I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless Mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence; and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.
H. G. WellsRelated topics
beast blind complexity cut deep drink faith fell fate fear left lost mechanism mind passion research saw state suffering tear vast wheelsRelated quotes
The Prussian Junker is the road hog of Europe. Small nationalities in his way hurled to the roadside, bleeding and broken; women and children crushed under the wheels of his cruel car; Britain ordered out of his road. All I can say is this. If the old British spirit is alive in British hearts that bully will be torn from his seat. Were he to win it would be the greatest catastrophe that befell democracy since the days of the Holy Alliance and its ascendancy. They think we cannot beat them. It will not be easy. It will be a long job. It will be a terrible war. But in the end we shall march through terror to triumph.
David Lloyd George
If society is organized to insulate its own arrangements from challenged and change, and thus to give itself the semblance of a natural object or an alien fate, the noncomputable and the nonmodular aspects of the mind will remain no more than a penumbral light around the darkness of computability and modularity. However, as society acquires the features of democratic experimentalism, those aspects become central to the life of the mind. The hold of the innate mental faculty on our experience gets turbinated by a political construction.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
A second hard truth: Much research points to the widespread existence of unconscious bias. Many people in our white-majority culture have unconscious racial biases and react differently to a white face than a black face. In fact, we all, white and black, carry various biases around with us. I am reminded of the song from the Broadway hit, Avenue Q: "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.” Part of it goes like this: Look around and you will find. No one's really color blind. Maybe it's a fact. We all should face. Everyone makes judgments. Based on race. You should be grateful I did not try to sing that.
James Comey
"Violence and materialism will become so widespread that from them will come weariness and disgust: and from the execution block a passionate yearning will rise to withdraw one's spirit from any collaboration with that error, and to at once initiate, starting with ourselves (which is the first progress), a new way to relate to life: the feeling that the world is alien to us if we have to stay in it without love, without an infinite opening of one towards the other, without a unity above so many differences and so much suffering...This is the present threshold of history.
Aldo Capitini
Intellectual superiority is not always accompanied by an equal degree of moral superiority, and the greatest geniuses may have much to expiate. For this reason, they often have to undergo an existence inferior to the one they have previously accomplished, which is a cause of suffering for them the hindrances to the manifestation of his faculties thus imposed upon a spirit being like chains that fetter the movements of a vigorous man. The idiot may be said to be lame in the brain, as the halt is lame in the legs, and the blind, in the eyes.
Allan Kardec