Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut
So, this Article was sent to me by Wretch himself, who has been afk for several months.
An interesting piece of wisdom quoted from an Article by Kurt Vonnegut:
“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”
The Context for this quote is discussing Mel Gibson’s “The Passion”, but I think there is a larger wisdom.
Another excerpt that I really enjoyed was as follows:
“And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.”
I’m sure there are plenty who disagree with him, for many reasons, some real, and some contrived, but nobody can disagree with his knowledge of the history of Zero.
The final quote I’ll post from this Article is as follows:
“That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.”
Although this Article is a little less linear than I generally enjoy (a trait Vonnegut is known for among fans and critics alike), I found it to be both insightful, and even fun in a beating up the bully of the school sort of way.
I guess that says as much as anything about how I feel about the current state of affairs.
****** Correction to article *******
“A lot of people think Jesus said [Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.], because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.”
This is close, but Confucius actually said “Do not unto others what you would not have others do to you”.
On the Sermon on the mount, it is said (in the NIV Bible) that the actual words of Jesus (The complete quote) are as follows: “do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets”, so the two quotes, while similar both in context and content are indeed different.
I feel compelled to point this out, only to show that it is possible, even plausible that if Jesus did say those words, he was paraphrasing Confucius.