Educators From The United States

"There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe."

"There surely is something to these terms, but too often they’re the result of minds intent on discovering meaning where there is only probability."

"You would think that the obvious irreligious objection would come to almost anyone’s mind when reading a religious tome or holy book. What if you don’t believe the holy book’s presuppositions and narrative claims and simply ask for independent argument or evidence for God’s existence? What if you’re not persuaded by the argument that God exists because His assertion that He exists and discussion of His various exploits appear in this book about Him that believers say He inspired?"

"Disproving a claim that something exists is often quite difficult, and this difficulty is often mistaken for evidence that the claim is true...Presented as I am periodically with these and other fantastical claims, I sometimes feel a little like a formally dressed teetotaler at a drunken orgy for reiterating that not being able to conclusively refute the claims does not constitute evidence for them."

"Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation."

"All art, in fact, has these two aspects: its content and its frame (or setting), which sets it apart from nonart and which says of itself, “This is not an everyday sort of communication. This is unreal.”"

"Appreciating humor—even recognizing it—requires human skills of the highest order (level?); no computer comes close to having them."

"The necessity of this psychic stepping back (or up) to the metalevel is probably what is meant when people say that a sense of perspective is needed for an appreciation of humor. It also explains why dogmatists, idealogues, and others with one-track minds are often notoriously humorless."

"Innumerate people characteristically have a strong tendency to personalize—to be misled by their own experiences, or by the media’s focus on individuals and drama."

"After all, one must have some grasp of logic even to recognize a non sequitur."

"I remember thinking of mathematics as a kind of omnipotent protector. You could prove things to people and they would have to believe you whether they liked you or not."

"Together the, two ingredients—a perceived incongruity with a point and an appropriate emotional climate—seem to be both necessary and sufficient for humor."

"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."

"Bad things happen periodically, and they’re going to happen to somebody. Why not you?"

"The universe acts on us, we adapt to it, and the notions that we develop as a result, including the mathematical ones, are in a sense taught us by the universe. Evolution has selected those of our ancestors (both human and not) whose behavior and thought were consistent with the workings of the universe."

"The connections among morality, prudence, and religion are complicated and beyond my concerns here. I would like to counter, however, the claim regularly made by religious people that atheists and agnostics are somehow less moral or law-abiding than they. There is absolutely no evidence for this, and I suspect whatever average distance there is along the nebulous dimension of morality has the opposite algebraic sign."

"It’s always healthy to recognize facts."

"It’s become somewhat fashionable to say that religion and science are growing together and are no longer incompatible. This convergence is, in my opinion, illusory. In fact, I don’t believe that any attempt to combine these very disparate bodies of ideas can succeed intellectually."

"Claiming that a holy book’s claims are undeniable because the book itself claims them to be is convincing only to the convinced."

"Confirmation of a person’s unreliable statement by another unreliable person makes the statement even less reliable."

"While not a panacea, candidly recognizing the absence of any good logical arguments for God’s existence, giving up on divine allies and advocates as well as taskmasters and tormentors, and prizing a humane, reasonable, and brave outlook just might help move this world a bit closer to a heaven on earth."

"The whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle having occurred."

"The later decades of a life become the time for our capabliites to find an unscattered focus, and in this way increase the force of their concentraled worth."

"In its own unhurried way, age soundlessly and with persistence treads ever closer behind us on slippered feet, catches up, and finally blends itself into us—all while we are still denying its nearness."

"Long after the theories on which they were based had been debunked, Galen's concepts of sickness and its treatment continued to have a pervasive influence on the daily practice of medicine. Indeed, it is a measure of medicine's progress over the past fifty years that a goodly number of his remedies were still being used until well into the twentieth century."

"Tradition is a persuasive teacher, even when what it teaches is erroneous."

"Poets, essayists, chroniclers, wags, and wise men write often about death but have rarely seem it. Physicians and nurses, who see it often, rarely write about it."

"Of hundreds of known diseases and their predisposing characteristics, some 85% of our aging population will succumb to the complications of one of only seven major entities: atherosclerosis, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, obesity, mental depressing states such as Alzheimer's and other dementias, cancer, and decreased resistance to infection. Many of those elderly who die will have several of them. And not only that; the personnel of any large hospital's intensive care unit can confirm the everyday observation that terminally ill people are not infrequently victims of all seven."

"If there is one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are fifteen operations, you know that none of them work."

"With deep sedation or the blessed respite of terminal coma that comes to some at the end of a difficult struggle, the actual hour when the heart stops is indeed often tranquil. Many do, in this way, avoid a tormented passage; but many others are in physical and mental distress till nearly the last moment, or even at the last moment."

