Absurd Statements Quotes

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind.

It's just the way things are. Take a moment to consider this statement. Really think about it. We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors towards animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don't even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. What could cause an entire society of people to check their thinking caps at the door--and to not even realize they're doing so? Though this question is quite complex, the answer is quite simple: carnism.

Whom have you fallen in love with?' I ask. 'Well, there was you,' the prince says. 'When we were children.' 'Me?' I ask incredulously. 'You didn't know?' He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. 'Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.' I cannot help snorting at the sheer absurdity of his statement. He puts a hand to my heart. 'Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women.

Carl Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” What Dr. Jung said in two separate and unrelated statements was: Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, P. 193 People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

As anyone who's ever been to a doctor knows, doctors are not necessarily your friends, any more than mail deliverers are you friends, or butchers are you friends, or refrigerator repair-people are you friends. A doctor is a man or woman whose job it is to make you feel better, that's all, and if you've ever had a shot you know that the statement 'Doctors can't hurt you' is simply absurd.

...and to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work; and practise anonymity. Silence in company; or the quietest statement, not the showiest; is also "medicated" as the doctors say. It was an empty party, rather, last night. Very nice here, though.

Did not the statement, "You do not exist," contain a logical absurdity?

Of course you would protect the woman,” he said. “You protect everyone, John—I don’t suppose you can help it.” Astonished, Grey opened his mouth to contest this absurd statement, but was forestalled when Percy leaned forward and kissed him softly. “You are the bravest man I know,” Percy said, his breath warm on Grey’s cheek. “And you will not convince me otherwise.

Stop talking now. Dom told us how you work. You take information, and then you use it." It's such an absurd statement, I have no idea how on earth to respond. Isn't that exactly what you're supposed to do with information? Do people just collect it and store it, spouting out facts when prompted like a computer?

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead.

When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

They warn that any effort to put two objects in the same place at the same time will have catastrophic consequences. When you think about it, a lot of fundamental physics is the solemn statement of the absurdly obvious. Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

ABSURDITY, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.

Here’s an eternally true statement: No matter how much good you’ve done, you could always have done more. The earlier you recognize that, the easier it is for you to accept blame.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?

Absurdism is a philosophy centered on embracing the meaninglessness of life while simultaneously rebelling against it and embracing what life can offer us. Camus is most famously attributed with this statement “Life is meaningless.” While that quote may seem depressing on its own, it changes when we realize that what he is really saying is that we are the creators of meaning in our lives. Meaning does not originate from life, we assign meaning to life and everything within it. We get to make it up.

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, . . . I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended.

Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion. They are then assailed, throughout the rest of their lives, by statements designed to make them believe all sorts of absurd propositions, such as that Blank’s pills cure all ills, that Spitzbergen is warm and fertile, and that Germans eat corpses.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Take the Citadel? That’s quite the boast,” Oak says, twisting the pin and frowning. Madoc makes a snorting sound, then turns to me. “I am sure that Wren here wouldn’t mind taking Lady Note’s castle and lands for herself.” I shake my head at the absurdity of the statement. He raises his brows. “No? Still sitting at the table and waiting for permission to start eating?” That’s an uncomfortably accurate way of describing how I’ve lived my life.

He also says you fall in love a lot.' That surprises a laugh out of him, although he doesn't deny any of it. 'There are certain expectations of a prince in Court.' 'You cannot be serious,' I say. 'You feel obliged to be in love?' 'I told you- I am a courtier, versed in all the courtly arts.' He's grinning as he says it, though, acknowledging the absurdity of the statement. I find myself shaking my head and grinning, too. He's being ridiculous, but I am not sure how ridiculous. 'I do have a bad habit, he says. 'Of falling in love. With great regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.' I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He'd only kissed back. 'As charming as you are, how can that be?' I say. He laughs again. 'That's what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would have been his half brother. But it's also alarming, because she's the one who murdered him.' Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it's strange how fond oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done.

I cannot have men stationed outside the first-class promenade. How will that look to well-paying passengers? This is not a workhouse and I will not treat my passengers like prisoners. They’re not being terrorized with a theatrical murder tonight and I intend to keep it that way. I will not make them suffer.” I physically had to check to see if my head had exploded from such a ridiculous statement. Gentle prodding of my hair proved my skull was still intact, miracle of all miracles. “You cannot be serious.” Thomas tossed his hands in the air. “It would seem an awful lot better to have crew members posted along the decks than to see dismembered body parts floating about while first-class patrons made their way to breakfast and tea. ‘Oh, look, Miss Eldridge, there’s a mauled torso. Won’t you pass the cream and sugar?’” “Don’t be absurd,” the captain said, aghast. “Apologies,” Thomas said, not sounding at all sorry, “I’m only following your lead.

Favorinus began with an interesting statement that it was “completely foolish and absurd” to think that just because “the tides of the ocean correspond with the course of the Moon that the Heavens govern who wins a lawsuit about an aqueduct”.

But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!

Madoc makes a snorting sound, then turns to me. 'I am sure that Wren here wouldn't mind taking Lady Nore's castle and lands for herself.' I shake my head at the absurdity of the statement. He raises his brows. 'No? Still sitting at the table and waiting for permission to start eating?' That's an uncomfortably accurate way of describing how I've lived my life.

An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler. Both are famous futurists. These quotes remind me that world-changing ideas will seem absurd to most people, and that the most useful work I can be doing is to push the envelope of what is considered possible.

Connectedness is the essence of everything...They sense that, of course, from time to time; have uneasy feelings that all they live by is nonsense. They have dim apprehensions that such propositions as 'God does not exist' are somewhat dubious at least in comparison with statements like 'All carnivorous cows eat meat.' That's where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of reality—puts together all their facts with a gluey whine of connectedness. Mere tripe, believe me. Mere sleight-of-wits. He knows no more than they do about total reality—less, if anything: works with the same old clutter of atoms, the givens of his time and place and tongue. But he spins it all together with harp runs and hoots, and they think what they think is alive, think Heaven loves them. It keeps them going—for what that's worth.

