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George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], gave us a speech, attempting to distinguish we from they.... Here's the problem with his comment, say "Our God is the God who named the stars". The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making.
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"I, Skeptic—Modern Skepticism in the Internet Age", The Amaz!ng Meeting 6 keynote speech, June 2008

 

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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It's very stressful becoming a parent. You know what was hard for me? Coming up with names for our children. I panic when I have to name a new document on my computer.... I got so desperate toward the end of my wife's third pregnancy that I found myself reading the credits at the end of movies, looking for names. Which means at some point, I'll have to explain to my little boy that he was named after the key grip on "Dude, Where's my Car?".

 

Jeff Stilson

 

A fifth kind of semantic awareness has to do with what might be called the "photographic" effects of language. We live in a universe of constant process. Everything is changing in the physical world around us. We ourselves, physically at least, are always changing. Out of the maelstrom of happenings we abstract certain bits to attend to. We snapshot these bits by naming them. Then we begin responding to the names as if they are the bits that we have named, thus obscuring the effects of change. The names we use tend to "fix" that which is named, particularly if the names also carry emotional connotations... There are some semanticists who have suggested that such phrases as "national defense" and "national sovereignty" have been... maintained beyond the date for which they were prescribed. What might have been politically therapeutic at one time may prove politically fatal at another.

 

Neil Postman

 

Easy contact was made on that fateful day with what obviously turned out to be a heretofore unknown type of UFO. I had hesitated for weeks to turn my cloudbuster pipes toward a "star," as if I had known that some of the blinking lights hanging in the sky were not planets or fixed stars but SPACE machines. With the fading out of the two "stars," the cloudbuster had suddenly changed into a SPACEGUN. From then onward, too, our approach to the problem of space became positive, affirmative, confident in using our carefully screened data.

 

Wilhelm Reich

 

Whoever attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than all the great and honored of the past. Every defender of a creed has graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine.

 

Robert G. Ingersoll

 

I decided last week that there are too many support groups in this country; you need to pick your own self up and go, you know? I saw this commercial last week, and it was for a bladder control awareness group. I'm like, let me explain something to you. If you have a bladder control problem, you're probably aware of it. Or you're in some weird-ass denial I've never even heard of, you know? "Bob, I got a moisture problem in this area, and I don't know if it's condensation due to high humidity, or...or if I'm pissin' myself, Bob."

 

Ron White