Quotes – Page 3 – Brian.Carnell.Com

Philip K. Dick on Reality

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

The first time I saw this quote, I thought it was likely fake. In other settings and times, Dick was no fan of reality. In 1980, for example, he wrote,

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards, I’m out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That’s what science fiction is all about.

John Wheeler on Ignorance

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
-John Wheeler, Scientific American, 1992.

Jean-Francois Revel on Utopianism

Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.
-Jean-Francois Revel, Last Exit to Utopia, 2009.

Maimonides On Accepting The Truth

. . . one should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.
-Maimonides, The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics, 1912, Joseph I. Gorfinkle, trans.

Nothing In All The World Is More Dangerous . . .

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love, 1963.

Fighting for Freedom

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
–Unknown

This quote is widely attributed to H.L. Mencken, but since it is never given an appropriate citation, I am skeptical that it is actually from Mencken.