Wisdumb Rock

• Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. — Hanlon's razor (1980); but see: You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity. — Robert Heinlein, "Logic of Empire" (1941).
• … the measure of friendship isn't your capacity to not harm but you[r] capacity to forgive … — Davan Macintire on friendship in Something*Positive, by R. K. Milholland
• … forgiveness is one of the many horrible side effects of loving someone. — Faye Macintire on forgiveness in Something*Positive, by R. K. Milholland
• Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. — Groucho Marx
• … we should catch young people before they become CEOs, investment bankers, consultants, and money managers, and do our best to poison their minds with humanity. — Kurt Vonnegut
• The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little. — Franklin D. Roosevelt
• The rich aren't working hard enough because they're not being paid enough; the poor aren't working hard enough because they're being paid too much? — attributed to J. K. Galbraith, satirizing neocon capitalism
• You need … to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder. — Eugene V. Debs, American socialist leader in early 20th century. NB: Debs was convicted, imprisoned, and disenfranchised for this speech against World War I, delivered on June 16, 1918.
• Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner – people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: girls, finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs. — Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat, to his daughters. Quoted in a review in: Robert Kuttner, "Starving for Your Job", The American Prospect, 2005-06-06.
• First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. — Gandhi
• Yogi Berra:
  • When you get to a fork in the road, take it.
  • You can observe a lot by watching.
  • Never answer an anonymous letter.
  • The first 90% of any trip takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90%.
  • Prediction is hard, especially when it's about the future.
  • What? You mean right now? — in response to "What time is it?"
• There is a fine line between paranoia and narcissism, and some people live on both sides of it. — Mark Oppenheimer, "Free Bob Avakian! Oh, He's Already Free? Never Mind.", Boston Globe, 27-Jan-2008, Ideas Section, p. E1.
• Well, most politicians have nothing against reason, but they won't go out of their way to visit it. — linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, interviewed in Anna Mundow, "The Interview: with Geoffrey Nunberg", Boston Globe, 30-July-2006, Ideas Section, p. D7.
• … political discourse is necessarily symbolic because the facts exceed our curiosity. — attributed to Walter Lipmann, in Anna Mundow, "The Interview: with Geoffrey Nunberg", Boston Globe, 30-July-2006, Ideas Section, p. D7.
• One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. — Bill Moyers
• … conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Conservative", 1841
• The whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature. — Arthur D. Hlavaty
• Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. (The world would be deceived, so let it be deceived.) — Petronius the Arbiter (27-66CE: the Neronian voluptuary and satirist, not the cat)
• Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. — Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman statesman/orator/writer (106-43 BCE) NB: Rome ruled for another 5 centuries
• Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. — Ted Geisel ("Dr. Seuss")
• Yeah, right. — Sidney Morgenbesser, during a lecture by the Oxford linguist J. L. Austin, in which it was asserted no human language uses double-positives to state a negative
• Pragmatism is great in theory, but it doesn't work in practice. — Sidney Morgenbesser
• Aha – what I wanted to be true would be, had I wanted the right thing to be true. — Dan Asimov, on the Math-Fun mailing list
• A slumming academic is a graceless spectacle: one cannot stoop donnishly to greet the lower orders and hope to keep one's balance. — James Parker, in a Boston Globe review of Camille Paglia's introduction to poetry, Break, Blow, Burn
• … a piece by the British artist Damien Hirst in which a dead lamb (whole, mint condition) is preserved inside a steel-and-glass case by a few gallons of formaldehyde solution. An object more transparently bereft of context, more pitifully without resonance, cannot be imagined. The title of the piece — "Away from the Flock" — would seem to be the last word. But no — … If Hirst's lamb is indeed suffering for our sins, then it would seem to be the sin of credulousnesss, of witless deference to self-appointed experts, for which it has been sacrificed. Looking from the wall label to the lamb, from the lamb to the wall label, we suddenly see that this innocent creature has been trapped in a special hell of pseudo-explication, wreathed about by torrents of nonsense, held in place not by formaldehyde but by a whining force-field of curatorial twaddle. — James Parker, in a Boston Globe review of Camille Paglia's introduction to poetry, Break, Blow, Burn
• W.C. Fields: "How do you do, Miss West?"
