“If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.”

— C. J. Cherryh

Chanur's Legacy (1992)

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C. J. Cherryh 24

United States science fiction and fantasy author 1942

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 4

“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Source: A Dish of Orts
Context: A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the mind of its composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to another of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is a wild dance, with a terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but as yet restraining her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
I will go farther. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding — the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.

“Wise is he who this hour, not year by year,
Makes himself safeguards, antidotes and shields
Against the weapons death or fortune wields.”

Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet

XXXI, 2
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

“Succes is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can't lose.”

Bill Gates book The Road Ahead

The Road Ahead (1995)
Variant: Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

“The average guy is fairly smart, if you give him the ability to make decisions for himself. That's the whole premise of America, and that's why America has prospered, and it prospers because if the average guy can get information, he can make his own decisions.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, Larry King Live (2000)

“Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

“[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

"One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)

“Donald Trump just has more courage. Whatever you might think of him, and I don’t think much of him, but he has more courage than his opponents…”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

David Brooks, as quoted in "Shields and Brooks on the GOP push to stop Trump" http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/shields-and-brooks-on-the-gop-push-to-stop-trump/ (4 March 2016), PBS NewsHour
2010s

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

“If you're up against a smart opponent, make him think himself to death.”

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