Extremis Quotes

“Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.”

“Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit – without hope, without witness, without reward. Virtue is only virtue in extremis.”

“Later he´ll be drunk in extremis and will only be able to speak the esperanto of alcoholics, which is a language full of stutterings from the geological layers of our animal ancestors”

“A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.”

“Dictators have no peers; only sycophants to do their bidding. That is how it was in Nazi Germany. And so it is wherever autocrats rule in government or in business. Dictators and braggarts cause their own demise, because when they finally are in extremis, they have only their lackeys to call on, while their adversaries attract the best of men.”

“Truth in the heart of heresy”