"The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. The triumphs of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted. The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology, and psychology. It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed. The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and and expressions of life itself. The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution." - Huxley in Brave New World.
"In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in the parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us. Graham knew too well that he contained all the elements to make murder; perhaps mercy too. He understood murder uncomfortably well, though. He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against. He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine." - Conclusion to Thomas Harris's Red Dragon.
"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do." - Leonardo da Vinci
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe pessimism is just one's inability to control his perspective - a sort of submission to fear and bleakness. It's too often correlated to intelligence as 'realism', when perhaps it's just a reworking of the Stockholm syndrome. A pessimist is just a hopeless captive of this "cruel world" turned in its favor.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."
- Mark Twain
"But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert?" - Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion
"You can have all the faith you want in spirits, and the afterlife, and heaven and hell, but when it comes to this world, don't be an idiot. Cause you can tell me you put your faith in God to put you through the day, but when it comes time to cross the road, I know you look both ways." - Dr. House
"This cosmic dance bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but if sweetness can win - and it can - then I'll still be here tomorrow to high-five you yesterday, my friend. Peace." - The Royal Tart Toter
"The essentially creative act is the union of opposites. We are afraid of all that is dark within ourselves, not realizing that it is but the shadow of what is light, and therefor inseparable from it."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
"Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin." - Frankenstein
“Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"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
"Logic is the anatomy of thought."
- John Locke.
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
- Albert Einstein
"It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it."
- Richard Feynman
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
-E. E. Cummings
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
"You don't live as long as I have without a healthy fear of snakes, Bobby."
- Creed from "The Office"
"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber."
- Robert Fulghum
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
-Gandhi
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
- Albert Einstein
"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."
-Albert Camus
"The homage that every nation pays to the concept of right proves, nonetheless, that there is in man a still greater, though presently dormant, moral aptitude to master the evil principle in himself and to hope that others will also overcome it."
- Kant, "Perpetual Peace."
“All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
- Blaise Pascal
"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth."
- Robert Southey
“The intellectual advancement of man depends on how often he can exchange an old superstition for a new truth”
- Robert Green
"Into the pit with those bloodthirsty sons of war!"
- Hag from "Army of Darkness"
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
- Albert Einstein
"Your place to serve is where your great passion meets a great need in the world."
- Frederick Beuchner
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
- Abraham Lincoln (Annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862.)
"There Are Two Kinds of People In The World: Those Who Think There Are Two Kinds of People In The World and Those Who Don’t."
- Robert Benchley
"I know you believe you understand what I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
- Robert McCloskey
"If you can't explain something simply, you don't know enough about it."
- Albert E.
"Two roads diverged in a woods and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference"
- Robert Frost
"He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
- John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty"
"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest..."
- John Stuart Mill in "On Liberty"
"I may not believe in what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it."
- Francois Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire
"When the road to happiness seems darkened, carry a light with you. When there seems to be little reason to carry on, your looking for too large of reasons. When you want to give up, then you know little of all the things you truly would lose"
- Confucious
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