You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric HofferRead
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You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.
We are confident. We have ourselves. We know how to sacrifice. We know how to work. We know how to combat the forces that oppose us. But even more than that, we are true believers in the whole idea of justice. Justice is so much on our side, that that is going to see us through.
There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
In this life struggle, here I am among you fully cognizant that a true believer has no fear of what God has ordained for him. Those who are visited by fear live only for their present, under the illusion that the world began with them and will end with their departure.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
One might equate growing up with a mistrust of words. A mature person trusts his eyes more than his ears. Irrationality often manifests itself in upholding the word against the evidence of the eyes. Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
A man asked Muhammad what was the mark whereby he might know the reality of his faith. Muhammad said, 'If thou derive pleasure from the good which thou hast performed and thou be grieved for the evil which thou hast committed, thou art a true believer.' The man said. 'In what doth a fault really consist' Muhammad said, 'when action pricketh thy conscience, forsake it.'
Just as the 99% of Soviet citizens who supported the Soviet regime in 1985 was no indication of what the people inside the USSR really thought, the army of true believers that we think we see in the Arab world is an illusion.
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding.
Instead of working so hard to prove the skeptics wrong, it makes a lot more sense to delight the true believers. _x000D_ They deserve it, after all, and they're the ones that are going to spread the word for you.
When you practice reporting for as long as I have, you keep yourself at a distance from True Believers. Either conservatives or liberals or Democrats or Republicans.
Startups are painful, stressful and at times demoralizing. You need to be a true believer in the vision of what you are doing. You need to passionate about it and love what you’re doing. If you don’t, there is no way you can sustain the hours, stress and disappointment. There’s no way you’re going to be able to convince investors, customers and most importantly recruit a world-class team if you not building something you think is going to change the world.
But would we know, whether the pretended prophet had really attained a just sentiment of morals? Let us attend to his narration; and we shall soon find, that he bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far only as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers.
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
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