Quotes 11

"There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth."--C.S. Lewis, "The Screwtape Letters, Preface," IX

"A single, freak, highly improbable event can conceivably happen. Many highly improbable events--drawing a winning lottery number or the distribution of playing cards in a hand of bridge--happen all the time. But a string of [such] imporbable events--drawing the same lottery number twice or the same bridge hand twice in a row--does not naturally happen."--Christian de Duve

"God does not play dice with the universe."--Albert Einstein

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"So that, whatever some have imagined and pretended about promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction."--Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God"

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from teh deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."--HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulu"

"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so."--Josh Billings

"Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat the eleventh grade."--James W. Loewen

"Some people have attacked the portrait of Columbus presented here as too negative. But I am not proposing that we should begin courses of American history by crying that Columbus was bad and so are we. Textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that."--James W. Loewen, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," p. 64

"It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one's opinions to bring them into line with one's actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as "cognitive dissonance," according to social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude and demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have doen, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier.

Columbus gives us the first recorded example of cognitive disonance in the Americas, for although the Natives may have changed from hospitable to angry, they could hardly have evolved from intelligent to stupid so quickly. The change has to be in Columbus."--James W. Loewen, "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," p. 62

"Factoring polynomials has convinced me of the existence of Satan, mainly because some of them are as confusing as Hell."--The Present Author

"The poet has short-cuts to truth which are denied the plodding man of science."--Paul B. Sears, "Deserts on the March," p. 105See More