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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“The idea of Christian perfection, which began in the ancient monasteries and spread to the world as an ideal, is one of the most appealing, demanding and ultimately hopeless notions of the spiritual life. By definition, only God is perfect—that is, complete and independent unto [God’s] self. Humans, on the other hand, are radically imperfect, and that, paradoxically, is welcome news, for the recognition of our incompleteness throws us on the mercy of God and enables us, as Saint Paul stressed, to put up with one another’s faults.”

“The idea of conformism among animals is increasingly supported for social behavior as well. One study tested both children and chimpanzees on generosity. The goal was to see if they were prepared to do a member of their own species a favor at no cost to themselves. They indeed did so, and their willingness increased if they themselves had received generosity from others—any others, not just their testing partner. Is kind behavior contagious? Love begets love, we say, or as the investigators put it more dryly, primates tend to adopt the most commonly perceived responses in the population.”

“The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights. Human rights is the fruit of various civilizations. I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.”

“The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.”

“The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is "causally inevitable." Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event or situation. [...] He said people can only act as they actually do. A murderer, for example, will inevitably murder because his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, his socioeconomic situation, his fear of rejection, the convenient proximity of a defenseless woman on a dark street corner, will all lead him, inevitably, to murder. Someone said, quite passionately as I recall, as if we were speaking of a specific murder and not a hypothetical one, "But he chose to murder! He had free will!" The bearded man said he himself was a "hard determinist" and therefore did not believe in free will. [...] If free will doesn't exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?”

“The idea of different countries and nationalities was purely an invention of the human mind handed down from one generation to the next, bringing war and division in its wake. This is what the Buddha meant by "In the sky there is no east or west but people create distinctions out of their minds and then believe them to be true".”

“The idea of direct action against the evil that you want to overcome is a kind of common denominator for anarchist ideas and anarchist movements. I think one of the most important principles of anarchism is that you cannot separate means and ends. Anarchism requires means and ends to be in line with one another. I think this is in fact one of the distinguishing characteristics of anarchism.”

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”

“The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.”