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"Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business con."
"The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."
"It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact."
"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
"Electing a bigot enables further bigotry."
"Civilization is the commercialization of survival."
Explore more quotes by William Kingdon Clifford
"An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life."
"A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions."
"He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart."
"This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation."
"No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe."
"Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it."
"Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it."
"If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest."
"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts."
"The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs."
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