David Davis had promised that Britain would be part of a free-trade area ‘almost twice the size of the EU’ within two years of the Brexit vote – a statement outdone in its absurdity only by Mr Davis’ later boast of negotiating a trading area ‘probably ten times the size of the European Union’. Based on GDP, Davis is aiming for something larger than the economies of the entire planet combined.68 So it can’t happen.

I do have a bad habit,” he says. “of falling in love. With regularity and to spectacular effect. You see, it never goes well.” I wonder if this conversation makes him think of our kiss, but then, I was the one who kissed him. He’d only kissed back. “As charming as you are, how can that be?” I say. He laughs again. “That’s what my sister Taryn always says. She tells me that I remind her of her late husband. Which makes some sense, since I would be his half brother. But it’s also alarming, because she’s the one who murdered him.” Much as when he spoke about Madoc, it’s strange how fond Oak can sound when he tells me a horrifying thing a member of his family has done. “Whom have you fallen in love with?” I ask. “Well, there was you,” the prince says. “When we were children.” “Me?” I ask incredulously. “You didn’t know?” He appears to be merry in the face of my astonishment. “Oh yes. Though you were a year my senior, and it was hopeless, I absolutely mooned over you. When you were gone from Court, I refused any food but tea and toast for a month.” I cannot help snorting over the sheer absurdity of his statement. He puts a hand to my heart. “Ah, and now you laugh. It is my curse to adore cruel women. He cannot expect me to believe he had real feelings. “Stop with your games.” “Very well,” he says. “Shall we go to the next? Her name was Lara, a mortal at the school I attended when I lived with my eldest sister and her girlfriend. Sometimes Lara and I would climb into the crook of one of the maple trees and share sandwiches. But she had a villainous friend, who implicated me in a piece of gossip—which resulted in Lara stabbing me with a lead pencil and breaking off our relationship.” “You do like cruel women,” I say. “Then there was Violet, a pixie. I wrote terrible poetry about how I adored her. Unfortunately, she adored duels and would get into trouble so that I would have to fight for her honor. And even more unfortunately, neither my sister nor my father bothered to teach me how to fight for show. I thought of the dead-eyed expression on his face before his bout with the ogre and Tiernan’s angry words. “That resulted in my accidentally killing a person she liked better than me.” “Oh,” I say. “That is three levels of unfortunate.” “Then there was Sibi, who wanted to run away from Court with me, but as soon as we went, hated it and wept until I took her home. And Loana, a mermaid, who found my lack of a tail unbearable but tried to drown me anyway, because she found it equally unbearable that I would ever love another.” The way he tells these stories makes me recall how he’s told me many painful things before. Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughed in the face of despair. “How old were you?” “Fifteen, with the mermaid,” he said. “And nearly three years later, I must surely be wiser.” “Surely,” I say, wondering if he was. Wondering if I wanted him to be.

[O piloto] Orr era louco e podia ser dado por incapaz. Bastava-lhe pedir, e a partir do momento em que o fizesse deixaria de ser louco e teria de participar em novas missões. Seria louco se participasse em novas missões e mentalmente são se não o fizesse, mas neste último caso teria de voltar a voar. Se o fizesse, seria louco e não teria de o fazer, mas se não quisesse, estaria em plena posse das faculdades mentais e deveria fazê-lo.

Consider this claim: as I walk along, time – as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process – slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They're all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling, they're called). Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe.

To argue that this development has anything to do with the technological progress during this period, that technological necessities which in Germany operated in the 1880s and 1890s, made themselves felt here in the 1930s, is not much less absurd than the claim, implied in a statement of Mussolini, that Italy had to abolish individual freedom before other European people because its civilization had marched so far in advance of the rest!

Although the entire political class does not want to know about it, it is more than probable that the constant increase in crime taking place in Europe is a sign of the beginning of an ethnic civil war. It is politically incorrect to say this, but the conclusion is obvious. Most cases of serious crime and routine delinquency are committed by perpetrators who have immigrated from non-European countries. It is absurd to describe as ‘racism’ a statement of the clear sociological facts.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” “Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the dissonances between that account and the account given by the mind working independently of the novel? For Sartre it was ultimately, like most or all problems, one of freedom. For Miss Murdoch it is a problem of love, the power by which we apprehend the opacity of persons to the degree that we will not limit them by forcing them into selfish patterns. Both of them are talking, when they speak of freedom and love, about the imagination. The imagination, we recall, is a form-giving power, an esemplastic power; it may require, to use Simone Weil's words, to be preceded by a 'decreative' act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords. We apply it to all forces which satisfy the variety of human needs that are met by apparently gratuitous forms. These forms console; if they mitigate our existential anguish it is because we weakly collaborate with them, as we collaborate with language in order to communicate. Whether or no we are predisposed towards acceptance of them, we learn them as we learn a language. On one view they are 'the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea,' but on another they destroy by falsehood the heroic anguish of our present loneliness. If they appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of them. If they ruin our innocence, we have to remember that the innocent eye sees nothing. If they make us guilty, they enable us, in a manner nothing else can duplicate, to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind. I shall end by saying a little more about La Nausée, the book I chose because, although it is a novel, it reflects a philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie. Under one aspect it is what Philip Thody calls 'an extensive illustration' of the world's contingency and the absurdity of the human situation. Mr. Thody adds that it is the novelist's task to 'overcome contingency'; so that if the illustration were too extensive the novel would be a bad one. Sartre himself provides a more inclusive formula when he says that 'the final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.' This statement does two things. First, it links the fictions of art with those of living and choosing. Secondly, it means that the humanizing of the world's contingency cannot be achieved without a representation of that contingency. This representation must be such that it induces the proper sense of horror at the utter difference, the utter shapelessness, and the utter inhumanity of what must be humanized. And it has to occur simultaneously with the as if, the act of form, of humanization, which assuages the horror. This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, and that contingency must be formalized, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in the modern theory of the novel. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats's figure, like ash on a burning stick? The novel will end; a full close may be avoided, but there will be a close: a fake fullstop, an 'exhaustion of aspects,' as Ford calls it, an ironic return to the origin, as in Finnegans Wake and Comment c'est. Perhaps the book will end by saying that it has provided the clues for another, in which contingency will be defeated, ...

