safe

Sunday, December 6, 2009
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SAFE ASSUMPTIONS
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The chances are everything you were taught as a child when you couldn't yet think for yourself is a lie.
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Any idea that divides our fellow men into them and us is based on a fallacy.
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They did to us what we would have done to them. Our so-called moral superiority is nothing but an extension of military inferiority.
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If reason is against us we drown it in an avalanche of empty verbiage.
Where there are too many long-winded speechifiers there are as many lies.
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Where speechifiers are a dominant minority, dialogue will be seen as suspect.
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The bigger the mouth, the smaller the brain.
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Freedom of thought begins on the day we teach ourselves to say “No, sir!” to those who expect us to say “Yes, sir!”
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Anything that justifies wars and massacres is wrong and anyone who justifies them is a liar.
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I may know something you don't know, but that doesn't make me better or wiser.
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The worst blunders in the history of mankind were committed by fools who thought they knew better or they had God on their side.
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Monday, December 7, 2009
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THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
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In a message to the Venetians, Pius II wrote in 1458:
“How much of your ancient character have you lost
as a result of too much intercourse with the Turks!”
Makes you think, doesn't it?
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“La donna e mobile” says a famous Verdi aria.
So are (alas!) Armenian friends.
I have made and lost friends on the flimsiest of reasons.
I have made friends because I was Armenian,
and I have lost friends because
I did not share their anti-Semitism.
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“An Armenian loves to eat
and he eats to hate,”
says an Armenian song.
And speaking of eating and hating:
“One Armenian eats one chicken,
two Armenians eat two chickens,
three Armenians eat each other.”
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In a letter from a friend:
"If, as you say, Armenian literature is a dead end,
why not give it up?"
I write for two totally non-literary reasons:
to fight boredom and
to acquire friends;
and with every book I have published,
I have acquired a new friend;
also made not two but twenty-two enemies?
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Raffi: "Even those among us
who have taken it upon themselves
to educate the people
are nothing but uneducated ignoramuses."
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Tuesday, December 8, 2009
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DECEPTION
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If no one deceives us,
we deceive ourselves into thinking
we are the center of the universe
and what we think and say matters.
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Deception works because we like to be deceived.
We like to be deceived so much that
we are more than willing to compensate our deceivers.
Some of the most highly paid men today
are professional, full-time deceivers.
They call themselves consultants,
public relations men, spin doctors,
advertisers, diplomats, lawyers, historians,
social engineers, chief executive officers, pundits,
senators and heads of state.
In the Vatican they are identified as
“propagators of the faith.”
Their counterparts in America
call themselves televangelists.
In Nazi Germany they worked for Dr Goebbels
and it's amazing the kind of people
that were taken in by their lies.
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Do deceivers believe in their own lies?
If they do, they are dupes.
If they don't, they are crooks with a forked tongue.
In either case they deserve our contempt and ridicule.
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Anyone who pretends to know and understand
more than he does is a deceivers.
And anyone who says “yes, sir!”
to someone he views as infallible is a dupe.
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Chekhov was right when he said:
“If I cannot answer the most important questions,
am I not deceiving my readers?”
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Today's quotations in my morning paper
is by Elbert Hubbard and it reads:
“Genius may have its limitations,
but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”
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