Understanding Quotes - page 96
It seems incredible that we should willingly trade certainty for quantum confusion and doubt. But, make no mistake, despite its simplicity, its appealing visual images and its resonance with our common understanding, classical physics failed. The quantum description was built amidst the ruins of the structure that preceded it, and it is therefore appropriate that we begin our journey from within this classical landscape.
Jim Baggott
The belief that the animals exist because God created them - and that he created them so we can better meet our needs - is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all.
Peter Singer
Intellectual honesty requires that one reflect on the contribution one's theory makes to the class struggle, and acknowledge it openly. One does not have to accept the specific claim that there are two, and only two, mutually exclusive worldviews, to one of which any theory must commit itself, to accept the general claim that entertaining, developing and propounding a theory are actions, and as such they represent ways of taking a position in the world. This means that any kind of comprehensive understanding of politics will also have to treat the politics of theorization, including the politics of whatever theory is itself at the given time being presented for scrutiny, as a candidate for acceptance.
Raymond Geuss
Every result of human purposiveness is of indisputable importance for man's social existence, but we should stop regarding social processes as deterministic manifestations of a necessary course of events. Such a view can only lead to the most erroneous conclusions and contribute to a fatal confusion in our understanding of historical events.
Rudolf Rocker
However fully man may recognise cosmic laws he will never be able to change them, because they are not his work. But every form of his social existence, every social institution which the past has bestowed on him as a legacy from remote ancestors, is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends. Only such an understanding is truly revolutionary and animated by the spirit of the coming ages.
Rudolf Rocker
Human being is both being in the world and living in the world. Living involves responsible understanding of one's role in relation to all other beings. For living is not being in itself, but living of the world, affecting, exploiting, consuming, comprehending, deriving, depriving.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
I find it necessary on the first page of this book, quite ready for publication, to give the following advice:
:Read each of my written expositions thrice:
:Firstly: at least as you have already become mechanized to read all your contemporary books and newspapers.
:Secondly: as if you were reading aloud to another person.
:And only thirdly: try and fathom the gist of my writings. Only then will you be able to count upon forming your own impartial judgment, proper to yourself alone, on my writings. And only then can my hope be actualized that according to your understanding you will obtain the specific benefit for yourself which I anticipate, and which I wish for you with all my being.
G. I. Gurdjieff
There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance -- physical, emotional, intellectual and every other way. Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off its ''national pastime'' pedestal in less than fifteen years.
Hunter S. Thompson