Miss Devonshire," Mr. Lewis says and looks out the window as if what he wants to say dances in that dormant winter garden. "The fantastic and the imaginative aren't escapism." "How so?" This seems important. "Good stories introduce the marvelous. The whole story, paradoxically, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual world. It provides meaning." "Yes," Warnie says. "It takes us out of ourselves and lets us view reality from new angles. It expands our awareness of the world." The significance of these statements creates tingles on my arms and neck. I realize fantasy and imagination aren't just for escape. And to dismiss them is absurd.

The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse. I use it sometimes, but I do so sparingly. By misuse, I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as “My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false,” or Nietzsche’s famous statement “God is dead.” The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something.

Trump was hardly in office when Democrats and their media allies began tarring him and his top aides as “white nationalists.” There were no facts to support the charge, only innuendo, and tortured interpretations of the word “nationalism” and of presidential rhetoric. One of the worst examples was the Charlottesville, Virginia, historical monument controversy. In that city, leftist protesters demanded the removal of “Confederate” monuments and memorials. The term “Confederate” in their usage extended even to statues of Thomas Jefferson and explorers Lewis and Clark (for being “white colonists”). This sparked a protest by conservatives who objected to the statue removals—not because they were racists, but because they didn’t want to see the removal of these reminders of America’s history. A “Unite the Right” rally was planned for August 11–12, 2017, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately, the rally attracted extremist groups, including neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. During the rally, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of leftist protestors, killing a woman. In response, Trump made a series of statements condemning the Klan, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and racism in general. In one of those speeches, he added, “You also had some very fine people on both sides.”115 Even though he had just condemned racism in his previous breath, many Democrats and pundits condemned Trump for calling racists “fine people.” This was not only absurd but dishonest. The “fine people on both sides” to whom he referred were those who wanted to remove the statues because they were reminders of slavery and those who wanted to preserve the statues because they were reminders of history. Trump never praised racists as “fine people”—he condemned them in no uncertain terms. But to the

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

The idea of progress is contemporary with the age of enlightenment and with the bourgeois revolution. Of course, certain sources of its inspiration can be found in the seventeenth century; the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns already introduced into European ideology the perfectly absurd conception of an artistic form of progress. In a more serious fashion, the idea of a science that steadily increases its conquests can also be derived from Cartesian philosophy. But Turgot, in 1750, is the first person to give a clear definition of the new faith. His treatise on the progress of the human mind basically recapitulates Bossuet's universal history. The idea of progress alone is substituted for the divine will. "The total mass of the human race, by alternating stages of calm and agitation, of good and evil, always marches, though with dragging footsteps, toward greater and greater perfection." This optimistic statement will furnish the basic ingredient of the rhetorical observations of Condorcet, the official theorist of progress, which he linked with the progress of the State and of which he was also the official victim in that the enlightened State forced him to poison himself. Sorel was perfectly correct in saying that the philosophy of progress was exactly the philosophy to suit a society eager to enjoy the material prosperity derived from technical progress. When we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of events, will be better than today, we can enjoy ourselves in peace. Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein’s careful statements. On that occasion the sort of formality that had been always present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I called him “dear boy,” and he tacked on the words “old man” to some half-uttered expression of gratitude, as though his risk set off against my years had made us more equal in age and in feeling. There was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth. He exerted himself to soothe me as though he had been the more mature of the two. “All right, all right,” he said rapidly and with feeling. “I promise to take care of myself. Yes; I won’t take any risks. Not a single blessed risk. Of course not. I mean to hang out. Don’t you worry. Jove! I feel as if nothing could touch me. Why! this is luck from the word Go. I wouldn’t spoil such a magnificent chance!”... A magnificent chance! Well, it was magnificent, but chances are what men make them, and how was I to know? As he had said, even I — even I remembered — his — his misfortune against him. It was true. And the best thing for him was to go.

Is it a long time since you saw him last?” I asked, not wishing to appear reluctant to speak to him of Morel, nor yet to seem to know that they lived together all the time. “He called in for five minutes this morning, as it happens, while I was still half asleep, and came and sat on the end of my bed, as if he were going to rape me!” I immediately concluded that M. de Charlus had seen Charlie within the hour, for when one asks a man’s mistress when she last saw the man one knows—and whom she perhaps thinks one believes—to be her lover, if she has just had tea with him, she will reply, “I saw him just before lunch.” Between these two statements the only difference is that one is false and the other true, but each is as innocent or, if you like, as guilty as the other. So it would be difficult to understand why the mistress (or here, M. de Charlus) invariably chooses the falsehood, if one did not know that their replies are determined, in a way unknown to the speaker, by a number of factors which seems so disproportionate to the triviality of the issue that it seems absurd to dwell on them. But for a physicist the position of the tiniest ball of pith is explained by the action, the clash or the equilibrium of the same forces of attraction or repulsion whose laws govern much greater worlds.

Q7. The total output of all the mathematicians who have ever lived, together with the output of all the human mathematicians of the next (say) thousand years is finite and could be contained in the memory banks of an appropriate computer. Surely this particular computer could, therefore, simulate this output and thus behave (externally) in the same way as a human mathematician-whatever the Godel argument might appear to tell us to the contrary? While this is presumably true, it ignores the essential issue, which is how we (or computers) know which mathematical statements are true and which are false. (In any case, the mere storage of mathematical statements is something that could be achieved by a system much less sophisticated than a general purpose computer, e.g. photographically.) The way that the computer is being employed in Q7 totally ignores the critical issue of truth judgment. One could equally well envisage computers that contain nothing but lists of totally false mathematical 'theorems', or lists containing random jumbles of truths and falsehoods. How are we to tell which computer to trust? The arguments that I am trying to make here do not say that an effective simulation of the output of conscious human activity (here mathematics) is impossible, since purely by chance the computer might 'happen' to get it right-even without any understanding whatsoever. But the odds against this are absurdly enormous, and the issues that are being addressed here, namely how one decides which mathematical statements are true and which are false, are not even being touched by Q7. There is, on the other hand, a more serious point that is indeed being touched upon in Q7. This is the question as to whether discussions about infinite structures (e.g. all natural numbers or all computations) are really relevant to our considerations here, when the outputs of humans and computers are finite.

