Goebel Gone Global

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

“I marvel at there young people: drinking their coffee, they tell clear, plausible stories. If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren’t embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I’d fall over myself. It’s true that no one has bothered about how I spend mytime for a long while. When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.”

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

“Success has always been a great liar.”

“As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.”

“Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

“Television, radio, and magazines are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”

“Anyone sincerely interested in philosophy must be interested in the nature of mathematics, and I hope to show why. As for those who persist in thinking otherwise - let them burn in hell!”