From RationalWiki
REAL LIFE BUSY
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| Sterile
is awarded the
Smite 'em with facts award
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For contributions to
aSK
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User:Sterile/sandbox, User:Sterile/ASKinfo
[[1]]
[edit] quotes
| “
| Yes, the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: Voracious robber barons may explain their cutthroat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on "survival of the fittest" to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and the corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation, and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler's rise to power. Very likely these or similar events would have transpired with or without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not admired by robber batons and Führers – altruism, general intelligence, compassion – may be the key to survival.
| ”
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| —Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Ballantine: New York, 1996; p 260.
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| “
| What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There’s no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That’s tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry, in less than 6,000 years, using just a pitchfork and a loud voice. It’s like playing speed chess against a computer and a thousand people with Nobel Prizes.
| ”
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| —[2]
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| “
| Far from bolstering the authority of morality, appeals to divine authority can undermine it. For divine command theories of morality may make believers feel entitled to look only to their idea of God to determine what they are justified in doing. It is all to easy under such a system to ignore complaints of those injured by one's actions, since they are not acknowledged as moral authorities in their own right. But to ignore the complaints of others is to deprive oneself of the main source of information one needs to improve one's conduct. Appealing to God rather than those affected by one's actions amounts to an attempt to escape accountability to one's fellow human beings.
| ”
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| —Elizabeth Anderson, "If God is Dead, is Everything Permitted?", quoted in The Portable Atheist
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| “
| Q:Is Intelligent Design scientific? A:Yes, didn't you see that we italicized scientific all over the place?[1]
| ”
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| “
| [F]iction masquerading as truth always offends me.
| ”
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| —Philip J. Rayment
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| “
| Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
| ”
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| —Carl Sagan, "A Dragon in My Garage", The Demon-Haunted World
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| “
| Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
| ”
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| —Alexander Pope
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| “
| The value of identity of course is that so often with it comes purpose.
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| —Richard Grant
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| “
| He who knows does not speak/He who speaks does not know/And I go round in circles.
| ”
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| —George Harrison
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| “
| The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
| ”
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| —Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address
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| “
| In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
| ”
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| —David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature via wikipedia
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| “
| Impact velocity. Physics, my ass...
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| —Sawyer, Lost
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| “
| ENJOLRAS: Let us die facing our foes./Make them bleed while we can.
COMBEFERRE: Make 'em pay through the nose.
COURFEYRAC: Make 'em pay for every man!
ENJOLRAS: Let others rise/ To take our place/ Until the earth is free!
| ”
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| —Les Miserables
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In honor of TK:
| “
| Mercutio. ... Thou! why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou
hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes;--what eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat; and yet thy head hath been
beaten as addle as an egg for quarrelling. Thou hast quarrelled with a man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened
thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter? with
another for tying his new shoes with an old riband? and yet thou wilt tutor me from quarrelling!
| ”
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| —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 1
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| “
| Benvolio. We talk here in the public haunt of men:
Either withdraw unto some private place,
And reason coldly of your grievances,
Or else depart; here all eyes gaze on us.
Mercutio.
Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze;
I will not budge for no man's pleasure, I."
| ”
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| —Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 1
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| “
| "It's not all in Hogwarts, A History. Though, of course, that book's not entirely reliable. A Revised History of Hogwarts would be a more accurate title. Or A Highly Biased and Selective History of Hogwarts, Which Glosses Over the Nastier Aspect of the School."
| ”
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| —Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
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| “
| Time is all the luck you need.
| ”
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| —"Lucky", Seven Mary Three
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