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win—a conviction with much grounding in experience—which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all? On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect been saying), and the statement, "Whatever you do, I don't want you" (which is what racism declares). It is, in other words, both absurd and immoral to equate the despairing response of the victim with the contemptuous assertion of the oppressor. It would, moreover, be tragic if white liberals allowed verbal hostility on the part of Negroes to drive them out of the movement or to curtail their support for civil rights. The issue was injustice before black power became popular, and the issue is still injustice.

You are claiming that the Soviet authorities began and influenced the existence of the Democratic Party [in Iran]. That is the basis of all your statements. The simplest way to discredit your absurd claim si to tell you about Iran, of which you are apparently ignorant. The people of Iran are oppressed, poverty-stricken, and miserable with hunger and disease. Their death rate is among the highest in the world, and their infant mortality rate threatens Iran with complete extinction. They are ruled without choice by feudalistic landowners, ruthless Khans, and venal industrialists. The peasants are slaves and the workers are paid a few pennies for a twelve hour day--not enough to keep their families in food. I can quote you all the figures you like to support these statements, quote them if necessary from British sources. I can also quote you the figures of wealth which is taken out of Iran yearly by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, of which the British Governemtn is the largest shareholder. 200 million pounds sterling have been taken out of Iran by your Oil company: a hundred times the total amount of Iran's national income and ten thousand times the total national income of the working people of Iran. By such natural resources as oil, Iran is by nature one of the wealthiest countries on earth. That wealth goes to Britain, while Iran remains poverty-ridden and without economic stability at all. It has no wage policies, no real trade unions, few hospitals, no sanitation and drainage, no irrigation, no proper housing, and no adequate road system. Its people have no rights before the law; their franchise in non-existent, and their parliamentary rights are destroyed by the corrupt method of election and political choice. The Iranian people suffer the terrors of a police regime, and they are prey to the manipulations of the grain speculators and the money operators. The racial minorities suffer discrimination and intolerance, and religious minorities are persecuted for political ends. Banditry threatens the mountain districts, and British arms have been used to support one tribe against another. I could go on indefinitely, painting you a picture of misery and starvation and imprisonment and subjection which must shame any human being capable of hearing it. Yet you say that the existence of a Democratic Party in Iran has been created by the Soviet authorities. You underestimate the Iranian people, Lord Essex! The Democratic Party has arisen out of all this misery and subjection as a force against corruption and oppression. Until now the Iranian people have been unable to create a political party because the police system prevented by terror and assassination. Any attempt to organize the workers and peasants was quickly halted by the execution of party leaders and the vast imprisonment of its followers. The Iranian people, however, have a long record of struggle and persistence, and they do not have to be told by the Soviet Union where their interests lie. They are not stupid and they are not utterly destroyed. They still posses the will to organize a democratic body and follow it into paths of Government. The Soviet Union has simply made sure that the police assassins did not interfere.... To talk of our part in 'creating' the democratic movement is an insult to the people and a sign of ignorance. We do not underestimate the Iranian people, and as far as we are concerned the Democratic Party...belongs to the people. It is their creation and their right, and it cannot be broken by wild charges which accuse the Soviet Union of its birth. We did not create it, and we have not interfered in the affairs of Iran. On the contrary, it is the British Government which has interfered continuously and viciously in Iran's affairs.

Finally, am I making any sort of statement by going with the lowercase “antisemite” as opposed to the uppercase “Antisemite”? Yes, I am. It’s my small way—and I am certainly not alone in this—of validating Sartre’s and Julius’s contention that antisemitism is an illogical, delusional passion full of self-contradictions and absurd contentions. It doesn’t deserve the dignity of capitalization, which in English is reserved for proper names.

To cut a long story short, thus far the contribution of logical philosophy to metaphysics has been entirely negative. The verdict seems to be that, under logical scrutiny, the entire body of metaphysical doctrine consists either of tautology or nonsense. But this amounts to a total “debunking” of metaphysics only as it has been understood in the West—as consisting of meaningful statements conveying information about “transcendental objects.” Asian philosophy has never been of the serious opinion that metaphysical statements convey information of a positive character. Their function is not to denote “Reality” as an object of knowledge, but to “cure” a psychological process by which man frustrates and tortures himself with all kinds of unreal problems. To the Asian mind, “Reality” cannot be expressed; it can only be known intuitively by getting rid of unreality, of contradictory and absurd ways of thinking and feeling. The

Foundationally, fundamentalists believe that all goodness derives from their god, so the presence of anyone being good without their god is a constant reminder that something is wrong with their belief on the source of goodness. They fumble for other possibilities like the improbable idea that all atheists are bad or the absurd conclusion that atheists don't exist and instead, that atheists have just deluded themselves into thinking they are atheists. That's why fundamentalists react with such remarkable aversion and hate when confronted with the AHA's simple GOOD WITHOUT A GOD stickers, advertisements, and billboards. It's why they so vehemently characterize our positive personal statement as a personal attack on them.

Also, someone stating that an experience being experienced a certain way, takes away from the experience, is absurd to me. "If you've never been in the lake with no clothes on before, then you've never been in the lake" is an outrageous statement, and a false one. I would venture to guess that the experience would be the same, with or without clothes, due to the relatively unrestrictive nature of swimwear. To be fair though, because I do value fairness and demand it from others, I could be wrong about my assessment of this. I, myself, have never been in the lake.

