Zarion Zory > Zarion's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”
― Judith Butler

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”
― Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.”
― Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.”
― Peter Singer

“Too many philosophers accept the idea that truth is best achieved by a marketplace of ideas conducted in the fashion of ultimate fighting. But aggressive styles that seek easy victories by harping on arcane counterexamples do not maximize truth...Sometimes, interestingly, the aim of truth is enhanced less by adversarial argument than by a receptivity that holds back on disagreement long enough to try out the new ideas on offer, push them further, see where they might go.”
― Linda Martín Alcoff

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Today, the language of the market penetrates every pore and forces every interpersonal relation into the schema of individual preference.”
― Jürgen Habermas

“Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

“I can't kill myself, I thought. I'm too insignificant. I'm nothing. I'm a thumbprint on the first-floor window of a skyscraper, a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea along with millions of tons of raw sewage, a squirrel eating a nut as a car bore down on him.”
― Rex Pickett, Sideways

“It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.”
― Roger Ebert

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.”
― Roger Ebert

“I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.”
― Roger Ebert