"The tendency toward mysticism is ingrained in human nature. Superstition, religion, and medicine have made their long journey together, and even now are unable to let go of one another's hands."

"Mayer was definitely a left-winger in politics, even a revolutionary. But his would be a revolution different from the one urged by the typical anti-capitalist agitator, socialist, or communist. His, an anti-materialist one, would indeed put an end to capitalism, but, he told the editors of Christian Century in 1944, it would be a moral one."

"The masses of the people could not be held back from Nazism, so powerful was its appeal, and this same priest, who would not leave his people, went with them to Nazism, too."

"Men who did not know that they were slaves do not know that they have been freed."

"National Socialism did not make men unfree; unfreedom made men National Socialists."

"One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

"Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma that had not been expelled with the Romans, the dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe."

"Justice alone knows liberty, equality, and fraternity, and justice is a human virtue arising from man's human capacity to reason. We cannot make sense out of justice by looking at the moon or taking dope or building battleships. We can make sense out of justice by using our reason to discover that justice, like wisdom, is better than rubies."

"If I believed that force would ever build a better world, I would be a Marxist revolutionary. But I have no more faith in poor men's animalism than in rich men's. And I want no proletarian revolution until the proletariat has demonstrated devotion to reason which the rich, with larger opportunities to cultivate that virtue, have so universally failed to achieve. I favor the underdog against the upperdog, but I favor something better than a dog above both of them."

"If the last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next."

"Socialism may be all right when men are fit to be socialists. The way may be hard and slow, but until we take it we shall find that the so-called Socialist state degenerates and Fascism as rapidly as the pacifist with warm hearts to generate into militarists with fevered brows. Marxism, like fascism and capitalism is materialism. The love of material goods above all others is as animal as of love of war. The love of justice above material goods must save us in the end it saved we may be."

"It is a sensible military tactic to recognize the enemy before you shoot. The common enemy is the animality in man, and not the men here and there who are behaving like animals at the moment. Neither science nor prayer nor force will save us. What will save us is the reason that enables men, in ancient Israel and modern America, to choose between guns and butter, and to choose well. When we have produced men of reason, we shall have a world of reason, and the Hitlers will disappear. As long as we produce men of force we shall have a world of force, and the Hitlers, whoever wins the wars, will carry the day. Society may make many demands on me, as long as it keeps me out of the cave. It may take my property. It may take my life. But when it puts me back into the cave I must say, politely but firmly, to hell with society. My ancestors were cannibals without benefit of parliaments."

"Plainly, the most powerful exception to the notion of a voluntary exchange in a market economy is the labor market. The existence of a market for labor is one of the distinguishing features of a market economy: workers compete to sell their labor at the most favorable price—meaning, in practice, the highest possible wage. At the same time, however, it is clear that the market for labor is qualitatively different from the market for goods, because workers need to sell their labor to survive."

"... it would seem that the permanency of the present union [Yugoslavia] is extremely doubtful."

"Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious."

"We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him."

"Kill the gringo. What I mean is we must kill the gringo economically and politically but not necessarily physically unless, of course, the worst comes to the worst."

"We’re the only ethnic group in America that has been dismembered. We didn't migrate here or immigrate here voluntarily. The United States came to us in succeeding waves of invasions. We are a captive people, in a sense, a hostage people. It is our political destiny and our right to self-determination to want to have our homeland [back]. Whether they like it or not is immaterial. If they call us radicals or subversives or separatists, that’s their problem. This is our home, and this is our homeland, and we are entitled to it. We are the host. Everyone else is a guest. It is not our fault that whites don’t make babies, and blacks are not growing in sufficient numbers, and there’s no other groups with such a goal to put their homeland back together again. We do. Those numbers will make it possible. I believe that in the next few years, we will see an irredentists movement, beyond assimilation, beyond integration, beyond separatism, to putting Mexico back together as one. That's irridentism. One Mexico, one nation."

"We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time. The explosion is in our population"

"Giere's book makes a serious case for constructivism, but those with strong objectivist inclinations will not be moved. For one thing, in spite of his best efforts and the excellent philosophical company he keeps, the constructivist position remains somewhat obscure. The notion of a physical world that emerges from the interaction of the objective and the subjective is difficult to grasp, even if you are a philosopher. And although Giere's arguments for constructivism are serious and provocative, they have uncertain force. Scientific descriptions surely are incomplete and affected by interest, but these are features the objectivist can take on board. Completeness and objectivity are orthogonal. Maybe in the end constructivism is true, or as true as a constructivist can consistently allow. Nevertheless, the thought that the world has determinate objective structures is almost irresistible, and Giere has not ruled out the optimistic view that science is telling us something about them."