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Quote by George Orwell

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Shooting an Elephant

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George Orwell
George Orwell

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, was a British novelist and political critic. Known for his sharp social criticism and profound insights into totalitarianism, Orwell is best remembered for his novels '1984' and 'Animal Farm', which remain influential to this day. more

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“The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.”

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Book:Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
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“Mujāhada, a collateral form of jihād (the so-called "holy war"), taken [by Sufis] to mean "earnest striving after the mystical life." The term is based on the Koranic text, "And they that strive earnestly in Our cause, them We surely guide upon Our paths." A Tradition makes the Prophet rank the "greater warfare" (al jihad al-akbar) above the "lesser warfare" (al jihad al-asghar, i.e., the war against infidelity), and explain the "greater warfare" as meaning "earnest striving with the carnal soul" (mujāhadat al-nafs).”

IslamStationsSufismJihadArabic1950MaqamMujahadin
Book:Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam
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“It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly—this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power.”

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Book:Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam
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“To understand the extreme lengths to which the Sufis were prepared to go in reading esoteric meanings into the quite simple language of their Scriptures, it is necessary to remember that the Koran was committed to memory by all deeply religious men and women, and recited constantly, aloud or in the heart; so that the mystic was in a state of uninterrupted meditation upon the Holy Book. Many passages which would otherwise pass without special notice were therefore bound to arrest their attention, already sufficiently alert, and to quicken their imagination, already fired by the discipline of their austerities and the rigor of their internal life.”

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Book:Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam
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“He went into their temple and there met their teacher, who had shaved his head and beard and wore scarlet robes. Shaqīq [of Balkh] said to him, 'This upon which thou art engaged is false; the men, and thou, and all creation—all have a Creator and a Maker, there is naught like unto Him; to Him belongs this world, and the next; He is Omnipotent, All-providing.' The servitor said to him, 'Thy words do not accord with thy deeds.' Shaqīq said, 'How is that?' The other replied, 'Thou hast asserted that thou hast a Creator, Who is All-providing and Omnipotent; yet thou has exiled thyself to this place in search of thy provision. If what thou sayest is true, He Who has provided for thee here is the same as He Who provides for thee there; so spare thyself this trouble.' Shaqīq said, 'The cause of my abstinence (zuhd) was the remark of that Turk.' And he returned, and gave away all he possessed to the poor, and sought after knowledge.”

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Book:Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam
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“The red glow of the robot's eyes held him. "Do you expect me," said Cutie slowly, "to believe any such complicated, implausible, hypothesis as you have just outlined? What do you take me for?" Powell sputtered apple fragments onto the table and turned red. "Why damn you, it wasn't a hypothesis. Those were facts." Cutie sounded grim, "Globes of energy millions of miles across! Worlds with three billion humans on them! Infinite emptiness! Sorry, Powell, but I don't believe it. I'll puzzle this thing out for myself. Good-by.”

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“Here we may observe fully developed the doctrine of passing away in God (fanā) which from Abū Yazīd's time onwards assumes a central position in the structure of Sufi theory. It was after all not a difficult transition to make from saying that all else but God is nothing (which is the logical outcome of the extreme ascetic teaching that the world is worthless and only God's service is a proper preoccupation of the believer's heart), to claiming that when self as well as the world has been cast aside the mystic has passed away into God.”

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“Science may appear to have no connection with political freedom…. Scientists are too busy with positive measures, such as productive research and the dissemination of the results of the search for truth, to take time out to refute every crackpot notion that gets into print…. If the democratic process were applied ideally, and if enough people were to accept the claims in the article as truth, then publicly supported schools and universities could be depopulated of competent faculties, whose places could be taken by quacks and political appointees. Granted that the chance of this is very small, nevertheless the imagined situation has a modern precedent. Something very similar did happen (on purely political grounds) in a European country during several years preceding the second world war. It has happened in other countries since the end of that war.”

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Book:The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe
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