories I have of my early life; Calvin & Hobbes. And the timing is rather fitting, I think...

Quote:Calvin: Well. I've decided I do believe in Santa Claus, no matter how preposterous he sounds.
Hobbes: What convinced you?
Calvin: A simple risk analysis. I want presents. Lots of presents. Why risk not getting them over a matter of belief? Heck, I'll believe anything they want.
Hobbes: How cynically enterprising of you.
Calvin: It's the spirit of Christmas.
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#2
RE: Daily quotes
Awesome thread. We've had a few quote threads before, but those are old now. So it's good that you started a new one.

I'll post my own favorites quotes in this thread as the days go by.
* * * * *

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light" - Plato

"I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am so ungrateful to these teachers." - Khalil Gibran

"Knowledge is that which, next to virtue, truly raises one person above another." - Joseph Addison

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."
- Samuel Johnson

"Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." - Oscar Wilde

"We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world." - Helen Keller
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#3
RE: Daily quotes
"May all brave Germans follow me!"

General Kurt von Schwerin - a few seconds before being ripped to pieces by a cannon ball.

ok seriously:

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." - Ludwig Wittgenstein.

"Where they have burned books, they will end up burning humans." - Heinrich Heine

"Every woman is the gift from the world to me." - Heinrich Heine

And to show just what a genius wit Heine was, during his time publications in Germany were censored, to avoid this some censored their writings them selves (Heine in a cheeky way):

"The German Censores —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— Idiots —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
—— —— —— —— ——"

"The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it" - Schopenhauer
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#4
RE: Daily quotes
Plato used to be my hero because of his allegory of the cave because of the idea of questioning the shadows on the wall. BUT, what I had missed in my college years that Dawkins rightfully brought up in one of his books, I read much later, Plato did not mean look for facts but question to find the "essence" of something. Dawkins basically thinks that meme fucked up future humanity because it was flawed and there is no "essence" in that evolution and universe that is in constant transition. Plato lead humanity to seek utopias and perfection which ended up having a bad influence on religion especially. It shook me when I first read Dawkins criticism of Plato, but it makes tons of sense and explains allot about how even smart people can and far too often do have flawed perceptions. I do believe that criticism is in "The Greatest Show On Earth".

But as far as quotes, Hitchens often brought up the absurdity of a perfect god who "puts an entertainment center into the middle of a sewage system".

And although Jefferson was a deist he valued questioning and had tons to say about the magic and absurdity of religion and the dangers of pulpit politics. "Question with boldness even the existence of a god" is his most famous.
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#5
RE: Daily quotes
I rejected Platos ideas on how the "perfect" state should be, right from when I first read about it.
To be honest I read about it in Poppers Open Sociaty and it`s enemies.

As to Platos idelism - I have always been empirical in my way of thinking.
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#6
RE: Daily quotes
"He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." -- Albert Einstein

"Mental toughness is many things. It is humility because it behooves all of us to remember that simplicity is the sign of greatness and meekness is the sign of true strength. Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love." -- Vince Lombardi

"It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants." -- William Cobbett

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -- Marcel Proust
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#7
RE: Daily quotes
I should have mentioned I will be doing these once per sleep cycle; not necessarily within a 24 hour time span. Basically sometime between sleeping, I post these.

So without further ado, here's one from Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary."

Quote:
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.

Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Evangelist, n., A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.

Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

Religion, n: A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the Nature of the Unknowable.

Christian, n.: One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

"Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man -- who has no gills."
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#8
RE: Daily quotes
Don't worry boys, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist.........

General John Sedgwick, US Army... his last words at the Battle of Spotsvylvania Courthouse.



Religion is what stops the poor from murdering the rich.

Napoleon I, Emperor of France


Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus - Roman statesman and historian
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#9
RE: Daily quotes
Given that today is Hitch Day, I feel the need to quote an appropriate individual for it. And because the man brought up so many points quickly and concisely and was essentially the sensei, the high templar, the grand master of the use of the blade known as Occam's Razor, I think I need to quote him repeatedly today, especially with a certain troll mucking about the forum the last few days. So instead of one quote, I am posting five!

Quote:“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

Quote:“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Quote:“Nothing optional—from homosexuality to adultery—is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Quote:“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

And of course, the truest thing ever spoken by any man ever...

Quote:“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
― Christopher Hitchens

It was a great tragedy what happened a year ago. Miss you, Hitchens. Wish I'd had the chance to at least meet you once in person, wish I'd heard of you earlier, wish I'd come across your writings and your razor-sharp wit much longer before your passing. Rest in peace, Horseman. Rest in peace.
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#10
RE: Daily quotes
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer." -Homer Simpson.

P.S. 4000th post. Big Grin
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