  Mae West: "How do you do what?"
• Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. — Gustav Mahler
• Hatred is a banquet until you recognize you are the main course. — Herbert Benson
• Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. — W. B. Yeats
• Nous naissons tous fous, quelques-uns le demeurent. (We are all born crazy, only some of us stay that way.) — Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot
• You don't have to run away to join the circus. The circus is right here, and it's swallowed you whole. — Jack Hardy, "Out of Control", The Mirror of My Madness (1976)
• We could bring calamity on ourselves and the world by forgetting that even the most powerful nations … remain themselves creatures as well as creators of the historical process. — Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
• The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. — opening line of The Go-Between, Leslie Poles Hartley
• When you're running down the street on fire, people get out of your way. — Richard Pryor
• Seek truth for authority, not authority for truth. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• … almost everyone thinks he's the good guy, and if you take your stand on the slope of Mount Righteous Cause, it has proven as slippery as greased glass. But social dominators will run to take their chances on that slippery slope. — psychologist Bob Altemeyer, in his popular-level summary of his work on Right Wing Authoritarianism, The Authoritarians, p. 163.
• Men, like poets, rush "into the middest", in medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. They fear it, and as far as we can see have always done so; the End is a figure for their own deaths. — Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending
• There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children. — WH Auden, New York Times magazine, 1962, on the subject of Lewis Carroll
• The second mouse gets the cheese. — who?
• Numquam "morde me" lamiae dices. — Nobody who will admit it, but quite likely a Buffy fan
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper. — Robert Frost
• A man is incapable of comprehending any argument which interferes with his revenue. — René Descartes
• It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it. — Upton Sinclair
• The pursuit of self-interest does not necessarily lead to overall economic efficiency. — Joseph Stiglitz
• George Santayana:
  • Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. — Life of Reason (1905) Vol I, "Introduction"
  • The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. — Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality"
  • Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. — Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
  • Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
• … skepticism means that, whatever one's doubts, one must act as if one can make a difference. — John William Ward, chair of the Ward Commission investigating corruption in public construction in Massachusetts in the 1980s, quoted in Mark L. Wolf's opinion piece, "A death foreshadowed", Boston Globe, Sunday July 23, 2006, p. E9. Wolf is cheif judge of the US District Courts for the District of Massachusetts, and was one of the first successful prosecutors of public figures using the powers resulting from the Ward Commission's work.
• Authority is the mask of violence. — Ralph Steadman
• Certitude leads to violence. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. — G. K. Chesterton
• The poor object to being governed badly; the rich to being governed at all. — G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
• When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song. — G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
• The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. — G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (1910), Chapter 5.
• I have sometimes had occasion to murmur meekly that those who endure the heavy labour of reading a book might possibly endure that of reading the title-page of a book. For there are more examples than may be imagined, in which earnest critics might solve many of their problems about what a book is, merely by discovering what it professes to be. — G. K. Chesterton, on critics who misunderstood The Man Who Was Thursday
• All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive. — G. K. Chesterton, The Thing. CW. III 191
• America is a serious parody. America is an exaggeration not more comic, but more solemn, than its original. We are all acquainted with the ordinary notion of a caricature, in which certain features are treated more largely, but more lightly. Thus, let us say, a King is given an outrageously large crown, and he becomes a pantomime King. But we must try and imagine the reversal of this process: we must conceive, not something heavy taken lightly, but something originally light taken heavily and hugely. It is not that the King becomes a comic character by the enlargement of his crown; it is actually that Punch becomes a serious character by the further elongation of his nose. Ordinary people treat their institutions as jokes. American people treat jokes as institutions. Englishmen make a picture absurd by expanding it into a hoarding. America makes a sketch eternal by expanding it into a fresco. — G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, Aug 15 1908, CW28:159
• Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist, letter to an associate (1849)
• When the master governs, people are hardly aware that he exists … when his work is done, the people say, 'Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!' — Tao te Ching, #17, transl. Stephen Mitchell
• François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. "Voltaire" (1694-1778):
  • A witty saying proves nothing.
  • Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres. ("In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.")
