aphorisms

April 10, 2010
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ONE OUT OF TEN THOUSAND
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Whenever asked for solutions, I offer a single word, “honesty.” And when asked to define honesty, I say nothing on the grounds that anyone who cannot recognize an honest man when he sees one deserves to be taken in by crooks.
We are responsible for our actions as surely as we are for our thoughts and attitudes; and life, as well as the law, do not allow us to plead not guilty by reason of ignorance.
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For many centuries men were deceived into thinking kings ruled by the will of God; and after abolishing monarchy they consented to be ruled by even more dangerous charlatans. As a result, many more millions died in wars, massacres, and genocides.
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Who is more guilty – the deceiver or he who consents to be deceived?
Mutual deception may be said to be at the root of all tragedies.
God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden, where He not only planted the Tree of Knowledge but also introduced the Serpent. In legal parlance, entrapment; in layman's terms, deception.
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We were deceived into thinking the Empire would not strike back because the Great Powers were on our side.
Hitler deceived his people into believing they belonged to a superior race and were therefore qualified, nay destined, to rule the world.
Stalin deceived the people into believing the economic foundations of capitalism were rotten and the future belonged to Bolsheviks.
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And consider what happens in HAMLET: Claudius deceives the people into thinking he is not a murderer and a usurper but the legitimate king of the land. Whereupon his nephew plots his revenge by deceiving the court into believing he is mad.
Who can forget the magnificent exchange between the usurper's senile minister of state and the “mad” prince?
POLONIUS: Do you know me my lord?
HAMELT: Excellent well, you are a fishmonger.
POLONIUS: Not I my lord.
HAMLET: Then I would you were so honest a man,
POLONIUS: Honest, my lord?
HAMLET: Ay sir; to be honest as this world goes is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.
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April 11, 2010
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ON POPULARITY
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It is an honest man's duty to expose the dishonest because not to do so amounts to legitimizing dishonesty and ignoring their victims. And because the dishonest outnumber the honest, an honest man is bound to be unpopular.
My guess is, the Beatles made more money in a single day than Mozart in a lifetime.
Popularity is for the birds and the likes of Elvis Pelvis.
Whenever I make myself unpopular with a reader, I think “mission accomplished.”
Can you name a single Armenian writer who was popular?
Naregatsi? Abovian? Baronian?
The first led an anonymous existence in a monastery.
The second committed suicide at the age of 43.
The third was betrayed to the authorities, driven out of business (as publisher) and died of TB at the age of 49.
And they were the lucky ones.
Charents and Bakunts were worse off.
The first was betrayed, arrested, and committed suicide in a Yerevan jail at the age of 40.
The second was betrayed, arrested, tortured, and shot and the age of 38.
First nation to convert to Christianity?
Maybe, but in name only.
Intelligent, progressive, civilized?
Don't make me laugh.
Philistinized, Ottomanized, Sovietized (which also means converted to atheism)?
That's more like it
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The Polish nation is in mourning today.
If what happened to them happened to us, I have every reason to suspect we would be celebrating.
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When the truth is unbearable or unreachable, we lie.
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April 12, 2010
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MUMBO JUMBO
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Some words are untranslatable. Case in point: in Armenian we have a word for “house,” but not one for “home.” There is a popular and widely quoted poem in English that says, “Every house ain't a home,” and “It takes a heap of living to make a house a home.” Translate that, if you can.
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Man does not understand man (including himself) and yet, theologians pretend to understand and explain God to us. We can't understand God for the simple reason that God and man do not share the same dictionary. Man may need dictionaries. God doesn't.
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God created man, and man created words, and the twain shall never meet. That's why everything we say about God is irrational, absurd, and blasphemous in the eyes of other men.
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When we say “God is love,” or “God is our Father,” we in a sense make an attempt to bring Him down to our own level of understanding, and in this effort we fail miserably. Hence countless orthodoxies, heresies, religious wars, and massacres. It is no exaggeration to say that more people have died in the name of God than any other concept, including the Devil. Figure that one out if you can.
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The Tower of Babel, like Reincarnation, is not a single occurrence but a constant and ceaseless process.
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For millions of years, primitive man thought of God as the Unknown and the Unknowable; the source of all good as well as evil. Traces of this belief may be found today in all organized religions, including our own – as when we say in the Lord's prayer, “Do not lead us into temptation,” thus identifying God with the Devil whose business it is to lead man into temptation.
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God may be many things but he is not and cannot be a contradiction. Some day we may see and understand this very clearly but not as long as we speak of Him as if He were a superior version of ourselves.
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When we say God knows everything, do we mean He knows all the names and numbers in all the telephone books in print today? God's words – assuming he has them, or needs them, or uses them – are not our words, and neither are ours His. When Wittgenstein said we should not speak about things we know nothing about (in his own words, “...about that of which one cannot talk, one must be silent”) I suspect he had God in mind and he was saying “Shut up!” to theologians. Two and a half millennia ago Socrates made a similar assertion when he said, “Of the gods we know nothing.”
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Jean-Paul Sartre, a contemporary of Wittgenstein, wrote a big philosophical treatise titled BEING AND NOTHINGNESS. In the cosmos, the planet on which we live is the size of a speck of dust so tiny that it might as well be invisible. Which may suggest that “being and nothingness” are not two contradictory conditions but one and the same, or as complementary to one another as mumbo jumbo.
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April 13, 2010
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APHORISMS
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We all harbor a killer and like 007 all we need is a license to kill.
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God did not create man in His own image. Man is prone to error. God is not – provided we assume creating man not to have been a serious blunder on His part.
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We choose an ideology or belief system not by its truth but by its usefulness to us.
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By selecting a set of values and facts, one can formulate an almost infinite number of belief systems and ideologies.
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There is a natural tendency in all of us to believe in pleasant lies and to reject painful truths.
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If the Bible is the word of God, then it is a clumsily garbled paraphrase by someone suffering from an advanced case of Alzheimer's.
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True knowledge contains doubts, false knowledge only certainties.
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If as a teenager I had read someone like me, I would have hated his guts.
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A bad reader can be a mean critic.
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Men have been talking about women since the beginning of time and they still can't figure them out. What does that tell you about the state of human knowledge and understanding?
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