Etienne Vermeersch Quotes

“Don't believe me, think for yourself.”

“Enjoy your successes, but also bear your setbacks.”

“Forgetting is not a lack of memory, but a lack of interest.”

“I am not claiming that my understanding is always correct, but it is the result of honest research. I accept that others come to a different conclusion, but I do hope that they too have done their homework.”

“I once said in a TV show that I visited a prostitute, but my wife knew that for a long time. There was no relationship involved, I just had to know what that was.”

“I would have an important part of development cooperation distributed in premiums to women who have themselves sterilised.”

“If you don't like a particular individual anymore, you have to drop him. The last thing you should do is worry about him, because then you give him too much credit.”

“If your son and that of your neighbor fall into the water, you have the right to first get your own son out of the water. But if your son can swim and the neighbor's can't, then a humane ethic requires that you take your neighbor's child out of the water first, and then yours.”

“It is extremely dangerous to trivialize the term 'racism'.”

“Migrants in our country have too many children.”

“No one ever went to Lourdes without an arm and returned with an arm.”

“Not being there doesn't hurt. I don't understand what that is, being afraid of death.”

“Nothing is better known than what is after death. Nothing.”

“Of course, if everything must have a cause, this also applies to God; if God can exist on his own, why not the world?”

“On a finite globe, the population cannot continue to grow indefinitely.”

“Paranormal gifts and gnomes have a very peculiar quality: as soon as you look at them, they disappear.”

“People who believe in astrology? You should immediately subtract them 30 IQ points.”

“The line between science and pseudoscience cannot be sharply drawn. Nevertheless, the distinction remains meaningful. The boundary between maturity and immaturity is also not sharp; yet that distinction is useful.”

“The only allowed technique to cheat during my exams is telepathy.”

“There have been centuries and centuries
in which I have not lived, and there will be centuries and centuries in which I do not live.”

“To me every person is an intellectual, every person who thinks about the way he lives with other people.”

“We are a flower that opens for a moment and then withers and it's done.”

“When I criticize Christian texts I am an antichrist, when I criticize communism I am an agent of capitalism, when I criticize antisemitism I am a leftist Marxist. I've heard everything.”

“Whoever believes in God does not have to be afraid and whoever does not believe in God does not have to be afraid at all.”

“With my fight for contraception, abortion and euthanasia I can say that I have moved a pebble in the river. For the result, I give everything away, all academic pretensions.”