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If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.
If premarital sex is a sin, who is the victim?
The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis.
We may be seeing a coming together of the humanities and the science of human nature.
No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatic of particular instances.
I hate victims who respect their executioners.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
Nothing that is complete breathes.
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
THE BULLSHIT ASYMMETRY
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." (Alberto Brandolini)
No one wants to die. Even people that wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to ge there.
We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong.
Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.
Emotions are enmeshed in the neural networks of reason.
I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've propbably misunderstood what I've said.
In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
The masses are the opium of religion.
Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e. g., “My telling you where to ?nd the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
The difference between 'involvement' and 'commitment' is like an eggs-and-ham breakfast: the chicken was 'involved' - the pig was 'committed'.
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.
America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.
The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.
The chains that bind us most closely are the ones we have broken.
We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are. 
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem in my opinion to characterize our age.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Well, it's either kiss me or kill me, that's how I see it.
Time is just memory mixed in with Desire.
We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won't need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don't fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.
We all decry prejudice, yet are all prejudiced.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Science in the past (and partly in the present), was dominated by one-sided empiricism. Only a collection of data and experiments were considered as being ‘scientific’ in biology (and psychology); forgetting that a mere accumulation of data, although steadily piling up, does not make a science.
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. 
Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.
The loss of a thing affects us until we have lost it altogether.
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it. 
Few persons care to study logic, because everybody conceives himself to be proficient enough in the art of reasoning already.
If our need for status is fundamental, this discomfort we feel about admitting it may seem surprising. But we tend to believe the brain’s heroic story, not the subconscious realpolitik of the game. To admit to being motivated by improving our rank risks making others think less of us, which loses us rank. Even admitting it to ourselves can make us feel reduced. So our awareness of our desire for status eats itself. We readily recognise it in rivals and even use it as a method of insult – which, ironically, is status play: an attempt to downgrade others and thereby raise ourselves up.
People will remember not what you said but how you made them feel.
When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
If someone were to analyze current notions and fashionable catchwords, he would find "systems" high on the list. The concept has pervaded all fields of science and penetrated into popular thinking, jargon and mass media.
Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to "human nature." … The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress their REAL HUMAN NATURE and to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole.
The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you.
My favorite animal is steak.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Truth is a pathless land.
To me, body and mind are different aspects of specific biological processes.
A dialogue is very important. It is a form of communication in which question and answer continue till a question is left without an answer. Thus the question is suspended between the two persons involved in this answer and question. It is like a bud with untouched blossoms . . . If the question is left totally untouched by thought, it then has its own answer because the questioner and answerer, as persons, have disappeared. This is a form of dialogue in which investigation reaches a certain point of intensity and depth, which then has a quality that thought can never reach.
People run in packs because they don't feel safe alone. I run alone because I don't feel safe in packs.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder."
If the rich could hire someone else to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.
Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.
Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right.
These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn't.
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.
Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.
I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment sought a new understanding of the human condition. The era was a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress.
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. … If we recognize this principle, no one has to spin myths about the indistinguishability of the sexes to justify equality.
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
She was so ugly when she was born, her Momma used to borrow a baby to take to church on Sunday.
Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
After Darwin, God's role changes from being the designer of all creatures great and small to being the designer of the laws of nature, from which natural selection can unfold, to being perhaps just the chooser of the laws. By the time God's role has been so diminished, he becomes a bit like a constitutional monarch, presiding ceremonially but not having any more work to do. That's a place for God if it makes people comfortable to keep God as the presider over the universe. I suppose that is satisfying for many.
Those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.
Who do you turn to when the only person who can stop your tears, is the one that's causing them?
We may say that feelings have two kinds of intensity. One is the intensity of the feeling itself, by which loud sounds are distinguished from faint ones, luminous colors from dark ones, highly chromatic colors from almost neutral tints, etc. The other is the intensity of consciousness that lays hold of the feeling, which makes the ticking of a watch actually heard infinitely more vivid than a cannon shot remembered to have been heard a few minutes ago.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?
People prefer bad company to solitude and anything to one's own company.
You learn something every day if you pay attention.
It's better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to timidly avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit. Responsibility means recognizing both pleasure and price, action and consequence, then making a choice.
As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. 
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'
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