Mark > Mark's Quotes

“There is no distinction between means and ends. There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. There is no way to enlightenment, enlightenment is the way.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child

“Civilization is the way one's own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed

“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“Tolerance like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”
― Octavia Butler

“When you hate, you generate a reciprocal hate. When individuals hate each other, the harm is finite; but when great groups of nations hate each other, the harm may be infinite and absolute. Do not fall back upon the thought that those whom you hate deserve to be hated. I do not know whether anybody deserves to be hated, but I do know that hatred of those whom we believe to be evil is not what will redeem mankind.”
― Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics

“We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported only insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.”
― Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?

“Humans in general are great at coming up with reasons to maintain their desired beliefs in the face of contradictory data. More intelligent and educated people aren’t necessarily better at critical thinking, but they are likely to be more clever and creative in coming up with such excuses—and scientists are no exception.”
― Steven Novella, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake