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PANGEA PROGRESS

Voltaire - The Laughing Lion

7/29/2011

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Voltaire:

"My trade is to say what I think."

“It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence. "


Laughing lions must come, said Nietzsche, well, Voltaire came, and “annihilated with laughter.”

“You know how to amuse and instruct at the same time” Frederick the Great on Voltaire


Louis XVI, seeing in his Temple prison the works of Voltaire and Rosseau, said, “Those two men have destroyed France” meaning his royal dynasty.

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“Our priests are not what simple folk suppose; their learning is but our credulity.”

“So you see that in a manner we begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience.”

Zadig: “As wise as it is possible for men to be…he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in any age, that is, little or nothing at all.”

“That is the order of things; one nail drives out another; so goes the world.”

“The rose’s thorns are all for me; for thee the rose.”

“I renounce a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.”

“The human mind is so small, and sinks under the weight of minutiae.”

“History could not come into its own until theology gave way.”

“When you have shown, in verse or otherwise, why so many men cut their throats in the best of all possible worlds, I shall exceedingly be obliged to you.” Voltaire on Christians who say this is the best of possible worlds.

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In Voltaire’s fingers the pen runs and laughs.  Anatole France

“Metaphysics is the most beautiful nonsense in the world.”

“To see one’s tastes annihilated, to have still enough life to wish to enjoy them and too little strength to do so, to become useless and intolerable to oneself, to die by degrees, that is what I have suffered.”

“It is only charlatans who are certain.”

“Ecrasez l’ Infame" – Crush the infamous thing (Voltaire’s motto on superstition)

“This is not a time for jesting; wit does not harmonize with massacres.” Voltaire on the tragedy of the Lisbon Earthquake

“Dulce est desipere in loco” (It is sweet to be foolish on occasion)

"Woe to the philosophers who cannot laugh away their wrinkles."

"Rire et faire rire" – To laugh and make laugh. (Voltaire’s motto before crush the infamy)

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A BIG Universe

7/27/2011

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"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. "

Feynman, 1959 Interview (From Genius by James Gleick)

"A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe."

-Carl Sagan
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Quotable Hitchens

7/27/2011

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On Arrogance: "I have been called arrogant in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit."

On Friendship: “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.”

On I.Q.: “There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.”

On Sexual Organs: “…A distressing human fact–the proximity of the sexual and the excretory organs.”

On Cancer: “To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

HITCHENS: Now, all of this massive Big Bang cosmological churning and destruction and annihiliation—which is paralleled, by the way on our own earth where 99% of all species that have already been on the planet have ever gone extinct, leaving no descendants. All of this could be part of a plan. There’s no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn’t it, with mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time and all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off.

HITCHENS: I think despair is quite a good starting point myself. I mean I think it’s very good to know that we’re born into a losing struggle. I think that the stoicism that comes from that and the reflection that comes from that is very useful. I’m not very impressed by people who say, “Well, I wish it wasn’t true so I’ll try and act as if it isn’t.” It is true. Everything is governed by entropy and decline and annihilation and disaster and you’re born into a losing struggle and because you’re a mammal primate, a primate mammal, you know you are and you know you’re going to die and there’ll be a lot of struggle and pain along the way.

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A good aphorism

7/27/2011

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A good aphorism is too hard for the teeth of time and is not eaten up by all the centuries, even though it serves as food for every age: hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which—like salt—is always prized, but which never loses its savor as salt does.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher. Mixed Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 168, 'In Praise of Aphorisms' (1879)
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”  ~Francis Bacon
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Dogmatic Answers that create more questions

7/24/2011

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Religion gives humans powerful explanations to the big questions of existence. The huge claims alone are attractive to people despite the lack of detailed evidence required for lesser claims.
Religion has answers that people desire to solve in our short lives but the problem is the questions religion answers only brings up more disturbing questions.  For example the  baggage of the Old Testament  stories. Why the need for  a human-god sacrifice that came late in human evolution and only to a selective few in ancient Palestine? In short religion fills the immense hole but in doing so creates many other holes which for a person seeking the truth creates the need for a more in depth search before accepting the dogmatic claims. 
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    "Our lives begin to end the day we are silent about things that matter"
    Dr. Martin Luther King

    Author of Blog
     Born in  the United States of America. Spent my Childhood in Kenya, East Africa. Graduate of  George Mason University in Global Affairs with a concentration in Africa and the Middle East.
    What I desire is not total agreement but thoughtful people. To share ideas and expand knowledge in the era of globalization.