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The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books in Western Civilization

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John Mark Reynolds

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“Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.”

PeopleReasonFaithPoliticsDemocracySocietyIgnoranceMoralityIllusionEthics
Book:Moral Man and Immoral Society: Study in Ethics and Politics
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“I’ve often wondered how the term “'New Atheism”' gained such currency. It is a misnomer. There is nothing new about nonbelief. All of us, without exception, are born knowing nothing of God or gods, and acquire notions of religion solely through interaction with others – or, most often, indoctrination by others, an indoctrination usually commencing well before we can reason. Our primal state is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists (most prominently Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens) have, in essence, done nothing more than try to bring us back to our senses, to return us to a pure and innate mental clarity.”

ReasonReligionKnowledgeAtheismClarityIndoctrinationAtheistsNew AtheismMental ClarityRichard DawkinsDawkinsSam HarrisBlank SlateNew AtheistsHarrisMisnomerChristopher HitchensHitchensNonbelief
Author:Jeffrey Tayler
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“What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose. Drinking and smoking over and over What's so great about a life that's sober? There's nothing cool about being young When the monsters of night have stolen the sun. I'm tired of searching for words in the sky. All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being young When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.”

YoungDeathSongCreativePoemDrinkingAlcoholSmokeSmokingTeensDieMonster
Book:Last Night I Sang to the Monster
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“Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect—it was this work for which, sixteen years later, he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near to a direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter into one fundamental unity. This last paper contains no references and quotes to authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.”

MatterReasonScienceTimeSpaceHistoryMathematicsMathPhysicsRelativityQuantum PhysicsNobel PrizeEinsteinAlbert EinsteinTheoretical PhysicsConclusionsTheory Of RelativityBrownianAnnalen Der PhysikRobert Brown
Book:Variety of Men
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