Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.

Rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.

Rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is read more

To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or lighthearted dramatic performance.

The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of read more

The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of read more

If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course!

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is read more

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.

Every man...should periodically be compelled to listen to opinions which are infuriating to him. To hear nothing but what is read more

Every man...should periodically be compelled to listen to opinions which are infuriating to him. To hear nothing but what is pleasing to one is to make a pillow of the mind.

All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for read more

All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across.