  • If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism; if there were two they would cut each other's throats. But there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.
  • Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
  • Every man is guilty of the good he didn't do.
  • What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly — that is the first law of nature.
  • Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.
  • It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
  • I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.
  • Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
  • Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
  • I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying you annuities.
  • It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
  • So far from believing in nothing, I can believe in witchcraft and am confident that with incantations (and arsenic) it is possible to poison a flock of sheep! (upon accusation of atheism)
• Good judgement comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgement. — Mark Twain
• Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. — Mark Twain
• Every man is a moon — he has a side no one sees. — Mark Twain
• Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. — Mark Twain
• The East and the West are both whores. But my whore is pregnant. — Berthold Brecht
• Fait au Québec par les Québécois/Made in Canada by Canadians. — ad campaign by Quebec-based Abris Penguin Shelters
• The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. — James Branch Cabell
• He had only one idea, and that was wrong. — Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli
• The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. — Archilochus
• Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind. — W.V.O. Quine, Natural Kinds
• Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973, p. 350
• A university student should know something about everything, and everything about something. — Anatole France
• A horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. — H. L. Mencken
• And in that state of nature, no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" whilst you find a rock. — attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. — H. L. Mencken
• Ludwig Wittgenstein (of course) is famous for near-incomprehensible prose. It might be deep, it might be trivial. Or, it might be both: seeing the depth in the ordinariness of things. Ah, but which…
  • The world is all that is the case.
  • Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen. (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one remain silent.)
• To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. — President Theodore Roosevelt
• If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble. — Sappho (7th century BCE)
• Because that's where the money is. — Willie Sutton, upon being asked why he robbed banks
• Speaking to suffering is a skill born in empathy, and it's not easily learned. Odin gave up an eye for wisdom. — John Isdell
• Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing - after they have exhausted all other possibilities. — Winston Churchill
• Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible. — Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, Book 1
• I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. — John Stuart Mill, in a March 1866 letter to Conservative MP Sir John Pakington
• The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. — Bill Moyers, in The Nation, reporting on a speech at the Conference for Media Reform in St Louis on May 14-15, 2005
• The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent — in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. — Richard Hofstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
• Politics is like coaching basketball: you have to be smart enough to play the game well, but dumb enough to think it's important. — Gene McCarthy, 1972 US presidential candidate
• I envy university professors. They are paid to question people who know nothing but try very hard to say something, while I have to question people who know everything but do their utmost to say nothing at all. — Piercamillo Davigo, an Italian judge investigating corrupt politicians
• If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. — President John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, 1961
• Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln, and if this right is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate. — 71 U.S. 2 (1866), ex parte Milligan, the US Civil War-era case upholding habeas corpus in wartime, even for "aiding the enemy", and that citizens cannot be tried by military tribunals
• A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. — Thomas Jefferson in 1798, after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
• Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under the robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. — C. S. Lewis
• This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing. — opening sentence of Robert P. Langlands' reveiw in Notices of the AMS (49:5, pp. 554-565) of Leonard Mlodinow's book, Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace; I think maybe he didn't like it.
• Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. — Leonardo da Vinci
• Wooden-headedness is a factor that plays a large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian's statement about Phillip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence. — my favorite historian, Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. This book is brilliantly described in Wikipedia as: "A meditation on the historical recurrence of governments pursuing policies evidently contrary to their own interests." Not entirely by coincidence, it is also a brilliant description of George W. Bush.
• Hæstaréttarmálaflutningslögmannsvinnukonuútidyralyklakippuhringurinn — In Icelandic, "the key ring holding the front door key belonging to the maid who works for the lawyer who presents cases before the supreme court", from Steinn Sigurðsson, of the PSU Astro Dept, in his blog Dynamics of Cats (moved)
• The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. — John Maynard Keynes
• Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. — John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
• Ok, stuff by me:
  • Conversation is when you and I revise our mutual understanding of the world. (Assuming you're not a fundamentalist and we have a mutual understanding of the world to begin with…)
  • Freedom is the mastery of form.
  • There is no evolutionary premium on elegance. Life is a kludge.
  • "This sentence is true" – why isn't that as outrageous as the other one?
  • Serendipity is where you find it.