Only after mathematics had been recognized as an autonomous interior constructional activity which, although it can be applied to an exterior world, neither in its origin nor in its methods depends on an exterior world, firstly all axioms became illusory, and secondly the criterion of truth or falsehood of a mathematical assertion was confined to mathematical activity itself, without appeal to logic or to hypothetical omniscient beings. An immediate consequence was that for a mathematical assertion a the two cases of truth and falsehood, formerly exclusively admitted, were replaced by the following three: (1) a has been proved to be true; (2) a has been proved to be absurd; (3) a has neither been proved to be true nor to be absurd, nor do we know a finite algorithm leading to the statement either that a is true or that a is absurd.

The metaethical theory known as emotivism argues that ethical statements never express truths or falsehoods, but rather, they merely express our emotional states—which are influenced by things like our cultural and experiential backgrounds, moods, personalities, and so on.

The Absolute can exercise its potential only through non-accidental accidents or chances. Chance, although almost accidental, is not accidental. In a predetermined world, chances would not be possible. Even if chances existed, they would only be appearances of chances and not real chances. In a world (universe) established based on its full potential, chance is compatible with determinism. This almost absurd statement becomes logical if observed from the point of view of the potential of the Absolute, which is predetermined. Absolute is not only absolute but also capable of infinity by exercising its infinite potential.

Russell’s Teapot (Celestial Teapot Analogy) We cannot equate Russell’s teapot idea with the idea of God. Although this idea is humorous, it isn't very sensible. If anybody without scientific credentials stated seriously that the teapot is circling the sun, the majority of people would think that a person stating that is either bipolar, schizophrenic, or suffers from some other mental illness. This kind of comparison is absurd. Comic and absurdist comparisons of this kind only muddy the waters. Proof or disproof of such a thing is unnecessary because almost everybody knows the teapot can't orbit the sun as freely as planets on a microcosmic or macro level. Regardless of Russel being aware that his example is nonsense, he still used it (and he states that). The point was not to prove anything but to make a funny remark to diminish the subject of the attack, God. It is a logical fallacy whenever we use such tactics or tricks because we use witty comments for lacking something more potent. If we make fun of some ideas, it does not mean they have no value. We cannot destroy an idea that has existed for millennia by witty but silly arguments. Carl Sagan made an even sillier argument about the undetectable dragon in his garage. To compare the idea of God to the teapot or a dragon in a garage is a useless way to refute an idea or argument with an “argument” (example) in the form of funny irony. I must emphasize that I admire Bertrand Russel and Carl Sagan for their ingenuity and insights. I also admire Bertrand Russell’s writing style because he could express complicated ideas and concepts in very readable and clear prose. There can be no comparison between the idea of God and a teapot floating around the Sun or between God and an unidentifiable dragon in the garage. We cannot base our arguments on the value of their wittiness because regardless of how witty the statement is, it has to stand the test of truth, not the test of wittiness. We can easily exclude the idea of a teapot floating in orbit around the sun as ridiculous. The same applies to the argument about the dragon in a garage. But can we exclude the idea of God from religious and theological thoughts and serious philosophical inquiries interested in discovering the truth about the world and God? We can easily refuse to accept a teapot or dragon in the garage arguments as serious arguments. However, we cannot a priori deny the legitimacy of the idea about God, at least not the deist one (or pantheistic).

When Jann Wenner, the hopelessly liberal founder of Rolling Stone magazine, was interviewing Bob Dylan in 2006, he was told that politicians cannot be counted on to solve problems. To him, the statement seemed absurd. “Who is going to solve them?” Wenner asked, incredulous. Dylan replied, “Our own selves2.” He’s exactly right. If we want things

After a moment to regain his composure, he propped himself up on his elbow to look down at me, desire still lurking in his mesmerizing eyes. “Alera? Are you…all right?” “Narian, we can’t do this.” I was more than a little shocked at the both of us. His brow furrowed, and he ran a hand through his disheveled hair. He took a breath and opened his mouth, then stopped, apparently unable to decide exactly what he wanted to say. “Why not?” “Because,” I said, pushing myself upright. “We’re not married!” He sat up as well and lit the lantern on my bedside table. I pulled my chemise back onto my shoulders and wrapped my arms around my legs while I waited for his reaction. “And marriage, that’s…important to you…for this,” he surmised, trying to work out the basis for my objection. “Yes,” I told him fervently. “Isn’t it to you?” He glanced at the bedclothes, as though he anticipated an unpleasant reaction to what he would say. “Well, no. We don’t have marriage in Cokyri.” My eyebrows shot upward. “You don’t have…marriage? Well then, how do you…I mean, where…where do your children come from?” “We just choose a partner,” he said, ignoring the absurdity of my question. “A woman chooses a man, and if he accepts, he is marked with a tattoo around his forearm. The tattoo is a great honor--men in Cokyri are proud to bear it.” “What about the church?” He shrugged, no longer worrying about how I might react. “Cokyri has no official religion. Some people seek the High Priestess’s approval to be bound, but they come to her of their own accord. Again, it is a choice.” “So…in order to be with me, all you would need is a tattoo?” I spoke tentatively, trying to absorb and understand his words. “Only to signify that I am yours and no one else’s. If that is what we both want.” His closing statement, though subtle, sough confirmation, his steel-blue eyes filled with love and longing. “I choose you,” I said, leaning toward him, and his mouth met mine with such ardor that my senses reeled all over again. He lay down with me on top of him, and it took all my strength of will to pull away. “But we have to be married.” He studied me, concluding that I truly believed in what I said. “Then let’s go get married.” “Now?” I blurted, eyes wide. “Is now a problem?

The best comedy paints an absurd picture. Something about the statement or scene is incongruent. Comic bickering about each other's view points is second best.

I'm not sure I'm drinking the right wine," Avery said, which confused Kane. Unguarded, he lowered his gaze to Avery, and then down to the wineglass, before looking at the bottle. Had he heard right? "I'm sorry?" Kane asked. "I'm guessing you have a wine room somewhere in this place. You keep coming through the back door over there with bottles of wine. I don't think this is truly a Montalcino. I'd like to see for myself." Kane narrowed his brow, opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again. Avery was already scooting out of the booth, coming to stand right in front of him. Avery was definitely taller than him…and why did that matter? No! Bad thoughts! This was a customer, nothing more. His height and gorgeous body had nothing to do with it. He focused on the absurdity of the man's last statement. Did Avery think they'd changed wines on him? Nothing else made sense.

