There is no great religious leader--from the Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther--who offered people what they want. On...ly what they need. But television is not well-suited to offering people what they need. It is "user friendly." It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cats exercise ... a magic influence upon highly developed men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces of the animal kin...gdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries have been the favorite animal of a Mohammed, Cardinal Richlieu, Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the ...divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why should all the major religions of the modern world include a crucial encounter with wilderness--Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed in ...the desert mountains, Siddhartha in the jungle? And why should the predominant modern view of the origin and development of life have arisen from the five-year wilderness voyage of a Victorian amateur naturalist named Charles Darwin? There evidently is more to wilderness than meets the eye--more than water, timber, minerals, the materials of physical civilized existence.... Placing Darwin in the tradition of Moses and Jesus may seem heresy from both the Judeo-Christian and scientific viewpoints, but I think the roles played by the three figures have been similar. They wrenched their respective cultures out of a complacency that amounted to self-worship and thrust them in new directions that (if not always entirely beneficial) enlarged the human perspective. Moses forced his society to accept a unifying law; Jesus forced his to accept the unity of all humanity; Darwin forced his to accept the unity of all life. I doubt whether any of the three would have been able to influence his society if he had not been fortified by a season in the wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Zhivago: It seems you bombed the wrong village. Strelnikov: They always say that. And what does it matter? A village betrays ...us, a village is burned. The point made. Zhivago: Your point. Their village.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.... The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom,... power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am convinced that the best service a retired general can perform is to turn in his tongue along with his suit, and to mothball h...is opinions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »