2026 Reading Challenge

Ben > Ben's Quotes

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  • #1
    Carl Sagan
    “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
    ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
    tags: aristocracy, capitalism, corruption, government, history, oppression, power, rationalization, society
    1785 likes

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  • #2
    You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new
    “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
    To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
    ― Buckminster Fuller
    tags: activism, adaption, change, development, digital-revolution, future, movement, new-models, p2p, progress, progression, protest, revolution, science, society, structural-changes, technology, world, zeitgeist, zeitgeist-movement
    1666 likes

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  • #3
    “IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.”
    ― Stafford Beer
    tags: change, cybernetics, models, paradigms, science
    15 likes

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  • #4
    “The purpose of a system is what it does.”
    ― Stafford Beer
    18 likes

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  • #5
    “Raising interest rates is voo-doo. You can't deal with a global system problem by trying to solve it with this.”
    ― Stafford Beer
    tags: economics, finance
    7 likes

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  • #6
    Ben McLeish
    “If you're only doing it for the money, it's probably not worth doing to begin with.”
    ― Ben McLeish
    1 likes

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  • #7
    Christopher Hitchens
    “There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really 'means' anything--is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.”
    ― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
    20 likes

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  • #8
    John Clare
    “O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away”
    ― John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript
    tags: poetry, time, words
    36 likes

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  • #9
    Carl Sagan
    “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
    ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
    tags: cosmology, delusion, knowledge, religion, science, truth, understanding
    1814 likes

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  • #10
    Samuel Beckett
    “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”
    ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
    tags: death, existentialism, time
    206 likes

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  • #11
    George Mikes
    “An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.”
    ― George Mikes, How to Be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and Advanced Pupils
    tags: order, queuing, the-english
    30 likes



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Tags From Ben’s Quotes

aristocracy
capitalism
corruption
government
history
oppression
power
rationalization
society
activism
adaption
change
development
digital-revolution
future
movement
new-models
p2p
progress
progression
protest
revolution
science
structural-changes
technology
world
zeitgeist
zeitgeist-movement
cybernetics
models
paradigms
economics
finance
poetry
time
words
cosmology
delusion
knowledge
religion
truth
understanding
death
existentialism
order
queuing
the-english