Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
- Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.
"One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide." -Saul Alinsky
Thank you for posting that. I like this quote very much, having started thinking about Alinsky when I started noticing references to his supposed "8 levels of control" for turning the world into a totalitarian zombie factory, beginning with "Control healthcare and you control the people". Does this sound like the same Saul Alinsky? No - it's a myth that started circulating in 2013, and I showed just how far it is from the truth (and how widely it is circulated) in http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/myths-about-saul-alinsky... (read more)