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Thursday, September 2, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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They say “God is great!” and they imply “He is on our side.”
To believe the unbelievable is the source of all fanaticism.
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The dinosaurs are the Titanics of evolution.
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Sympathy is seldom extended to those who demand it.
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Don't write what you think but what you really think,
especially if it is the opposite of what you think.
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On the day my critics begin to agree with me,
I will start wondering if I have succumbed to senility.
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Have I said this before? No matter.
If something is worth saying, it is worth repeating.
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Whenever an adult delivers a cliché, I am tempted to ask:
How old were you when you first heard that line, five or seven?
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Vanity, it has been said, has a voracious appetite,
which is why I dismiss as a lie any statement that flatters our collective ego.
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A nationalist historian who believes in his own version of history
has a dupe for a reader.
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"Makers of idols don't believe in them," says an old Chinese proverb,
and if Italians are to be believed, "Even the Pope doubts his faith
seven times every day."
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Friday, September 3, 2010
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SPECULATIONS
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The number of atoms in the universe is constant.
Birth and death neither add nor subtract from the total.
In birth atoms are assembled and in death they are disassembled.
This cycle is repeated endlessly.
Life moves not from being to nothingness and vice versa
but from organization to disintegration and back to organization again.
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The dead enter a timeless realm
in which a fraction of a second is as long as a million years.
The time before we were born or even before the universe existed
(or what cosmologists call the Big Bang)
is the realm of timelessness.
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God exists not in the cosmos that is accessible to telescopes and microscopes
but in a different realm and dimension.
Examples of different dimensions are
the realms of such abstractions as numbers, dreams, or music.
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In dreams being and nothingness are no longer contradictions
but parallel realms in which the dead live.
An infinite number of organisms also means
an infinite number of realms some of which may become accessible to us
only after we die.
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Saturday, September 4, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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If you do the right thing they will laugh at you and say, “That fool doesn't know what's good for himself.”
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The worst pretend to be better because that's the only way they know how to live with themselves.
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If you don't know what I mean when I speak of “Ottomanized Armenians,” I suggest you take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
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For the man who is tormented by painful memories, Alzheimer's must be bliss.
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We are never told everything. We always get a carefully edited version of events, sentiments, ideas, and speculations.
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To how many of my critics I could say, “I have at no time claimed to be a genius like you.”
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Among the many signs held by opponents of the construction of a mosque near ground zero in New York City, I notice one that says “BOYCOTT TURKISH GOODS & PRODUCE.” (TIME, August 16, 2010, page 17.)
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There is a tendency in all bullies and victimizers to choose the defenseless as their targets because it is less labor intensive.
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