Whenever there is a man of Tao his statements will look absurd. They are, because they don't fit in with your mind.

Reductio ad absurdum, or reduction to absurdity, is a form of argument that proves a statement by demonstrating that its opposite is absurd.

April 30 The Spontaneity of Love Love suffereth long, and is kind. . . . 1 Corinthians 13:4 (rv) Love is not premeditated, it is spontaneous, that is, it bursts up in extraordinary ways. There is nothing of mathematical certainty in Paul’s category of love. We cannot say—“Now I am going to think no evil; I am going to believe all things.” The characteristic of love is spontaneity. We do not settle statements of Jesus in front of us as a standard; but when His Spirit is having His way with us, we live according to His standard without knowing it, and on looking back we are amazed at the disinterestedness of a particular emotion, which is the evidence that the spontaneity of real love was there. In everything to do with the life of God in us, its nature is only discerned when it is past. The springs of love are in God, not in us. It is absurd to look for the love of God in our hearts naturally, it is only there when it has been shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. If we try to prove to God how much we love Him, it is a sure sign that we do not love Him. The evidence of our love for Him is the absolute spontaneity of our love, it comes naturally. In looking back we cannot tell why we did certain things, we did them according to the spontaneous nature of His love in us. The life of God manifests itself in this spontaneous way because the springs of love are in the Holy Ghost. (Romans 5:5)

Moreover, those who are foolish enough to try and deny the law of non-contradiction end up contradicting themselves in the process. Without the law of non-contradiction, a positive or negative statement can be entirely true and entirely false at the same time and in the same sense. If that were the case, words and propositional statements would mean nothing. Furthermore, to deny the laws of logic is to use a logic that is irrational. Thus, to deny the laws of logic is to argue in a self-referentially absurd manner.

Very well, then. We'll take it." "Now, wait just one moment," Gareth protested, growing angry. "I will not have my wife and daughter spending the night in a bawdy house!" Juliet took him aside, leaning close to him and tilting her face up to whisper in his ear:  "Gareth, I don't like this any more than you do, but it's only for one night, and it will save us some money." "We have plenty of money, we don't need to be frugal!" "That is the most absurd statement I've yet to hear you utter." He set his jaw. She continued, "You gave most of your money to the vicar, and what Perry and the duke gave us, though substantial, won't last forever. We cannot afford to be choosy, Gareth. Now, please — put aside your pride for a moment and be practical, would you?" "It has nothing to do with pride. I want to bring you to a hotel," he said sullenly. "A nice hotel. It's our wedding night, Juliet; you deserve no less." "A wedding night is a night just like any other," she said pragmatically, her unthinking words inadvertently cutting him to the bone. She saw the sudden hurt in his eyes and laid her hand on his wrist. "We don't have money to waste, Gareth." He stared at her, crushed by how lightly she seemed to regard the symbolic parts of marriage that he considered special — that she, had she loved him, would consider special, too. Was that how she rated their marriage, as well? Dispensable? Not worth some extra effort? He wondered, rather bitterly, if her marriage to Charles would have meant so little that she would have dishonored it by spending their wedding night in a brothel, as she was happy to do with theirs. Somehow he doubted it. "Very well, madam," he said, retreating into formal aloofness to disguise his hurt. "Have it your way, then."   ~~~~

January 27 Look Again and Think Take no thought for your life. Matthew 6:25 A warning which needs to be reiterated is that the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the lust of other things entering in, will choke all that God puts in. We are never free from the recurring tides of this encroachment. If it does not come on the line of clothes and food, it will come on the line of money or lack of money; of friends or lack of friends; or on the line of difficult circumstances. It is one steady encroachment all the time, and unless we allow the Spirit of God to raise up the standard against it, these things will come in like a flood. “Take no thought for your life.” “Be careful about one thing only,” says our Lord—“your relationship to Me.” Common sense shouts loud and says—“That is absurd, I must consider how I am going to live, I must consider what I am going to eat and drink.” Jesus says you must not. Beware of allowing the thought that this statement is made by One Who does not understand our particular circumstances. Jesus Christ knows our circumstances better than we do, and He says we must not think about these things so as to make them the one concern of our life. Whenever there is competition, be sure that you put your relationship to God first. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” How much evil has begun to threaten you to-day? What kind of mean[9] little imps have been looking in and saying—“Now what are you going to do next month—this summer?” “Be anxious for nothing,” Jesus says. Look again and think. Keep your mind on the “much more” of your Heavenly Father.

School vision statements often read something like, “We believe all kids can learn” or “life-long learners” or something silly like that. What an absurd thing to put in writing! “We, at Grassy Hill Elementary, believe all Kindergarteners can get taller” or “We, the Prospect Junior High cafeteria staff, believe that all kids can and will eat food.

Elias’s view of reality was distorted and that he actually believed he could talk his way out of the whole affair. He was trying to sell the court as he had sold FMC and Kerr-McGee. When the video stopped Elias’s testimony quickly deteriorated into the theater of the absurd. He rambled without prompting, his thoughts frequently disjointed and defiant. He maintained that the tank left AEI empty, and any statements attributed to him to the contrary were “fantasy.” He said the material trucked to Evergreen from AEI was actually Kerr-McGee material he had previously trucked to AEI to turn into fertilizer and not the cadmium-bearing FMC material. He blamed the workers for their own injuries. He called OSHA overzealous and said they found no violations. He blamed Bill Brugger for the Tesco American litigation. At every opportunity he elevated himself and his efforts to get AEI and Evergreen working, saying it took “fortitude.

