Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?
Instead, the polling business gives the patricians an idea of what the mob is thinking, and of how that thinking might be changed or, shall we say, “shaped.” It is the essential weapon in the mastery of populism by the elite.
And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true – that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response – which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up – contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.
It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of “discrimination.” This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.
There is an old Belfast joke about the man stopped at a roadblock and asked his religion. When he replies that he is an atheist he is asked, “Protestant or Catholic atheist?
Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.
Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.
Nor have I any idea why Said should consider Orwell’s life a ‘comfortable’ one. Having taken a bullet through the throat, and while suffering from a demoralising and ultimately lethal case of TB, he lived on an astonishingly low budget and tried whenever possible to grow his own food and even to make his own furniture. Indeed, if there was anything affected about him, it might be his indifference to bourgeois life, his almost ostentatious austerity.
If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding and has confronted us with findings far more “miraculous” and “transcendent” than any theology.
There are times when it is conservative to be a revolutionary, when the world must be turned on its head in order to be stood on its feet.
Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy.
To begin with a summary of Paine’s astonishing life and career is to commence with a sense of wonder that he was ever able to emerge at all.
Three years later, Mr. Turley has received no reply to his letter. Nor can anybody account for the missing money: saints, it seems, are immune to audit.
You don’t so much as become an atheist as find out that’s what you are. There’s no moment of conversion. You don’t suddenly think ‘I don’t believe this anymore.’ You essentially find you don’t believe it.
Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly – ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.9.
I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.
Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers.
Only servility requires the realm of illusion.