The result of what Kennedy did can be understood by analogy. It is as if he created a building named, 'A man on the moon in ten years,' and inside the building he put offices for all the various ideas, positions, notions and people that had to do with space flight. The first office inside the front door of the building in 1961 would have been called, 'it can't be done.' This office would have been inhabited by the skeptics and the cynics.A content or position is threatened by any opposite position. Given two opposing positions, only one can survive. On the other hand, a context gives space to, it literally allows, it even encourages, positions that are apparently the opposite. In fact, the most important position in a newly-created context is the position which appears to oppose the context.
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The problems of the world cannot possible be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
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...although both the Academics and the Pyrrhonian Skeptics say that they believe some things, yet here too the difference between the two philosophies is quite plain. For the word believe has different meanings; it means not to resist but simply to follow without any strong impulse or inclination, as the boy is said to believe his tutor; but sometimes it means to assent to a thing of deliberate choice and with a kind of sympathy due to strong desire, as when the incontinent man believes him who approves of an extravagant mode of life. Since, therefore, Carneades and Cleitomachus declare that a strong inclination accompanies their credence
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Modern cynics and skeptics ... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
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I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
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Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
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The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
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Skeptics are never deceived.
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