Brief Quotes - page 17
I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.
Roger Ebert
Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. ... An opposite conception comes in with Bacon's "knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.
Richard Weaver
The nature of man is such that he tends to believe what he wants to believe. Whether it is true or not usually provides only a brief hesitation. Men believe on the basis of their likes and dislikes. Unfortunately, much of what we believe to be true may be partially true. Absolute truth or absolute falsehood is rare. A total falsehood is easier to detect than a partial falsehood. Even a total truth is totally true only in context.
Robert LeFevre
Gould's arguments on the quirkiness of human intelligence are not only presented as part of an evolutionary argument, but also I believe to buttress an ideological viewpoint. In brief, his assessment of Man as an evolutionary accident is to lead us into a libertarian attitude whereby, by virtue of a cosmic accident, we, and we alone, have no choice but to take responsibility for our own destiny and mould it to our desire.
Simon Conway Morris
