From Martin Amis, interview on www.cbc.ca, May 7/08 (re: his The Second Plane):

Nabokov, in one of his essays, says, “I think like a genius; I write like a distinguished man of letters; and I talk like an idiot.”

and also, from the same interview:

“...individuals are on the whole very manageable. It's conglomerates of individuals that give us the world's ills. Part of [Islam] has been taken over by an ideology. It's an ideology grafted onto a religion; it's two-ply.

“It's a feeling of mine that an ideology is always going to be violent; religion not at all, necessarily. When you commit yourself to a total system of belief, a system that will answer all questions - which, when you think about it, no system can do - once you make that leap, it feels very empowering, because you're with the like-minded. But it will always tend to be violent. When the orthodoxy is challenged, it can't defend it with mind alone, because there's such a commitment to the irrational. The response is always likely to be glandular. It's always likely to include body heat, because you need the body to defend, because you can't do it with mind alone.

The next one is from Dan Gardner, author of Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear:

Flying is safer than driving. It is so much safer that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one jet a week, a passenger on a plane would be more likely to arrive than someone in a car. (After 9/11) traffic fatalities climbed. One researcher calculated that the exodus from America's airports claimed 1,595 lives.

Now, two from Ben Franklin:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. As quoted in Benjamin Franklin: An Exploration of a Life of Science and Service (1938) by Carl Van Doren, pg. 777

The second is from a letter to Abbé Morellet (1779):

We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it.

This one is a longer pasage by Homyouin Sirizi, published in the online magazine Tehran Avenue,in July 2008. He is writing about the Iranian situation, and referring (I presume) to some Shi'ites' expectation of the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: http://tehranavenue.com/article.php?id=815

A hero is a symbol of failure, the manifestation of a disconsolate society that seeks the embodiment of its dreams and wishes not in group formations but in individual stalwarts. A Hero is a projection of collective impotency. It is as such that a hero always appears as super-human -- a tragic figure bound to failure. The need for heroes is on the one hand an indication of a society's inability to achieve its objectives collectively and at the same time the desire for individual fulfillment of potentials. Perhaps it is not the hero per se that appeals to us but the individualism that s/he represents. Masses are conglomerations of individual bodies but a society is a collective. Perhaps the appearance of the hero -- an ideal or a paragon -- indicates a desire to move away from mass society. A hero preserves the ideals of a society still incapable of forming social organizations.

The destruction of a hero, the playing down of his/her role, is detrimental to a society that that dreams of liberation. One of the ways to convince a society of the impossibility of change is to demystify its heroes. A hero soon becomes a symbol which is subsequently used as an instrument in the hands of despotic powers. The appearance of a hero in the social horizon at first serves as a release mechanism of individual aspirations and social intensities. S/he becomes a magnate, bringing together scattered ideologies and militant individuals together. As such, a utopian society directs all its demands to and heaps all its responsibilities on the hero. When these responsibilities are divested from citizens and invested in a hero, the road is paved for despotism and repression. The apparatus of power learns how to demystifies its heroes, reducing them to commodities, void of any power to inspire the masses.

And the last one is from the website of occultist and Tarot fan Mary K. Greer, http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/manly-palmer-hall/:

The way I see it, there are three unacknowledged magical “initiations.” The first is when we come across a teaching or practice and have to determine if it contains a truth or way to which we want to commit ourselves. The second initiation is when we discover we’ve been betrayed by ‘lies’ and we have to decide to leave or continue the work. The third initiation is when we discover that the lie itself contains a greater truth. The second initiation is betrayal and until we have confronted betrayal and moved through it we will never encounter the third initiation. We experience these three initiations all the time, although a fourth is proposed that takes us beyond the world of truth and lies.