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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“But merely accepting authoritarian truth, even if that truth has some virtue, does not bring skepticism to an end. To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit. . . . Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit by tying fruits of truth onto its branches.”

“But might not his [the president's] nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The person ultimately appointed must be object of his preference, though perhaps not in the first degree. It is also not very probable that his nomination would often be overruled.”

“But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.”

“But Mockingjays were never a weapon," said Madge. "They’re just songbirds. Right?" "Yeah, I guess so,” I said, But it’s not true. A mockingbird is just a songbird. A mockingjay is a creature the capitol never intended to exist. They hadn’t counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to thrive in a new form. They hadn’t anticipated its will to live.”

“But modern man, unlike Christian [Pilgrim's Progress], has no book in his hand, he has no faith in Evangelist, and a heavenly city seems to him much more likely to be a mirage. The God-dimension is missing, and he does his thinking in a curious parody of Christian verities.”

“But Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”

“But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit. The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.”

“But money has a peculiar nature. It can buy objects and souls, but it can also change them. It dulls emotions. Then, with the methodical and disciplined way in which it is accumulated, it severs every tie of its possessor to the spiritual world, in whose name sometimes their furious pursuit initially sparked. Ultimately, the hunting and cornering, with the ferocity and determination of a bewildered frenzy, disrupts the centre, blurs perceptions, erases the outlines of values, and extracts meaning—both from the pursued and the pursuer. Money loses its purpose. Its function. It no longer serves him, and he forgets to serve himself with it, sinking into self-loathing. The only nature that money eventually retains, and which he attributes to it, because he remembers nothing else, is accumulation. This is the very end: of the humanity in him and the life he was given.”