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7ba784a Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. destiny einstein inspirational Albert Einstein
e32d551 "[ :] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. 's thought was not taught in Germany; was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, , and were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms - the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome - if it's an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of , that says that he's doing God's work and executing God's will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making albert-einstein barbaric catholicism charles-darwin darwin darwinism einstein evolution fascism fascistic freud fuhrer germany hitler jewish mein-kampf nazi nazism pope science separation-of-church-and-state sigmund-freud superstitious united-states vatican Christopher Hitchens
a444b4f Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation. albert-einstein einstein inspirational loner Albert Einstein
9cce14b "You could give a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after , , , , , and their colleagues. I'm not saying you're more intelligent than aristotle charles-darwin crick darwin einstein francis-crick intellect isaac-newton james-d-watson james-watson knowledge max-planck newton planck polymath science understanding watson Richard Dawkins
a1a5a99 Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen. einstein energy matter physics science Bill Bryson
1bdc5e5 I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah. antisemitism atheism christianity christians einstein freud humans islam jesus jews marx messiah moses muhammad muslims myth prophets religion theism Christopher Hitchens
c05ceab So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the or of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an and a and a , who had married to and had a copy of Marilyn's conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in and Annie Navasky's front room, with and as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase. annie-navasky antisemitism arthur-miller atheism bar-and-bat-mitzvah best-man budapest damascus david-rieff debate desecration eastern-europe einstein eritrea germany india iraq islam istanbul jewish-question jewishness jews kurdish-people marilyn-monroe martin-amis middle-east morocco normality poland prague rabbis religion religious-conversion robert-goldburg salvation security shakespeare spinoza steve-wasserman synagogues temples tunisia victor-saul-navasky Christopher Hitchens
0fae399 The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch--Homo Sapiens--would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass. connection einstein evolution gravity interconnection science the-universe Neil deGrasse Tyson
9af8923 "Why should I have to hide the fact that I don't believe there's a supreme being? There's no proof of it. There's no harm in saying you're an atheist. It doesn't mean you treat people any differently. I live by the Golden Rule to do unto others, as you'd want to be treated. I just simply don't believe in religion, and I don't believe necessarily that there's a supreme being that watches over all of us. I follow the teachings of . said he worshipped the sun. He was a fellow atheist. I'm in good company ... , atheism atheist belief carlin charles-darwin company darwin einstein george-carlin golden-rule mark-twain supreme-being twain Jesse Ventura
40e35f8 People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla [...], I went to [...] check in with : the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. ( as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people 'disappeared' all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one's former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [....] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that 'terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that's why she's detained.' I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn't understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. 'We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.' Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general-- --had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. [...] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied-- : 'roundly' denied--holding Jacobo Timerman 'as either a journalist or a Jew.' While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: [...] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as 'evidence' by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there's the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of... we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it's one, two, three... go! christianity death-squads einstein freud jacobo-timerman jorge-rafael-videla marx Christopher Hitchens
82ccab0 "One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that "the Bradman class" denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein." archimedes bradman-class cambridge count-lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy einstein g-h-hardy godfrey-hardy godfrey-harold-hardy isaac-newton lenin leo-tolstoy lev-nikolayevich-tolstoy literature newton politics science shakespeare tolstoy vladimir-ilyich-lenin vladimir-lenin william-shakespeare C.P. Snow
48b0878 "Much later, when I discussed the problem with blunder cosmological-constant einstein greek physics problem science George Gamow
944b3b1 Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. einstein programming software-development software-engineering Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
81418d9 The cult of individual personalities is always, in my view, unjustified . . . It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. cognitive-bias einstein human-civilisation humanity Walter Isaacson
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