"We have sympathized with the misplaced obsessive emotionality you have thrown into your delusional activities.” "What do you mean, ‘delusional'? I know what I'm doing!” The priest shook his head gently. "Whatever you think is wrong. I suppose you feel that you live your own life and strive to achieve your goals?” "Well, of course!” "But that is not the case at all. Actually, you have no independent life of your own. You do not live, you are lived! You are a completely automatic mechanism with a built-in I-reflex. Your life has no meaning, since you are not even a person. You are nothing more than a short-lived, inconsistent, and accidental collection of tendencies. Your only possible relevance is as the unwitting vehicle for the purpose of bringing forth the Avatar.”.
Robert SheckleyRelated topics
accidental automatic avatar bringing case collection course delusional forth head independent life live meaning mean mechanism nothing person possible priest purpose relevance shook strive suppose think throw vehicle well whatever wrong emotionality built-in obsessive goalsRelated quotes
... an undercurrent of thought was going on in my mind which gave at last a result, whereof it is not too much to say that I felt at once the importance. An electric circuit seemed to close; and a spark flashed forth the herald (as I foresaw immediately) of many long years to come of definitely directed thought and work by myself, if spared, and, at all events, on the part of others if I should even be allowed to live long enough distinctly to communicate the discovery. Nor could I resist the impulse - unphilosophical as it may have been - to cut with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge, as we passed it, the fundamental formula which contains the Solution of the Problem, but of course, as an inscription, has long since mouldered away.
William Rowan Hamilton
Obama offered Muslims a careful admonition about women's rights, noting how denying women education impoverishes a country - balanced, of course, with this: "Issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam." Example? "The struggle for women's equality continues in many aspects of American life." Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some American university where the women's softball team has received insufficient Title IX funds - while, on the other hand, Saudi women showing ankle are beaten in the street, Afghan school girls have acid thrown in their faces, and Iranian women are publicly stoned to death for adultery. (Gays as well - but then again we have Prop 8.) We all have our shortcomings, our national foibles. Who's to judge?
Charles Krauthammer
But he, with these burthens on him, planned, commenced, and completed, the History of India; and this in the course of about ten years, a shorter time than has been occupied (even by writers who had no other employment) in the production of almost any other historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of reading and research. And to this is to be added, that during the whole period, a considerable part of almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children: in the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labour, care, and perseverance rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose, in endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual education.
John Stuart Mill
For if experience has ever taught a truth, it is that a plurality in the supreme Executive will forever split into discordant factions, distract the nation, annihilate its energies, and force the nation to rally under a single head, generally an usurper. We have, I think, fallen on the happiest of all modes of constituting the Executive, that of easing and aiding our President, by permitting him to choose Secretaries of State, of Finance, of War, and of the Navy, with whom he may advise, either separately or all together, and remedy their divisions by adopting or controlling their opinions at his discretion; this saves the nation from the evils of a divided will, and secures to it a steady march in the systematic course which the President may have adopted for that of his administration.
Thomas Jefferson
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender.... And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empires beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the fight, until in Gods own time the new world in its power and might steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
Winston Churchill
