I don't believe in failure. It's not failure if you enjoy the process.
The whole history of religion is a history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence.
I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying
the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I
now enjoy.
You can’t lose faith you never had to begin with.”
Ah. So you never believed in the Bright at all?”
Of course I believed. Even now I believe, in principle. But when I was sixteen, I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priests had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.”
Is the proposed operation likely to succeed?
What might be the consequences of failure?
Is it in the realm of practicability in terms of materiel and supplies?
Failure? Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? Failure—the possibilities do not exist”.
The world and the devil fight against us believers, because we will not wear their mask of hypocrisy, under which gross wickedness may be committed.
Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.
You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.
We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry. Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man. But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth or cease to exist.