"Reason is like a runner who doesn't know that the race is over, or, like Penelope, constantly undoing what it creates.... It is better suited to pulling things down than to building them up, and better at discovering what things are not, than what they are."

Pierre Bayle Entertainment See all quotes by Pierre Bayle →

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“There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.”

“If the Multiplicity of Religions prejudices the State, it proceeds from their not bearing with one another but on the contrary endeavouring each to crush and destroy the other by methods of Persecution. In a word, all the Mischief arises not from Toleration, but from the want of it.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these b…"

— Augustine of Hippo

Philosophy354–430

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"Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you."

— Robert Silverberg

Literature1935

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"Ideological conformity depends on conditions of prosperity; it has no staying-power of its own."

— Paul Mattick

Economics1904–1981

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"Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if yo…"

— Lawrence Wright

Journalism1947

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