#though

Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#humans #thought-provoking #violence #faith

Until I got married, when I used to go out, my mother said good bye to me as though I was emigrating. ↗

— Thora Hird

#emigrating #go #good #got #i

I remember when you used to have your profession on your passport and I always thought that being a painter was the best one to be, because my heroes were Goya and Francis Bacon. ↗

— Damien Hirst

#bacon #because #being #best #francis

Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the Left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the anti-Christ, although a disturbing number of people on the Right are convinced he is. ↗

— David Horowitz

#conservatives #convinced #deal #disturbing #duplicate

Thinking good thoughts is not enough, doing good deeds is not enough, seeing others follow your good examples is enough. ↗

— Douglas Horton

#doing #doing good #enough #examples #follow

The second I met Zac, I thought he was a really cool guy. It's hard not to have chemistry with someone who is so attractive. ↗

— Vanessa Hudgens

#chemistry #cool #cool guy #guy #hard

They have shrunk from inquiry, though they have strained after punishment. I have in every shape dared the one, that I might, so far as lay in my power, be able to secure the other. ↗

— Joseph Howe

#after #dared #every #far #i

The result of this union would be, not the fortuitous result of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of a single thought. ↗

— Jacques Ibert

#aspects #concessions #fortuitous #harmonious #result

Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries. ↗

— Mark E. Hyman

#behind #both #centuries #children #deficient

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought. ↗

— Janis Ian

#assassinated #died #difficult #everyone #fine