How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?
Orson Scott Card
» Orson Scott Card - all quotes »
Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.
Bertrand Russell
You know, the problem I have with Michael Moore is the problem I have with a lot of people who are fanatical and push really hard on things, which is not willing to say the other side is wrong. They have to be evil.
And what I'm looking for is him to just say, maybe people are making mistakes. But it's always this conspiracy thing. There's always a conspiracy out to get him and a bunch of people doing things that are evil and psychotic and not simply wrong. And he's so cynical. He's so incredibly cynical.Michael Moore
Honesty is difficult. It is easier to hide in the crowed and to drown one’s own guilt in that of the human race, easier to hide from oneself than to become open in honesty before God. This honesty is certainly not a perpetual enumerating, but neither is it the signing of a name on a piece of white paper, a signed confession to an empty generality; and a confessor is not a co-signatory in the human race’s enormous account book. But without honesty there is no repentance. Repentance is nauseated by the empty generality, but it is not a pretty arithmetician in the service of the faintheartedness-rather an earnest observer before God. To repent of a generality without substance is a contradiction, akin to inviting the most profound passion to dine on superficiality, but to tie one’s repentance to a particular is to repent of one’s own responsibility and not before God, and to vitiate the intention is self-love in depression. If it so easy to repent: to love and to feel one’s wretchedness ever more deeply, to love while the punishment is being suffered, to love and not want to falsify the punishment as divine dispensation, to love and not want to hide secret resentment as if one suffered an injustice, to love and not want to stop seeking the sacred source of this pain!
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization, you can't just swallow it whole.
Frank Zappa
Card, Orson Scott
Cardano, Gerolamo
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z