The Great Quotes thread

[HopSan]

Posted by Johnnycomelately (here)

Posted by Bruce G Charlton (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1942
Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging in 1945 at the concentration camp in Flossenbürg, when he was aged 39.

Actually, I completely disagree!

I would say almost the opposite is true: that stupidity is much less dangerous than malice - so long as the stupid are genuinely well-motivated, they will stumble towards right action.

But malice (i.e. evil) is not self-correcting, but rather (all too often) malice feeds upon itself, and increases without specific limit.

I’m with Bruce here, mostly. Because malice thinks it won’t come to grief, has no broader context for self awareness, operates by jumping over walls.

But competance is def a thing or not, as Bill’s mention of stupidity points out.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cMFWFhTFohk

Bill, BGC, Johnny,

A really interesting theme!
Crux, as I see it:

Is a prisoner always a 'victim' -- and so truthful, right and honest?

[rgray222]

After Biden called Trump supporters garbage.

You can't lead Americans if you don't love Americans."
Donald J. Trump

[gord]

“All these investigations, the thorough research on the Stasi structures, the methods they used and are still using, all that will fall into the wrong hands. These structures will be painstakingly examined – to copy them.

They will be adapted a bit so that they’ll work in a free Western society. The dissidents won’t necessarily be arrested. There are finer possibilities to neutralize someone. But the secret prohibitions, the surveillance, the suspicions, the fear, the isolation and ostracisms, the branding and censoring of those who won’t go along – that will come back, believe me.

Institutions will be created that will work far more effectively, in a far more sophisticated way than the Stasi. Also the permanent lying will come back, the disinformation, the fog in which everything loses its form.”

-East German dissident Bärbel Bohley

[Paul D.]

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[Raskolnikov]

[Vicus]

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

[rgray222]

When we destroy nature we diminish our capacity to sense the divine.
RFK jr.

[Bill Ryan]

An election is not a popularity contest, or an award for showmanship. If you want to fulfill your duty as a citizen, then you need to become an informed voter. And if you are not informed, then the most patriotic thing you can do on election day is stay home. Otherwise your vote, based on whims or emotions, is playing Russian roulette with the fate of this nation.

Thomas Sowell: economist, social philosopher and political commentator, now aged 94

[Jamie]

"When Debate is lost, Slander becomes the tool of the loser" - Socrates

Lots of debate whether Socrates is the originator of this saying, but regardless a true saying none the less.

[Eva2]

"I couldn't live a week without a private library--indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1,500 or so books I possess." "From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent."
~ HP Lovecraft

Looking back at the twentieth century, we can certainly see tremendous progress in all fields of technology. Advancement in this sphere of our human lives, however, has been achieved at the cost of a gradual loss of the instinctual, holistic knowledge that has guided and protected life on Earth for great spans of time.
•
But it would be wrong to nourish a desire for a return to the “good old days.” Fortunately, they cannot be retrieved. New ways of tapping this knowledge must be found while retaining the accomplishments of our scientifically trained intelligence. In order to focus with our sharpened intellect on the physical, material side of nature, we have had to neglect the dimension that constitutes the underlying cause and support of our physical world: the spiritual world.
•
Whether we acknowledge that world or not, the fact that we are confronted with an avalanche of life-negating and life-destroying events cannot be denied, and the underlying causes must be found if we, the Earth, and all its life are to survive. The dying of honeybees in large areas of the world is only one fragment in this whole picture. What can we do about a situation of such global dimensions? Times of crises, whether personal, nationwide, or global, are times of chance and opportunity.
•
These “moments” in history wake us and shake us up so that we can abandon the path of (self) destruction, change our course, and head in a new direction that offers possibilities for life. Without regaining an all-encompassing knowledge—this time not instinctual or traditional—we can gain no real truth.
•
We are floundering on a sea of hypotheses about the origin of life, about our cosmos, evolution, and the goal of evolution. It takes an honest scientist such as Steven Hawkins to acknowledge that our worldview today is based on assumption: “Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. … Today scientists describe the universe in terms of two basic partial theories.
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) did not discard the intellectual accomplishments of our scientific age but, by utilizing them, researched another dimension, which is needed to complement the admirable achievements of the natural, physical and psychological sciences of our time.
•
His method, called “spiritual science,” or “anthroposophy” (anthropos = humankind, sophia = wisdom), can be learned by anyone who applies great stamina of will, concentration, and intent. By reaching into the realms of the reality that causes and affects the sense-perceptible, material world, Steiner was able to cut through the jungle of hypotheses and theories that directly or indirectly influence our everyday actions.
•
Steiner passed on his research results in approximately forty written works and two thousand lectures. The results of his investigations into spiritual realities are not intended to be “believed”; rather, we are to verify them through common sense and wakeful, open, and unbiased minds.
•
Through application to everyday, practical life, the fruits of these insights have become abundant throughout the world—in pedagogy, curative education, medicine, agriculture, religion, the arts, the sciences, and in the social realm.
•
{Rudolf Steiner - Lecture on Bees}

[Dennis Leahy]

If love is not part of the equation, the answer is wrong.

[Bill Ryan]

Beware the fury of a patient man.

John Dryden, 1681

[HopSan]

Russians are slow to harness, but quick to ride.

-- Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg

[rgray222]

Those who have chosen a side in politics are being played like the keys on a piano.

[Kryztian]

Scientia Igne Probata; Veritas Per Fidem

Translation: “Knowledge is proven through fire, Truth through faith.”

Latin proverb quoted at the end of the anonymous Immaculate Constellation document.

[Raskolnikov]

"Lying to ourselves is more deeply rooted than lying to others."

Dostoevsky

[Michi]

When you choose to collect experiences rather than things, you never ever run out of storage space.

- Joshua Becker

[Eva2]

“I think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn't their life and our life. Nor your life and my life.
That it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.”
~Kate Forster

[Vicus]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Beware the fury of a patient man.

John Dryden, 1681

[Eva2]

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

Ilya Prigogine
Nobel Laureate