Member Quotes - page 39
A few years ago I had occasion to visit Peru, and I got to know a fine philosopher and a truly wonderful human being-Francisco Miro Casada. Miro Casada has been an idealist all his life, while being, at the same time, a man of great experience (a former member of several governments and a former Ambassador to France). I found him a man who represents the social democratic vision in its purest form. Talking to him, and to my other friends in Peru (who represented quite a spectrum of political opinion), I heard something that was summed up in a remark he, Miro Casada, made to me, "Whenever you have a Republican president, we get a wave of military dictatorships in Latin America".
Hilary Putnam
I must mend the ways of my mind. This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works. I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of our fossils, radioactive at that.
Lewis Thomas
16) There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.
To prove a point, one may seek out a foolish Socialist, thirteenth century Liberal, Scientologist, High Frontier advocate, Mensa member, science fiction fan, Jim Bakker acolyte, Christian, witch, or fanatical devotee of Special Interest Lib. It doesn't really reflect on the cause itself. Ad hominem argument saves time, but it's still a fallacy.
Larry Niven
One of the things we deal with as a theme is legacy-thinking about the future of oneself, the future of one's family, one's culture. How they're going to survive, and how their survival will be viewed by those in the future. In doing so, I had to really think about my past and the past of my people. I'm a member of the African diaspora, and what we have experienced, I had to tap into and use that...I quickly understood that me growing up in Texas, my grandparents living through Jim Crow America, my parents living through Jim Crow America, to a degree, my aunts and uncles; those are all very different experiences. There's a difference in being raised somebody who's gone through that and actually being a person who dealt with that....
Jonathan Majors