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liberatingreality · 12 hours
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Intelligence is noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence also consists of ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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liberatingreality · 2 days
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People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Søren Kierkegaard
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liberatingreality · 5 days
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A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
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liberatingreality · 6 days
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Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
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liberatingreality · 7 days
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Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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liberatingreality · 9 days
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Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority. The consensus of all serves as proof of the correctness of 'their' idea.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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liberatingreality · 11 days
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Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men.
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun
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liberatingreality · 13 days
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The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widely spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals
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liberatingreality · 20 days
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Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
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liberatingreality · 21 days
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The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
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liberatingreality · 26 days
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The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
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liberatingreality · 1 month
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If you want to know who controls you, look to who you are not allowed to criticize.
Tacitus
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liberatingreality · 1 month
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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
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liberatingreality · 1 month
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Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing "selves" that are worth expressing.
Matthew Kelly
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liberatingreality · 1 month
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The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.
Terrence Mckenna
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liberatingreality · 2 months
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It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
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liberatingreality · 2 months
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Alain de Botton
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