  • Doubt is what keeps you from believing stupid stuff.
  • Fear is what keeps you from doing stupid stuff.
  • Authority is a poor excuse for leadership.
  • Real authority comes from truth, not power.
  • Certainty is just an excuse not to listen to new evidence.
  • Just because you see an example of something being done badly doesn't mean it cannot also be done well.
  • Scientists talk about nature; cranks talk about themselves.
  • It never pays to humiliate an opponent. Defeat, disarm, divert, coopt, compromise, befriend, … never humiliate.
  • If you're gonna lose your grip on reality, let go with both hands. No half measures!
  • If you don't have a solution, you can always admire the problem.
  • An archetype is what you get when you factor-analyze a real person.
  • Look… if I could explain it, it wouldn't be transcendant in the first place, now would it?
• Some counterexamples of emphatically non-wisdumb from miscellaneous crazies:
  • … in such a war, it is Christian and an act of love to strangle the enemies confidently, to rob, to burn, and do all that is harmful until they are overcome. — Martin Luther, defending the massacre of his Protestant opponents
  • The earth is flat, and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished. — Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, Supreme religious authority, Saudi Arabia in a religious edict of 1993. Quoted in Yousef M. Ibrahim, "Muslim Edicts take on New Force", The New York Times, February 12, 1995, p. A-14.
  • No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. — Pres. George H. W. Bush, as Republican presidential nominee, Aug 27, 1987
  • The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians. — Pat Robertson, quoted in M. Schwartz & K. J. Cooper, "Equal Rights Initiative in Iowa Attacked", Washington Post, 1992-AUG-23, Page A15.
  • I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a Biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism. — Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue. Reported by the News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, IN, 1993-AUG-16
• Spirituality and related at-best-semi-decidable questions:
  • When discussing American television (assuming one must do so at all) it is necessary to understand one important fact: there is Joss Whedon, there is crap, and there is nothing else.
    • Very occasionally, if you really pay attention, life doesn't suck.
    • If nothing we do matters, the only thing that matters is what we do. — Angel
    • A hero "… live[s] as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." — Angel
    • The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. — Buffy
    • The more you live in this world, the more you realize how much you're apart from it. — Whistler in Buffy
  • Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good. — St. Augustine, Homily 7 on 1 John
  • Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. … ‘Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem,’ Niebuhr wrote, ‘are insufferable in their human contacts.’ The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics). — Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in "Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr", a NYT essay on why American conservative religious hysteria ignores Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps one of the 20th century's greatest theologians
  • Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr (got a citation?)
  • It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality — this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods… In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken. — Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man
  • We are all Kitty Genovese's neighbors. — United States v. George W. Bush et al., by former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega
  • In the end, there's no justice. There's just us. — Who?
  • They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
  • Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. — Mark Twain
  • No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair. — John Scalzi
  • The only justice in the world is the justice that people make. Nature itself is utterly indifferent to our ideas of what is and is not just. — Commenter named "Other Significant Otter", in the blog Respectful of Otters, in an entry on the just world hypothesis
  • The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. — Frederick Buechner
  • We want experiences, fitting ones, of profound connection with others, of deep understanding of natural phenomena, of love, of being profoundly moved by music or tragedy, or doing something new and innovative, experiences very different from the bounce and rosiness of happy moments. What we want, in short, is a life and a self that happiness is a fitting response to — and then to give it that response. — Robert Nozick, The Examined Life
  • Robertson, Falwell, Dobson etc. are not our fellow-Christians. Their religion is an Americanised version of State Shinto with a thin coat of Christianoid whitewash on top (call it Red-State Shinto). Their religion is, in the end, not at all unlike mainstream mediæval 'Christianity': a flimsy Christian veneer over a ragbag mix of superstitions, pagan survivals and sheer invention, all in the service of the ruling aristocracy. It's a different aristocracy today; it's also a different (and to my mind much inferior) aesthetic. Otherwise, the game is the same thing it has always been. — Mrs Tilton, commenting at Pharyngula
  • Faith is something more to be struggled with than had. — Jeremy Ahouse
  • Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. — Phillip K. Dick
  • Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. — Paul Tillich
  • Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn. — Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)
  • I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use. — Galileo Galilei
  • … some are guilty, but all are responsible. — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people. — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • Always preach the gospel; use words, if necessary. — Francis of Assisi (though probably falsely attributed, this reflects the spirit of Chapter XVII of the Rule of 1221)
  • Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. — Søren Kierkegaard
  • It's not necessary to be a saint to do good. You need willing hands, not clean ones. — Mother Theresa
  • Equity bids us to be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions, nor this or that detail so much as the whole story. — Aristotle
• On being a scientist:
  • The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard. — John Tukey
  • E pur si muove! ("And yet it moves!") &mdash Galileo Galilei, allegedly muttered under his breath after being forced by the Inquisition to recant his belief that the earth orbits the sun.
