#error

Terrorism is in good part an effective government propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy. ↗

— Mark Poster

#attention #dangerous #deflect #effective #enemy

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#error #life #past #virtue #life

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#humor #terror #humor

Thank God, my name isn’t in the list of those who died or were killed yesterday! ↗

— Suman Pokhrel

#terror #death

It is hard for one who has not had a similar experience to imagine the terror that still gripped Taeko and Mrs. Tamaki and Hiroshi, so intense a terror that afterwards it seemed almost funny. ↗

— Junichiro Tanizaki

#life #pain #terror #imagination

She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#life

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#revolution #revolutionary #state-terrorism #terrorism #dictatorship

The closing of a door can bring blessed privacy and comfort - the opening, terror. Conversely, the closing of a door can be a sad and final thing - the opening a wonderfully joyous moment. ↗

— Andy Rooney

#bring #closing #comfort #conversely #door

To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#fault #wisdom #forgiveness

When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness that has produced Britney Spears and Janet Jackson. They do not see, and do not want to see, the openness - the freedom of thought and inquiry - that has made us powerful, the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West's economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change. And the fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change. ↗

— Thomas L. Friedman

#openness #radicals #terrorists #change