fortune's fickle favours........................

     If men were able to exercise complete control over all their circumstances, or if continuous good fortune were always their lot, they would never be prey to superstition.  But since they are often reduced to such straits as to be without any resources, and their immoderate greed for fortune's fickle favours often make them the wretched victims of alternating hopes and fears, the result is that, for the most part, their credulity knows no bounds.  In critical times they are swayed this way or that by the slightest impulse, especially so when they are wavering between the emotions of hope and fear; yet at other times they are overconfident, boastful, and arrogant.

-Baruch Spinoza, from the preface to Theological-Political Treatise, Second Edition as translated by Samuel Shirley