I shall not be posting anything new on my blog for the next six weeks as I am travelling to the UK for Christmas. I have decided to share a list of all the quotes I have posted since 2017.
This is the seventh and final part of the list, quotes 61 to 7?.
Enjoy.
Quote of the Day #61 – Chinua Achebe
“Charity … is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens (like yourselves) who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” [My emphases]
Quote of the Day #62 – William Harwood
“The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence, whilst insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.”
Quote of the Day #63 – General Sir Charles Napier
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them . . . [m]y carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
Quote of the Day #64 – Charles Darwin
“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae… feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
Quote of the Day #65 – The Jam: Eton Rifles (1979)
“What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?”
Quote of the Day #66 – Anna Soubry (or was it Homer Simpson?)
“My campaign is a disaster, Moe. I hate the public so much! If only they’d elect me. I’d make them pay.”
Quote of the Day #67 – Theodore Roosevelt
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.”
Quote of the Day #67a – Friedrich Nietzsche
“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself, and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”
Quote of the Day #68 – Mark Twain
“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”
Quote of the Day #69 – Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
“69 dudes.”
Quote of the Day #70 – Can you guess who said this?
“[T]he whole basis of the Maastricht treaty is the establishment of a European central bank which is staffed by bankers, independent of national Governments and national economic polices, and whose sole policy is the maintenance of price stability. That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government in the United Kingdom – or any other Government – would wish to carry out…The Maastricht treaty does not take us in the direction of the checks and balances contained in the American federal constitution. It takes us in the opposite direction of an unelected legislative body – the Commission – and, in the case of foreign policy, a policy Commission that will be, in effect, imposing foreign policy on nation states that have fought for their own democratic accountability.”
Quote of the Day #71 – Thomas Jefferson (warning: contains offensive material)
“I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.”
Quote of the Day #72 – Frantz Fanon
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong.
When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.
It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance.
And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalise, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
Quote of the Day #73 – Richard Dawkins
“Islamophobia is an otiose* word which doesn’t deserve definition. Hatred of Muslims is unequivocally reprehensible, as is hatred of any group of people such as gay people or members of a race. Hatred of Islam, on the other hand is easily justified, as is hatred of any other religion or obnoxious ideology. Muslims themselves are the main victims of Islam.”
* serving no practical purpose or result
Quote of the Day #74 – Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
“I have the right to persecute you because I am right and you are wrong.”
Quote of the Day #74a – Tacitus
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Quote of the Day #75 – African Proverb
“A wise man never knows all, only fools know everything.”
Quote of the Day #76 – Thomas Paine
“Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.”
Quote of the Day #77 – John Maynard Keynes
“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job I likely to be ill-done.”
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