{"quotes":[{"text":"It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! And chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.","author":"Wilhelm Reich","tags":["celibacy","christianity","corruption","dictatorship","freedom","french-revolution","freud","galileo","hitler","inquisition","jesus","lenin","marriage","marx","nietzsche","responsibility","socialism","stalin","subhuman"],"id":64552,"author_id":"Wilhelm+Reich"},{"text":"The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years. ","author":"Tim Maudlin","tags":["atheism","biblical","big-bang","cosmology","creation-myth","earth","evolution","galileo","galileo-galilei","genesis","homo-sapiens","mythology","science","universe"],"id":109392,"author_id":"Tim+Maudlin"},{"text":"We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["anthropocentrism","atheism","enlightenment","galileo","geocentricism","god","heliocentricism","nature","reason","religion","science","souls"],"id":174004,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"We're better than Galileo. Because he's dead.","author":"Jenny Lawson","tags":["better","dead","galileo","humor","inspirational","jenny-lawson"],"id":183749,"author_id":"Jenny+Lawson"},{"text":"After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.","author":"Franz Cumont","tags":["astrology","astronomy","copernicus","galileo","galileo-galilei","heleocentricm","johannes-kepler","kepler","mystery","nicolaus-copernicus","pseudoscience","science"],"id":185559,"author_id":"Franz+Cumont"},{"text":"Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.","author":"Ken Robinson","tags":["copernicus","creativity","galileo","intelligence","kepler","paradigm"],"id":194285,"author_id":"Ken+Robinson"},{"text":"Misunderstood! It is a right fool's word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.","author":"Ralph Waldo Emerson","tags":["copernicus","galileo","genius","greatness","jesus","luther","misunderstood"],"id":228423,"author_id":"Ralph+Waldo+Emerson"},{"text":"Actually, what we really need to remember about Galileo is that most of the people who use his name in argument could barely spell it, let alone tell us what actually happened to the man. His case is used over and over again because critics can't think of any other scientists who were mistreated by the Church. And in this instance they're right. There may have been some people in the scientific world who did not enjoy Church support and were even challenged by Catholicism but, sorry to disappoint, there weren't very many of them. The Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery, and those who refer to Galileo tend to forget that Louis Pasteur, the inventor of pasteurization, was a devout Catholic, as was Alexander Fleming, who gave us penicillin. Or Father Nicolaus Copernicus, who first proposed the theory of the earth revolving around the sun - this was precisely what Galileo stated, but Copernicus taught it as theory and not fact. Or Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, who proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. In the field of acceleration, Fr. Giambattista Riccioli changed the way we understand that particular science; the father of modern Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher, and the Yugoslavian Fr. Roger Boscovich was the founder of modern atomic theory.","author":"Michael Coren","tags":["church","galileo","science"],"id":259869,"author_id":"Michael+Coren"},{"text":"Galileo, yet men turn around women!","author":"Ljupka Cvetanova","tags":["aphorism","around-me","around-the-world","attraction","galileo","galileo-galilei","give-me","give-me-a-reason","give-me-love","give-me-the-strength","life-rule","like","like-me","love","love-me","love-rule","lust","men","no-rule","quote","rule","rules-to-live-by","saying","women","yet-it-turns"],"id":260706,"author_id":"Ljupka+Cvetanova"},{"text":"The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise and poor Ra lost his divinity.","author":"Ashwin Sanghi","tags":["copernicus","divinity","galileo","god","mythology","sun"],"id":304811,"author_id":"Ashwin+Sanghi"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}