A Quote by Patrick Hayden

We tend to idealize tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nut cases.

Patrick Hayden

Quote Topics

Cases Find Idealize Losers Nut Ourselves Tend Then Tolerance Why Wonder

Quote Author

Patrick Hayden
Scientist
Born: October 9, 1975

We writers of series fiction tend to idealize ourselves in our characters, giving them attributes we wish we possessed and ever more interesting lives.

Marcia Muller

HIV is no respecter of persons. Any of us could find ourselves with the disease, and then what? We tend to stigmatize as a way to deceive ourselves about our invincibility. But it is a delusion.

Kwame Dawes

Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory.

Fred Hoyle

When you're younger, you kind of assume you'll be fine at whatever. Then you get older, and you're either unsuccessful and you wonder why, or you're successful and you wonder why.

Ethan Coen

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Clifford Geertz

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Karl Popper

But, as Douglas E Harding has pointed out, we tend to think of this planet as a life-infested rock, which is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell infested skeleton. Surely all forms of life, including man, must be understood as "symptoms" of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy in which case we cannot escape the conclusion that the galaxy is intelligent.

Alan Watts

I'm a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why - when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult - we wonder why we cower and we run away.

David Goggins

There are always losers when society evolves. In the free market, these losers are expected and encouraged to retrain and find new ways to survive and thrive.

John McAfee

Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder. I believe it also ends in wonder. The ultimate way in which we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder. That's why I'm so opposed to the kind of miracle-mongering we find in both new-age and old-age religion. We're attracted to pseudomiracles only because we've ceased to wonder at the world, at how amazing it is.

Sam Keen

When I look at my earlier work, I often wonder why I acted like that, why I wore that dress, why I said that dialogue... Why couldn't I do it better? I realized I was too young then and not confident.

Riya Sen

Nut cases only succeed in multiple killings when they can be confident their prospective victims are disarmed.

Vin Suprynowicz

No one can learn tolerance in a climate of irresponsibility, which does not produce democracy. The act of tolerating requires a climate in which limits may be established, in which there are principles to be respected. That is why tolerance is not coexistence with the intolerable. Under an authoritarian regime, in which authority is abused, or a permissive one, in which freedom is not limited, one can hardly learn tolerance. Tolerance requires respect, discipline, and ethics.

Paulo Freire

It used to be that, when something strange happened, we'd hear on the news "Police believe this is the act of an isolated nut." On the internet there are no isolated nuts; whatever kind of nut you are, you can find fifty nuts in the world exactly like you.

Bruce Perens

We ask ourselves all kinds of questions, such as why does a peacock have such beautiful feathers, and we may answer that he needs the feathers to impress a female peacock, but then we ask ourselves, and why is there a peacock? And then we ask, why is there anything living? And then we ask, why is there anything at all? And if you tell some advocate of scientism that the answer is a secret, he will go white hot and write a book. But it is a secret. And the experience of living with the secret and thinking about it is in itself a kind of faith.