WT Sharpe > WT Sharpe's Quotes

“Early on, to arouse a sense of belonging, of “community,” the party began to emphasize the importance, above everything else, of ritual and propaganda—the flags, the insignia, the uniforms, the pageantry, the standard greetings, the declarations of loyalty, and the endless repetition of slogans. Nazism was a cult. The appeal was strictly to emotion.”
― Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

“Does that mean that religious texts are worthless as guides to ethics? Of course not. They are magnificent sources of insight into human nature, and into the possibilities of ethical codes. Just as we should not be surprised to discover that ancient folk medicine has a great deal to teach modern hightech medicine, we should not be surprised if we find that these great religious texts hold versions of the very best ethical systems any human culture will ever devise. But, like folk medicine, we should test it all carefully, and take nothing whatever on faith.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life

“Even in the heyday of frozen concentrate, the popularity of orange juice rested largely on its image as the ultimate natural beverage, fresh squeezed from a primordial fruit. But the reality is that human intervention has modified the orange for millenniums, as it has almost everything people eat.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Bettinger bought his first genetic test in 2003. A few years later he launched a blog—The Genetic Genealogist—with the aim of explaining the science behind the tests in simple language.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total about a decade ago.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“And it wasn’t just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change’s report, an assessment of global warming’s impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. “Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“But with sea levels rising along the East Coast—a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change—scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“We drove through the Old Dominion University campus, where a small permanent lake has formed in the back corner of a huge parking lot. “You can’t pave under water,” he noted dryly, “so this obviously wasn’t under water when this parking lot was paved.”
― Deborah Blum, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

“JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987) American writer Notes of a Native Son (1955) A devotion to humanity … is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty.”
― George Seldes, The Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated: From Abelard to Zola, from Ancient Greece to Contemporary America, the Ideas That Have Shaped the History of the World

“HOSEA BALLOU (1771–1852) American theologian Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way. A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil’s propagation. Universalist publications, c. 1819”
― George Seldes, The Great Thoughts, Revised and Updated: From Abelard to Zola, from Ancient Greece to Contemporary America, the Ideas That Have Shaped the History of the World

“What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“In the American South, where I live, Christianity is very much about the Bible. Most Christians come from churches that preach the Bible, teach the Bible, adhere (they claim) to the Bible. It is almost “common sense” among many Christians in this part of the world that if you don’t believe in the Bible you cannot be a Christian. Most Christians in other parts of the world—in fact, the vast majority of Christians throughout the history of the church—would find that common sense to be nonsense.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

“And so we have one of the great ironies of the early Christian tradition. The profoundly Jewish religion of Jesus and his followers became the viciously anti-Jewish religion of later times, leading to the horrific persecutions of the Middle Ages and the pogroms and attempted genocides that have plagued the world down to recent times.6 Anti-Semitism as it has come down to us today is the history of specifically Christian reactions to non-Christian Jews. It is one of the least savory inventions of the early church.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

“4. To cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

“7. This is a consensus view among scholars today. For one thing, Matthew used Mark as a source for many of his stories, copying out the Greek word for word in some passages. If our Matthew was a Greek translation of a Hebrew original, it would not be possible to explain the verbatim agreement of Matthew with Mark in the Greek itself.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

“TEXT 1.2 CURING BLINDNESS, INSCRIPTIONES GRAECAE, 4.1.121-22.18 (THIRD CENTURY B(r), ALCETAS OF HALLEIS
The blind man saw a dream. It seemed to him that the god [Asclepius] came up to him and with his fingers opened his eyes, and that he first saw the trees in the sanctuary. At daybreak he walked out sound.”
― Dale C. Allison Jr., The Historical Jesus in Context

“Our uniquely human capacity for sorrow at the deaths of those who are strangers to us is built on an evolutionary substrate. Our own ways of mourning may be unique, but the human capacity to grieve deeply is something we share with other animals.”
― Scientific American Editors, Our Furry Friends: The Science of Pets

“Jesus of Nazareth dressed like a Jew, prayed like a Jew (and most likely in Aramaic), instructed other Jews on how best to live according to the commandments given by God to Moses, taught like a Jew, argued like a Jew with other Jews, and died like thousands of other Jews on a Roman cross. To”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“Despite Paul’s insistence that Jesus “was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:4), no Jewish source, outside those associated with the followers of Jesus, shows any expectation that the messiah would be killed and after three days rise. The”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“If one person contends that there is no anti-Jewish teaching in the New Testament but another insists that there is, who’s right? Who gets to speak? Unlike Nazi newspapers and KKK pamphlets, the New Testament prompts different reactions from people of goodwill. For”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“When American parents of Italian or Polish or Kenyan background tell their children to “stop acting like wild Indians,” they are not intending to promote bigotry, but they are promoting it nonetheless. And when parents in rural areas of the Philippines tell their children to “stop acting like Jews,” anti-Judaism is the unintended result. Disease cannot be cured when those infected are in denial.”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“The synoptic Gospels suggest that the entire Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, met on the first night of Passover to determine Jesus’s fate—this would be tantamount to gathering all the members of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House press corps together late on Christmas Eve to debate a minor case of law. If”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“Christian missionaries who seek to bring Jews the “good news of Jesus” do not do so because they hate Jews; they do so because they love Jews. On the other hand, the message that Jews are not “complete” or “fulfilled” unless they accept Jesus as the Messiah is not likely to be received by most Jews with great warmth; it is tantamount to telling Christians that their religion is incomplete or erroneous without acceptance of the Qur’an. Thus,”
― Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew

“There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about. We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too. I’ll do my best to resist that temptation. But watch me carefully.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

“The Six was everything that a book club book should be: short at two hundred pages, highbrow because it dealt with English history, and sexy because it focused on a man who had humped his way through half the English court. It was also critically acclaimed by the right people, meaning that the New York Times loved it but the masses did not.”
― Kathy Cooperman, Crimes Against a Book Club

“When Sarah finally got pregnant, she was determined to be ruthlessly positive about it. She would not jinx her twins by complaining about minor inconveniences. No, she would remain sunny. She read all the feel-good books she could find on pregnancy and child-rearing, blocking out dark thoughts by force of will. But as the days wore on and her nausea went from bad to worse, one book kept bobbing up in Sarah’s consciousness: Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin’s tale about Satan’s mother. Rosemary had had morning sickness too, right?   47”
― Kathy Cooperman, Crimes Against a Book Club

“Nietzsche suggests that “if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.” In”
― Christopher Phillips, Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

“I’ve always admired parents who discipline their children in hushed whispers: “Arthur, you are a naughty boy for turning on all the gas jets. Now I want you to drag your little sister out into the fresh air, give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and apologize. Don’t make Mama have to raise her voice.” I”
― Erma Bombeck, Forever, Erma

“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion.23 He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. According to Renan, “The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men.”24 So, too, the opposite of the chauvinist is not the traitor but the reasonable citizen who is in love with the present and has no taste for martyrdom and the heroic gesture. The traitor is usually a fanatic—radical or reactionary—who goes over to the enemy in order to hasten the downfall of a world he loathes. Most of the traitors in the Second World War came from the extreme right. “There seems to be a thin line between violent, extreme nationalism and treason.”25 The kinship between the reactionary and the radical has been dealt with in Section 52. All of us who lived through the Hitler decade know that the reactionary and the radical have more in common than either has with the liberal or the conservative.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements