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Einstein never said that… « Ben Shoemate

By on November 15, 2011 in Great Quotations, Other Blogs

I was cleaning out some old email accounts today and scanned through them for anything I thought I should really say and  in  one of them I found an “Einstein” quote one of my brothers had sent to me all the way back in 2007…

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination. “

Albert Einstien 

…and looking at first I noticed Einstein was spelled wrong but then also wondered why hadn’t I heard of this quote before? Where did it come from? It just really didn’t sound right to me. I thought Einstein said that?…

So I did what I always do, I Googled it. I googled it and found this excellent blog article by ben Shoemate entitled: Einstein never said that… « Ben Shoemate. While the whole article is a good read the last paragraph really was apropos for me…

Why does this bother me?

People use quotes as a way to strengthen their own position. If I can quote someone you respect, it adds credibility to whatever argument I’m making. Over time, the truth gets further and further away. The biggest names have always attracted people who are more than willing to put words into their mouths for their own gain – Confucious, Jesus, Aristotle, Shakespere, Einstein, and the biggest, most misquoted, of them all – God. All of them have probably been quoted more for the things they never said, than things they actually did say. I imagine this is the most disappointing part of time travel, waiting around to witness words never spoken and deeds never done.

Thanks Ben, I’ll be back for more too. ‘Got your feed in my Google Reader now too.

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Because I believe the Bible and other "holy" books are fiction…

By on November 10, 2011 in Great Quotations

A great quote I found in the comment policy on the My Thoughts Are Free blog this morning:

Because I believe the Bible and other “holy” books are fiction, using the Bible to attempt to prove that a god exists, would be like using the Cinderella story to convince me that a pumpkin can be changed into a coach by a fairy godmother.

via My Thoughts Are Free: IS RELIGION A GUARANTEE OF MORAL BEHAVIOR?.

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Question with boldness—Thomas Jefferson

By on August 23, 2011 in Critical Thinking, Great Quotations, Religion

Thomas Jefferson

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.

via FreeThoughtPedia.

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Alexander Hamilton on Prayer

By on August 22, 2011 in Great Quotations

I don’t know how true the story and the quotes are, it all sounds apocryphal to me, but then again it sounds great so I will post it anyway…

In the Continental Congress, Benjamin Franklin was losing an argument, so he said, “Gentlemen, I move that we pause for a moment of prayer.”

Alexander Hamilton, whose side was winning, responded, “Gentlemen, I move that we don’t bring in any outside interference.”

via The Dangers of Prayer.

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Rightful liberty is…

By on August 21, 2011 in Great Quotations

Thomas Jefferson—

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add within the limits of the law because law is often but the tyrants will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

 

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QotD for Friday, August 5, 2011

By on August 5, 2011 in Great Quotations

I stumbled adolescence this quote about Ayn Rand and her ideology of Objectivism in a critique by Michael Gerson of the failed movie Atlas Shruged for the Washington Post.

“The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.”

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand’s achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne.

 

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Tell people…

By on July 20, 2007 in Global Climate Disruption, Great Quotations

A great quote I just picked up from the header of George Monbiot’s blog this evening while reading his post regarding Channel 4’S Problem With Science (it was Channel 4 that produced “The Great Global Warming Swindle”)

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it.
Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

 

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Thinking Different

By on July 17, 2007 in Global Climate Disruption, Great Quotations

A television commercial very well worth remembering.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

(Jack Kerouac – From his book: On The Road)

Is that apropos? I like to think it is.

(I was reminded of this old commercial after tracing back an incoming link from the Sumptuous! – reflecting a world too special to waste blog in a post there entitled Thinking differently where the author there drfrank claims to have rediscovered it from the "blog of Steven Brant, a New York based consultant who’s trying to use systems thinking to meld the domains of sustainable development and conflict prevention. The entry there containing it was a great one entitled "Al Gore: "Think Differently" To Create A Better World")

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A couple of very interesting and important quotes for us to think about today from two of our founding fathers.

By on July 4, 2007 in Great Quotations

A couple of very interesting and important quotes for us to think about today from two of our founding fathers.

Bejamin Franklin in 1759, well before this county was born:

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

And James Madison at the Constitutional Convention:

“The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

And Madison again:

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

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The age of the earth is now established beyond any reasonable doubt as very great, yet in the United States millions of Fundamentalists still stoutly defend the naive view that it is relatively short…

By on June 17, 2007 in Great Quotations, Recommended Reading

Another great quote by Francis Crick from his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul:

“The age of the earth is now established beyond any reasonable doubt as very great, yet in the United States millions of Fundamentalists still stoutly defend the naive view that it is relatively short, an opinion deduced from reading the Christian Bible too literally. They also usually deny that animals and plants have evolved and changed radically over such long periods, although this is equally well established. This gives one little confidence that what they have to say about the process of natural selection is likely to be unbiased, since their views are predetermined by a slavish adherence to religious dogmas.”

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