bending_sickle | Let's start, then, with some simple examples...*

How to be a Guru, Chapter 2: The Other Way Round

"Let's start, then, with some simple examples of the world's crazy and contradictory nature, and proceed gradually to more complicated ones."

"(By the way, I should like to remark in brackets there have been five peope whose influence was fundamental and who changed humanity's image of itseld and the surround world: Jesus, Newton, Darwin, Freud and Einstein. As it happens, three Jews and two Englishmen.)"

"Moral indignation is the most suspect of all human emotions."

"The greatest fear of all humanity is loneliness and isolation. We are social animals, we must belong to a herd. The herd means acceptance, warmth and some safety. You may join the Pink Rockers, the skinheads, a criminal gang or White's - it doesn't matter which, but you must belong."

"The prophets of doom, the seemingly timid writers, the revolutionary artists, the philosophers who dare to turn against the tide of accepted beliefs - men who dare to be alone - these are the real heroes."

"Hitler is too horrible and too near to us to take a lighthearted view of. Nonetheless, one cannot fail to notice the yawning gap, the chasm between his intentions and his achievements. He meant Germany to rule the world and suceeded in breaking it up into three parts; he was determined to destroy Bolshevism and brought the Soviet Union into the centre of Europe, strengthening it beyond Stalin's wildest dreams, and helped to make it one of the two super-powers; he meant to make the Germans the admired master-race of the world and turned them - for a while - into the most detested and despised race: to use his own phraseology, into theJews of the world. That Germany has suceeded in shedding this imaged after his ignomious death, has nothing to do with him. He meant to destroy the Jews and while he carried this intention hideously far, the fact remains that no single individual contributed more to the establishment and immediate recognition of Israel than Adolf Hitler."

"Their [preachers and philosophers] advice amounted to no more than this: if the world was full of better people, it would be a better world. Pretty obvious, we have all been thinking for the last five thousand years. But we were, as usual, mistaken. It is quite possible, indeed likely, that if we had been a nobler and more virtuous breed the earth would be an even more rotten place than it is.

The sad truth is that virtuous and noble intentions have been responsible for more crimes, wickedness and suffering than any criminal or tyrant has achieved."

"Our mistakes reveal the truth while our well-considered statements often obscure of hide it; people are not at all what they seem to be: the weak are often strong, the hero may be a weakling; the fragile and myopic seeker for the truth is often a real hero; the self-righteous moralist is a crank or a phoney; the men trying to be good caused more pain, suffering and injustince than men trying to be evil; earnest believers in religion and dogma have caused and are causing more suffering and bloodshed than all the depraved criminals of all the ages put together."

* How to be a Guru, George Mikes