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The Tibetan missionaries in their mood of bright confidence disconcerted the imperial governments by laughing the new movement into frustration. For a sham faith cannot stand ridicule.

Olaf Stapledon

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Olaf Stapledon
Age: 64 †
Born: 1886
Born: May 10
Died: 1950
Died: September 6
Paramedic
Peace Activist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Faith
Frustration
Cannot
Governments
Government
Bright
Disconcerted
Mood
Sham
Confidence
Missionaries
Laughing
Imperial
Movement
Tibetan
Stand
Ridicule

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In you, humanity is precarious and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
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I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin.
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In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid.
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So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
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In a sick world even the hale are sick.
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We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery.
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That strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
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It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit... We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be.
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Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?
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In fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.
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A nation . . . is just a society for hating foreigners.
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It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.
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My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.
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To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident... themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.
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In that instant when I had seen... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.
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Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.
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