There are explicit statements from various quarters of the magisterium, up to and including Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, asserting the rights of the secular to remain secular, of the Jews to remain Jews, of the protestants to remain protestants, and the schismatics eastern churches to remain in schism. How is it, then, that a Catholic faithful to immemorial Catholic tradition is to be taken to task for remaining Catholic? Talmudic Judaism, masonic secularism, and heterodox Christianity need not change at all, but Catholics must change all?!? This is not merely unfair, this is absurd! Beyond its absurdity lies an utter unnecessity: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and so is His Body, the Catholic Church! None who clings to Christ needs to repent his beliefs, to apologize for his beliefs, or to change his beliefs. The obedience demanded of the Catholic is permanent, therefore, the Church to which he offers his obedience must be permanent in her teaching, in her practices, and in her rituals! (page 366)

and if you’ve ever had a shot you know that the statement “Doctors can’t hurt you” is simply absurd.

The lesson? No problem is too large for a sprint. Yes, this statement sounds absurd, but there are two big reasons why it’s true. First, the sprint forces your team to focus on the most pressing questions. Second, the sprint allows you to learn from just the surface of a finished product.

Hochschild repeats the urban legend that Léopold burned all the EIC documents, going “to extraordinary lengths to try to erase potentially incriminating evidence.” Quite the opposite: Léopold was proud of the EIC and went to extraordinary lengths to leave behind an extensive record. The testimony of his military aide that Hochschild cites about “burning the State archives” and turning “most of the Congo state records to ash” was a misunderstanding: what the aide saw burning were ruined and unreadable papers among the thousands of documents that came back in crates from the Congo in 1908. Léopold left behind 14 trunks filled with his personal letters and financial statements. Everything was carefully cataloged in “a vast room that looked like a post office,” the aide recalled. Some of it went missing in the turmoil of World War II before resurfacing in the basement of a house in 1983. Just last year, researchers at the Royal Museum for Central Africa who work on the EIC archives published a new book, The Congo Free State: What Could Archives Tell Us?

In mathematics no truths could be recognized which had not been experienced, and that for a mathematical assertion a the two cases formerly exclusively admitted were replaced by the following four: 1. a has been proved to be true; 2. a has been proved to be false, i.e. absurd; 3. a has neither been proved to be true nor to be absurd, but an algorithm is known leading to a decision either that a is true or that a is absurd; 4. a has neither been proved to be true nor to be absurd, nor do we know an algorithm leading to the statement either that a is true or that a is absurd.

In mathematics no truths could be recognized which had not been experienced, and that for a mathematical assertion a the two cases formerly exclusively admitted were replaced by the following four: 1. a has been proved to be true; 2. a has been proved to be false, i.e. absurd; 3. a has neither been proved to be true nor to be absurd, but an algorithm is known leading to a decision either that a is true or that a is absurd; 4. a has neither been proved to be true nor to be absurd, nor do we know an algorithm leading to the statement either that a is true or that a is absurd.

If a person says, “I don't want money”, it is equivalent to saying: “I don't want to serve my family, friends, and compatriots.” This statement is absurd, but it is also absurd to sever the relationship between the two!

I have pointed out that the concept current among most flying-saucer enthusiasts that the unidentified flying objects are simply craft used by visitors from another planet is naive. The explanation is too simple-minded to account for the diversity of the reported behavior of the occupants and their percieved interaction with human beings. Could this concept serve precisely a diversionary role in masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the technology that gives rise to the sightings? [...] Here then, is a brief statement of five new propositions based upon the material we have reviewed so far: 1. The things we call unidentified flying objects are neither objects nor flying. They can dematerialize, as some reliable photographs seem to show, and they violate the laws of motion as we know them. 2. UFOs have been seen throughout history and have consistently recieved (or provided) their own explanation within the framework of each culture. In antiquity their occupants were regarded as gods; in medieval times, as magicians; in the nineteenth century, as scientific geniuses; in our own time, as interplanetary travelers. (Statements made by occupants of the 1897 airship included such declarations as "We are from Kansas" and even "We are from anywhere... but we'll be in Greece tomorrow.") 3. UFO reports are not necessarily caused by visits from space travelers. The phenomenon could be a manifestation of a much more complex technology. If time and space are not as simple in structure as physicists have assumed until now, then the question "where do they come from?" may be meaningless; they could come from a place in time. If consciousness can be manifested outside the body, then the range of hypotheses can be even wider. 4. The key to an understanding of the phenomenon lies in the psychic effects it produces (or the psychic awareness it makes possible) in its observers. Their lives are often deeply changed, and they develop unusual talents with which they may find it difficult to cope. The proportion of witnesses who do come forward and publish accounts of these experiences is quite low; most of them choose to remain silent. 5. Contact between human percipients and the UFO phenomenon always occurs under conditions controlled by the latter. Its characteristic feature is a factor of absurdity that leads to a rejection of the story by the upper layers of the target society and an absorption at a deep unconscious level of the symbols conveyed by the encounter. The mechanism of this resonance between the UFO symbol and the archetypes of the human unconscious has been abundantly demonstrated by Carl Jung, whose book Flying Saucers makes many references to the age-old significance of the signs in the sky. I am not regarding the phenomenon of the UFOs as the unknowable, uncontrollable game of a higher order of beings. Neither is it likely, in my view, that an encounter with UFOs would add to the human being anything it did not already possess. Everything works as if the phenomenon were the product of a technology that followed well-defined rules and patterns, though fantastic by ordinary human standards. It has so far posed no apparent threat to national defense and seems to be indifferent to the welfare of individual witnesses, leading many to assume that we may be dealing with a still-undiscovered natural occurrence ("It cannot be intelligent," say some people, "because it does not attack us!"). But its impact in shaping man's long-term creativity and unconscious impulses is probably enormous. The fact that we have no methodology to deal with such an impact is only an indication of how little we know about our own psychic world.

You’re supposed to report the news, she grumbled. Not spread vicious rumors in the form of questions. Martín had always believed in the importance of responsible journalism as a cornerstone of freedom and democracy, and so she was routinely disappointed by journalists who incited controversy by broadcasting ideas that were patently absurd—all the while avoiding legal repercussions by simply turning every ludicrous statement into a leading question.

