If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.
A war in the Taiwan Strait would destroy China's international relations overnight. It would destroy Chinese - Japanese relations, not to mention Chinese - American relations.
Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.
The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.
[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?
Faith is the mortar that fills the cracks in the evidence and the gaps in the logic, and thus it is faith that keeps the whole terrible edifice of religious certainty still looming dangerously over our world.
Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.
When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum. ("Out Of The Deep")
Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water! ("Out Of The Deep")
Nature seems to welcome defiance of conventions, and to say, with a smile, 'So, the truant has come back again!' ("Absolute Evil")
I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)
Author says the ineffectual U.S. Navy of two centuries ago lost two thirds as many men to duelist bullets as to sea hazards.
I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surren...
I think a cyber-terrorism attack is overblown, though the threat exists. I think al Qaeda and other groups are more interested in symbolic terrorism, like what they did to the World Trade Center - suicide bombers or something that really has an effec...
There are people, particularly in the United States with which I am most familiar, who would say how ironic that Tehran would be the sponsor of an anti-terrorism conference, because there are people who say that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism.
We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing wh...
Let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more. Proverbs 31:7
Now faith is being sure of what we believe in and certain of what we do not see. (Heb. 11:1)
Perceptions of the world and of other actors diverge from reality in patterns that we can detect and for reasons that we can understand.
