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One of my heroes.

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 18:46:00 -0500

One of my heroes.

"It has been my experience to put aside a decision for future pondering. Then one day, fencing a..."

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 12:28:00 -0500

“It has been my experience to put aside a decision for future pondering. Then one day, fencing a piece of time to face the problem, I have found it already completed, solved, and the verdict taken. This must happen to everyone, but I have no way of knowing that. It’s as though, in the dark and desolate caves of the mind, a faceless jury had met and decided. This secret and sleepless area in me I have always thought of as black, deep, waveless water, a spawning place from which only a few forms ever rise to the surface. Or maybe it’s a great library where is recorded everything that has ever happened to living matter back to the first moment when it began to live.”

- The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck

"An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one..."

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:10:07 -0400

“An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them — fear — is more potent than the rest.”

- Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

"In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? — See?” and I think..."

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:20:33 -0400

“In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See? — See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.”

- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig

"He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be..."

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:40:00 -0400

“He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office.”

- The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

"Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 05:48:51 -0400

“Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Why I Am Not a Christian

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:14:00 -0500

A collection of excerpts I found interesting from Bertrand Russell’s essay.

The Natural-law Argument

The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice

What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.

The Moral Problem

You remember what happened about the fig tree. “He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: ‘No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever’ … and Peter … saith unto Him: ‘Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.’” This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

The Emotional Factor

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Fear, The Foundation of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do

We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:22:38 -0500

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

- Mark Twain

"… we can’t know better until knowing better is useless."

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:27:00 -0500

“… we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.”

- Looking for Alaska by John Green

Climb a mountain, tell no one. Then ironically highlight it on...

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:55:00 -0500

Climb a mountain, tell no one.
Then ironically highlight it on a high-resolution scan of a map.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:08:00 -0500

Pinterest:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Project Gutenberg

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:26:33 -0500

Project Gutenberg:

Project Gutenberg offers over 38,000 free ebooks to download to your PC, Kindle, Android, iOS or other portable device. Choose between ePub, Kindle, HTML and simple text formats. Our ebooks are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries. Readers outside of the United States must check the copyright laws of their countries before downloading or redistributing our ebooks.

"I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:56:51 -0500

“I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

- Ayn Rand, Atlass Shrugged

"Suppose you were a giant who could not see individual people and never became aware of an aggregate..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:51:03 -0500

“Suppose you were a giant who could not see individual people and never became aware of an aggregate of less than one million of them. You would just be able to notice that London contains more matter by day than by night. But you could not possibly be aware of the fact, that on a given day, Mr. Dixon was ill in bed and did not take his usual train. You would therefore believe the movement of matter into London in the morning and out of it in the evening to be a much more regular affair than it is. You would no doubt attribute it to some peculiar force in the Sun. A hypothesis which would be confirmed by the observation of the movement is retarded in foggy weather. If, later, you became able to observe individual people, you would find that there is less regularity than you had supposed. One day, Mr. Dixon is ill and another, Mr. Simpson. The statistical average is not affected, and to a large scale observation there is no difference. You would find that all the regularity you had previously observed could be accounted for by the statistical law of large numbers. Without supposing that Mr. Dixon and Mr. Simpson had any reason beyond caprice for their occasional failure to go to London in the morning. This is exactly the situation which physics has arrived in regard to atoms. It does not know of any laws completely determining their behaviour. And the statistical laws which it has discovered are sufficient to account for the observed regularity in the motions of large bodies. And as the case for determinism has rested on these, it seems to have broken down.”

- Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science

Photo

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:31:51 -0500

Photo

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:31:08 -0500

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:43:00 -0500

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

- George R. R. Martin