Favourite Quotes

[Shiranu]

So... yes, your favourite quotes. Could be anything... philosopher, artist, politician, the guy down the street.

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door. "

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have."

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."

"If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember."

[Satt]

The following is my favorite, because it is what really got me THINKING about my beliefs at the time. It is what essentially led me to Agnosticism. Thank Epicurus!  =D>

"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

[GSOgymrat]

Off the top of my head:

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments. There are consequences. - Robert Ingersoll

I always want to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been specific. - Lily Tomlin

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. - Oscar Wilde

[Shiranu]

Only peril can bring the French together. One can't impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.

I don't necessarily agree with this one, but I think the guy was alot smarter than I was...

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it."

"Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;
yet it is its center that makes it useful.

You can mould clay into a vessel;
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;
but the ultimate use of the house
will depend on that part where nothing exists.

Therefore, something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not."

[ZachyFTW]

Not so much a quote but a  10 min video with more amazing quotes than I care to write. If ya got 10 minutes I highly recommend watching it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcO4TnrskE0

[Hopist]

url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_1[/url]"]
Louis: If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth.

There is something about this quote that appeals to me.

I think of this quote not in terms of dying but about letting go and moving on from crappy situations.

Sometimes the assholes we encounter in life help us overcome our inertia and make changes.

I liked the Louis character in that film, everyone should have a Louis in their life. :)

[FrankDK]

"I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature.  They are all alike; founded on fables and mythology.  Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, and imprisoned.  What has been the effect of this coercion?  To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth."
- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Short

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."-Benjamin Franklin

"Priests and conjurors are of the same trade." Thomas Paine

"The founders of our nation were nearly all Infidels, and that of the presidents who had thus far been elected [Washington; Adams; Jefferson; Madison; Monroe; Adams; Jackson] not a one had professed a belief in Christianity.... Among all our presidents from Washington downward, not one was a professor of religion, at least not of more than Unitarianism." -- The Reverend Doctor Bird Wilson, an Episcopal minister in Albany, New York, in a sermon preached in October, 1831

"With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured--especially in other people."
               --Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience: the unity of knowledge"

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment to begin improving the world." -- Anne Frank

Frank

[Brian37]

If our species never questioned social norms our species never would have left the caves. Me

[Shiranu]

If our species never questioned social norms our species never would have left the caves. Me

Doubtful, the caves aren't a very life-sustaining area. Humanity would have been forced to leave the caves to find food and water, which basic needs tend to over-ride any sort of philosophical or cultural reasoning.

Also human's probably didn't begin in caves but sought refuge in them, meaning they had already "left" the caves because they weren't native to them anyways...

[TheRealJLM]

"Religion offers an idealized, however
incorrect, explanation for existence. Freedom
from ignorance is freedom from being
controlled by the powers seeking to repress
the truth." -Justin McClelland

(I wrote this - Check it out in my book entitled "I Don't Want to Die")

[Triple Nine]

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance then baffle them with bullshit.

This is quote can pretty much describe the entirety of human history and the human condition.

[Brian37]

If our species never questioned social norms our species never would have left the caves. Me

Doubtful, the caves aren't a very life-sustaining area. Humanity would have been forced to leave the caves to find food and water, which basic needs tend to over-ride any sort of philosophical or cultural reasoning.

Also human's probably didn't begin in caves but sought refuge in them, meaning they had already "left" the caves because they weren't native to them anyways...

Um you might want to look up the word "Metaphor". People do go around calling our first homo sapien humans "CAVEMEN!"

The sentence is simply saying humans progressed, not that they literally lived in caves.

[Shiranu]

If our species never questioned social norms our species never would have left the caves. Me

Doubtful, the caves aren't a very life-sustaining area. Humanity would have been forced to leave the caves to find food and water, which basic needs tend to over-ride any sort of philosophical or cultural reasoning.

Also human's probably didn't begin in caves but sought refuge in them, meaning they had already "left" the caves because they weren't native to them anyways...

Um you might want to look up the word "Metaphor". People do go around calling our first homo sapien humans "CAVEMEN!"

The sentence is simply saying humans progressed, not that they literally lived in caves.

It was a joke :.

[Poison Tree]

The below quotes are all from Robert M Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

When its two-thirty on those [sleepless] mornings, I always have a brain tumor. These are very useful for that sort of terror, because you can attribute every conceivable nonspecific symptom to a brain tumor and justify your panic. Perhaps you do, too; or maybe you lie there thinking that you have cancer, or an ulcer, or that you've just had a stroke.      Even though I don't know you, I feel confident in predicting that you don't lie there thinking, "I just know it; I have leprosy." True?


Independent replication of results is essential in science. Years into a chase, a scientist triumphs and publishes the structure of a new hormone or brain chemical. Two weeks later the other guy comes forward. He has every incentive on earth to prove that the first guy was wrong. Instead, he is forced to say. "I hate that son of a bitch, but I have to admit he's right. We get the identical structure." That is how you know that your evidence is really solid, from independent conformation by a hostile competitor

 
To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, "Are you crazy? That's stressful." Throughout hominid history, if you're running 26 miles in a day, you're either very intent on eating someone or someone's very intent on eating you.


[on the Amish]This is relatively benign gibberish, and history buffs may even feel comforted by those among us who live the belief system of medieval peasants.


I, for example, am resoundingly mediocre at soccer, but nothing keeps me from my twice-weekly game. Invariably there comes a moment when I manage to gum up someone more adept that I; I'm panting and heaving and pleased, and there's still plenty more time to play and a breeze blows and I suddenly feel dizzy with gratitude for my animal existence.


[on other primates suffering depression and other mental illnesses] It would seem relatively straightforward to pull together some sound psychotherapeutic advice for these unhappy beasts. But in reality, it's hopeless. Baboons and macaques get distracted during therapy sessions, habitually pulling books off the shelves, for example; they don't know the days of the week and they constantly miss appointments; they eat the plants on the waiting room, and so on.


If you want to improve health and quality of life, and decrease the stress, for the average person in a society, you do so by spending money on public goods—better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. The bigger the income inequality is in a society, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average. The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead, they would derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good—a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, "The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition." He notes how this "secession of the wealthy" pushes toward "private affluence and public squalor." And more public squalor means more of the daily stressors and allostatic load that drives down health for everyone. For the wealthy, this is because of the costs of walling themselves off from the rest of society, and for the rest of society, this is because they have to live in it.

[Jmpty]

The problem is

You think
you have time.

The Buddha