The absurdity of many UFO stories and of many religious visions is not a superficial logical mistake. It may be the key to their function. According to Major Murphy, the confusion in the UFO mystery may have been put there deliberately to achieve certain results. One of these results has been to keep scientists away. The other is to create the conditions for a new form of social control, a change in Man’s perception of his place in the universe. Are his theories fantastic? Before we decide, let us review a few other facts. We need to examine more closely the political connections. Paris Flammonde, in his well-documented Age of Flying Saucers, remarked that “a great many of the contactees purvey philosophies which are tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones.”1 A catalogue of contactee themes, compiled from interviews I have conducted, includes the following. Intellectual abdication. The widespread belief that human beings are incapable of solving their own problems, and that extraterrestrial intervention is imperative to save us “in spite of ourselves.” The danger in such a philosophy is that it makes its believers dependent on outside forces and discourages personal responsibility: why should we worry about the problems around us, if the Gods from Outer Space are about to solve them? Racist philosophy. The pernicious suggestion that some of us on the Earth are of extraterrestrial descent and therefore constitute a “higher race.” The dangers inherent in this belief should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t forgotten the genocides of World War II, executed on the premise that some races were somehow “purer” or better than others. (Let us note in passing that Adamski’s Venusian, the Stranger of the Canigou seen by Bordas, and many other alleged extraterrestrials were all tall Aryan types with long blond hair.) Technical impotence. The statement that the birth of civilization on this planet resulted not from the genius and ability of mankind, but from repeated assistance by higher beings. Archaeologists and anthropologists are constantly aware of the marvelous skill with which the “Ancient Engineers” (to use L. Sprague de Camp’s phrase) developed the tools of civilization on all continents. No appeal to superior powers is necessary to explain the achievements of early culture. The belief expressed by the contactees reveals a tragic lack of trust on their part in human ability. Social utopia. Fantastic economic theories, including the belief that a “world economy” can be created overnight, and that democracy should be abolished in favor of Utopian systems, usually dictatorial in their outlook.

An idle brain is the Devil's workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a rain it certainly is not idle.

He stopped and turned around, smiling at me for the first time. “All right, do tell me, please, which of the two is greater, do you think: the Prophet Muhammad or the Sufi Bistami?” “What kind of a question is that?” I said. “How can you compare our venerated Prophet, may peace be upon him, the last in the line of prophets, with an infamous mystic?” A curious crowd had gathered around us, but the dervish didn’t seem to mind the audience. Still studying my face carefully, he insisted, “Please think about it. Didn’t the Prophet say, ‘Forgive me, God, I couldn’t know Thee as I should have,’ while Bistami pronounced, ‘Glory be to me, I carry God inside my cloak’? If one man feels so small in relation to God while another man claims to carry God inside, which of the two is greater?” My heart pulsed in my throat. The question didn’t seem so absurd anymore. In fact, it felt as if a veil had been lifted and what awaited me underneath was an intriguing puzzle. A furtive smile, like a passing breeze, crossed the lips of the dervish. Now I knew he was not some crazy lunatic. He was a man with a question—a question I hadn’t thought about before. “I see what you are trying to say,” I began, not wanting him to hear so much as a quaver in my voice. “I’ll compare the two statements and tell you why, even though Bistami’s statement sounds higher, it is in fact the other way round.” “I am all ears,” the dervish said. “You see, God’s love is an endless ocean, and human beings strive to get as much water as they can out of it. But at the end of the day, how much water we each get depends on the size of our cups. Some people have barrels, some buckets, while some others have only got bowls.” As I spoke, I watched the dervish’s expression change from subtle scorn to open acknowledgment and from there into the soft smile of someone recognizing his own thoughts in the words of another. “Bistami’s container was relatively small, and his thirst was quenched after a mouthful. He was happy in the stage he was at. It was wonderful that he recognized the divine in himself, but even then there still remains a distinction between God and Self. Unity is not achieved. As for the Prophet, he was the Elect of God and had a much bigger cup to fill. This is why God asked him in the Qur’an, Have we not opened up your heart? His heart thus widened, his cup immense, it was thirst upon thirst for him. No wonder he said, ‘We do not know You as we should,’ although he certainly knew Him as no other did.

Donald has always been able to get away with making blanket statements (“I know more about [fill in the blank] than anybody, believe me” or the other iteration, “Nobody knows more about [fill in the blank] than me”); he’s been allowed to riff about nuclear weapons, trade with China, and other things about which he knows nothing; he’s gone essentially unchallenged when touting the efficacy of drugs for the treatment of COVID-19 that have not been tested or engaging in an absurd, revisionist history in which he’s never made a mistake and nothing is his fault.

Lincoln found the clearest statement of that spirit in the Declaration of Independence, with its claim for the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln’s interpretation of the phrase became the centerpiece of his narrative about the nation. The Founders, Lincoln said, in adopting the Declaration, did not declare that all people were at that time living in a state of equality. To say so would have been absurd, given not only the widespread bondage of black people but the restricted suffrage of many whites and the legal inequality of women. Nor did the Founders declare that they intended to secure complete equality in their lifetimes. The spirit of the Declaration, Lincoln said, was meant to be realized—to the greatest extent possible—by each succeeding generation. The Founders cast off despotism and created the framework for a free republic, invoking, as they did, not arguments of mere self-interest but the ideal of natural, universal, God-given rights. “They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society,” Lincoln said, “which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for . . . even though never perfectly attained.

No problem is too large for a sprint. Yes, this statement sounds absurd, but there are two big reasons why it’s true. First, the sprint forces your team to focus on the most pressing questions. Second, the sprint allows you to learn from just the surface of a finished product.

Roosevelt thought such statements were nonsense and made certain his feelings were known in an address to Congress. “The overwhelming mass of our people cherish a lively regard and respect for the people of Japan … To shut them out from the public schools is a wicked absurdity, when there are no first-class colleges in the land, including the universities and colleges of California, which do not gladly welcome Japanese students and on which Japanese students do not reflect credit … Throughout Japan Americans are well treated, and any failure on the part of Americans at home to treat the Japanese with a like courtesy and consideration is by just so much a confession of inferiority in our civilization.” He even suggested at one point that Japanese immigrants should be allowed to become naturalized citizens.