Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does.”
Un chagrin de passage (1994, A Fleeting Sorrow, translated 1995)
“Destiny was apparently a word describing an individual’s desperate need for certainty.”
Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 12 (p. 349)
The Opium of Intellectuals (1955), Conclusion: The End of the Ideological Age?
“When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.”
Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
“When you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win.”
As quoted by Robert C. Martin in Software Development magazine (September 2005), p. 60
From 1980s onwards, Only Integrity is Going to Count (1983)
Context: I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, "Your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn't know we had an option. I feel so much better." They say, "Your optimism." And I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don't tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I'm talking about.
