MentaT: Mayıs 2005

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

-Benjamin Disraeli

Belief is an obsolete Aristotelian category.

-Dr. Jack Sarfatti, physicist

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.

-Richard Feynman

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

-Stephen Jay Gould

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong--faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it is too late.

-Dune, Frank Herbert

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

-Protagoras

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

-John Adams

The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.

-Galileo Galilei

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

-Isaac Asimov

Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

-Richard Dawkins

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

-Stendhal

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.

-Albert Einstein

The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.

-Ferdinand Magellan

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

-Benjamin Franklin

A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist.

-Diderot

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

-Albert Camus

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

-Oscar Wilde

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-Tom Clancy

The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it.

-Frank Herbert Chapterhouse: Dune

When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them

-Frank Herbert

The female sense of sharing originated as familial sharing--care of the young, the gathering and preparation of food, sharing joys, love and sorrows. Funeral lamentation originated with women. Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge.

-The Stolen Journals, God of Emperor:Dune

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

-Karl Marx

Patriotism ruins history.

-Goethe

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

-Bertrand Russell

Wise men talk because they have something to say. Fools talk because they have to say something.

-Plato-

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

-Gandhi

Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

-Karl Marx

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.

-Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

-Alfred North Whitehead

[Those] who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations.

-Claude Bernard

The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

-William Whewell

Why are things as they are and not otherwise?

-Johannes Kepler

To say that a man is made up of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer.

-Hermann Joseph Muller

Theory guides. Experiment decides.

-anonymous

The production of useful work is strictly limited by the laws of thermodynamics. The production of useless work seems to be unlimited.

-Donald E. Simanek

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

-Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

-Konrad (Zacharias) Lorenz

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

-Thomas H. Huxley

The gods did not reveal from the beginning All things to us; but in the course of time Through seeking, men found that which is better. But as for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor will he know it; neither of the gods, Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. And even if by chance he were to utter The final truth, he would himself not know it; For all is but a woven web of guesses.

-Xenophanes

We know nothing in reality; for truth lies in an abyss.

-Democritus

..philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex.

-Steve Jones

Scientists are explorers. Philosophers are tourists.

-Richard Feynman

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.

-Roger Bacon

Every experiment proves something. If it doesn't prove what you wanted it to prove, it proves something else.

-anonymous

Nobody knows why, but the only theories which work are the mathematical ones.

-Michael Holt

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

William of Ockham

Science is the record of dead religions.

-Oscar Wilde

Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.

-Oscar Wilde

It is...idle to pretend, as many do, that there is no contradiction between religion and science. Science contradicts religion as surely as Judaism contradicts Islamâ€”they are absolutely and irresolvably conflicting views. Unless, that is, science is obliged to change its fundamental nature.

-Brian Appleyard

The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.

-H. L. Mencken

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth.

-Archimedes

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

-Benjamin Franklin

War does not determine who is right, only who is left.

-Bertrand Russell

I don't know with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but I know World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

-Albert Einstein

Peace at home, peace in the world.

-M.K. Atatürk

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Pazar, Mayıs 22, 2005

Dune