Bassel E. Helal > Bassel's Quotes

“How good it is when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this is the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood!
And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected.
How good these perceptions are at getting to the heart of the real thing and penetrating through it, so you can see it for what it is!
This should be your practice throughout all your life: when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.
Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.”
― Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Leisure without books is death, and burial of a man alive.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand.”
― Seneca

“No matter how many men you kill, you can't kill your successor.”
― Seneca, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

“The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“God pity a one-dream man.”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“إن الله يقيم الدولة العادلة وإن كانت كافرة ولا يقيم الدولة الظالمة وإن كانت مسلمة،”
― ابن تيمية

“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Many of us shrink from judicial execution of even the most horrible human criminals, while we cheerfully countenance the shooting without trial of fairly mild animal pests. Indeed we kill members of other harmless species as a means of recreation and amusement. A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet the chimp feels and thinks and — according to recent experimental evidence — may even be capable of learning a form of human language.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.

The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

“The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.”
― P.B. Medawar

“The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”
― P.B. Medawar

“I am often asked, 'What made you become a scientist?' But I can't stand far enough away from myself to give a really satisfactory answer, for I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

“For these reasons a young scientist must not be disheartened if he does not become the eponym of a natural principle phenomenon or disease. Although the importance of discoveries maybe overrated no young scientists need think that he will gain a reputation or high performant merely by compiling information particularly information of the kind nobody really wants. But if he makes the world more easily understandable by any means whether theoretical or experimental he will learn his colleagues gratitude and respect.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist