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In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
 
Forget the failures. Keep the lessons.
 
For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.
 
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
 
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
 
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?
 
I think so badly of philosophy that I don't like to talk about it. ... I do not want to say anything bad about my dear colleagues, but the profession of teacher of philosophy is a ridiculous one. We don't need a thousand of trained, and badly trained, philosophers — it is very silly. Actually most of them have nothing to say.
 
What we see depends mainly on what we look for
 
Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.
 
There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our
character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.
 
We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.
 
If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word you say, talk in your sleep.
 
Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related.
 
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
 
The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.
 
...someone’s hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an “isomorphic sensorimotor” response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; the more the implicit racism, the more blunting. Similarly, among subjects of both races, there’s more activation of the (emotional) medial PFC when considering misfortune befalling a member of their own race than of another race.
 
The Observer is the Observed.
 
Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
 
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
 
If every man could act as he chose, the whole of history would be a tissue of disconnected accidents.
 
2718 quotes