Well then, ridiculously long post here:
"Modern people and modern theology, in trying to start from man alone, are left where the brilliant German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche found himself. Nietzsche in the 1880s was the first one who said in the modern way that God is dead, and he understood well where people end when they say this. If God is dead, then everything for which God gives an answer and meaning is dead."
-How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, Francis A. Schaeffer
"According to nature' you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power-how could you live according to this indifference? Living - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living - estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative 'live according to nature' meant at bottom as much as 'live according to life' - how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?"
-Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
"...We've just seen that the discussion as to how many people there should be in the world has now, as it were, become quite acceptable. It is not acceptable, at the moment, to discuss who should be the parents of the next generation, who should be born, and who should have children. There's a general feeling that if we are all nice to each other and if everybody has 2.3 children, everything will pan out. I don't think that is true. For good genetic reasons, even though you have more medical care, transplantation of organs, and all these things, it would be an unhealthy biological situation. Some group of people should decide that some people should have more children and some should have fewer...You have to decide who is to be born."
-Francis Crick
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. . .Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
-The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells
"No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals."
-Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert
"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
-Chapterhouse: Dune, Frank Herbert
[spoiler] "The dark is generous.
Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding us from the truths of others.The dark protects us from what we dare not know.
Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night's embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day's harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is only temporary: that every night brings a new day.
Because it is day that is temporary.
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self. With each victory of the light, it is the darkness that wins.
The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the darkness that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.
The dark's patience is infinite. Eventually, even stars burn out.
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins-but in the heart of its strength lies weakness; one lone candle is enough to hold it back.
Love is more than a candle.
Love can ignite the stars."
-Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Mathew Stover [/spoiler]
"It's called the gray fallacy. One person says white, another says black, and outside observers assume gray is the truth. The assumption of gray is sloppy, lazy thinking. The fact that one person takes a position that is diametrically opposed to the truth does not then skew reality so the truth is no longer the truth. The truth is still the truth."
-Theokhoth
"The big deal with prenatal infanticide is people are doing exactly what we did with slavery: defining people as "not people" for the sake of convenience and killing them with semantics so as not to burden our conscience. Some people happen to have a problem with this."
-Theokhoth
"Ideas and philosophical systems as well as movements grounded on a definite spiritual foundation, whether true or not, can never be broken by the use of force after a certain stage, except on one condition: namely, that this use of force is in the service of a new idea or Weltanschhauung which burns with a new flame."
-Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
"Nothing is harder to do, more dubious to succeed at, or more dangerous to manage than making oneself a ruler and introducing a new order. This is because he...makes enemies of all those who have done well under the old, and finds only half-hearted defenders in the men who would do well under the new...Men intrinsically do not trust new things that they have not experienced themselves."
-The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
"Among those who plot to assassinate the tyrant, those who are most worrisome, and should be most carefully watched, are those who do not strive to preserve their own lives while destroying his."
-Politics, Aristotle
"Can our future be cleanly shorn
from a life to which we're born?
Is each of us a creature free-
or trapped at birth by destiny?
Pity those who believe the latter.
Without freedom, nothing matters."
-The Book of Counted Sorrows
"The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats...or even individuals capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of plain mortals,
wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. In such a case they become uncertain and suspicious, especially if the enemy refrains from going in for the same nonsense...Isn't it perfectly understandable that the whole country ends up lending more credence to enemy propaganda...than to its own?"
-Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
"Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty."
-Frank Herbert
"We all are prisoners at one time or another in our lives, prisoners to ourselves or the expectations of those around us. It is a burden that all people endure, that all people despise, and that few people ever learn to escape."
-Exile, by R.A. Salvatore
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger."
-Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
"There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in it's potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even Man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war altogether."
-Thomas Edison
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold."
"All the same," replied Syme patiently, "just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."
-The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterson
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly Meaningless! What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say...For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."
-Ecclesiastes, King Solomon
"Reaching into your own pocket to help the poor is praiseworthy. Reaching into someone else's pocket to help the poor is immoral."
-Aransom
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