#ali

Désormais, sous prétexte de laïcité, tous les discours se valent : l’erreur et la vérité, le faux et le vrai, le fantasque et le sérieux. Le mythe et la fable pèsent autant que la raison. La magie compte autant que la science. Le rêve autant que la réalité. Or tous les discours ne se valent pas : ceux de la névrose, de l’hystérie et du mysticisme procèdent d’un autre monde que celui du positiviste. Pas plus qu’on ne doit renvoyer dos à dos bourreau et victime, bien et mal, on ne doit tolérer la neutralité, la bienveillance affichée pour la totalité des régimes de discours, y compris ceux des pensées magiques. Faut-il rester neutre ? Doit-on rester neutre ? A-t-on encore les moyens de ce luxe ? Je ne crois pas... ↗

— Michel Onfray

#neutralité #relativisme #science

Science is a cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars; it is proud and wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world views. ↗

— James Lovelock

#science

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned. ↗

— Eminem

#dealing #got #i #learned #one thing

It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer. 'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?' 'Let them die,' he repeated. I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby. 'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .' He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky. ↗

— Colette

#gender-relations #sexuality #sidonie-gabrielle-colette #science

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together ↗

— Julian Barnes

#progress #science #stupidity #science

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#capitalism #corruption #government #history #oppression

Why is it that when you don't want to think about something, you can't stop thinking about it? ↗

— Stella Lennon

#teens #teen

Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can't really afford to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. ↗

— Milton Friedman

#technology

A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor. ↗

— Sean Covey

#fruit-salad #originality #teen

I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better? ↗

— Jess C. Scott

#books #cool #culture #desire #emotion