  • The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions. — Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked) (1964)
  • The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. — John Gardner, Excellence, 1961
  • I often say … that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. — Wm. Thompson, Lord Kelvin
  • When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? — John Maynard Keynes
  • If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. — John Kenneth Galbraith
  • He who can do nothing, knows nothing. — Paracelsus
  • One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. — Sophocles, ca. 450 BCE
  • Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. — Stephen Jay Gould
  • No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett
  • There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact. — Thomas Huxley
  • No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
  • Truth must be repeated again and again, because error is constantly being preached around it. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Always side with the truth. It's much bigger than you are. — Teresa Nielsen Hayden
  • I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious. … But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant. — H. L. Mencken
  • Believe it or not, there is a certain charm to simply telling the truth, and even to telling the truth simply. — Molly Ivins, Alternet syndicated columnist
  • … all generalizations suck. — David Brin, "Scholarship vs Science", August 2005
  • All truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. — Arthur Schopenhauer
  • No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish. — David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.
  • I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not. — Peter Medawar
  • Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. — John Adams, "Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials", December 1770
  • ...ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, frontmatter, p. 2.
  • Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance. — Bertrand Russell, "Philosophy for the Layman", Unpopular Essays, 1950
  • If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. — Mark Twain
  • It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear. — Henry David Thoreau
  • Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both. — Horace Mann
  • There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. — Buddha
  • Luck is not a problem-solving technique. — Chad Orzel, Uncertain Principles
  • Truth is just truth — You can't have opinions about the truth. — Peter Schickele, from P.D.Q. Bach's oratorio "The Seasonings"
  • If the chemist is running away, try to keep up. — who?
  • The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. — Linus Pauling
  • It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. — W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief, 1879.
  • E. T. Jaynes wrote a great book on probability theory, filled with provocative, occasionally irksome things like this:
    • … a false premise built into a model which is never questioned cannot be removed by any amount of new data. … no amount of coin tossing data by a stochastic model could have led us to the discovery of Newtonian mechanics, which alone determines those data. — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. xxvi
    • Recent history demonstrates that anyone foolhardy enough to describe his own work as "rigorous" is headed for a fall. Therefore, we shall claim only that we do not knowingly give erroneous arguments. — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. xxvii
    • An argument which makes it clear intuitively why a result is correct is actually more trustworthy, and more likely of a permanent place in science, than is one that makes a great overt show of mathematical rigor unaccompanied by understanding. — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. xxvii
    • … to make progress in a new area, it is necessary to develop a healthy disrespect for tradition and authority, which have retarded progress throughout the 20^th century. — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. xxviii
    • …although our concern with the nature of logical inference leads us to discuss many of the same issues, our language differs greatly from the stilted jargon of logicians and philosophers. There are no linguistic tricks, and there is no "meta-language" gobbledy-gook. … In any event, we feel sure that no further clarity would be achieved by taking the first few steps down that infinite regress that starts with: "What do you mean by "exists"?" — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, p. xxviii
  • We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle
  • Sans les mathématiques on ne pénètre point au fond de la philosophie.
    Sans la philosophie on ne pénètre point au fond des mathématiques.
    Sans les deux on ne pénètre au fond de rien. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  • Il y a les problèmes que l'on se pose, et les problèmes qui se posent. — Henri Poincaré
  • There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. — G. H. Hardy
  • I wouldn't even think about playing music if I was born in these times... I'd probably turn to something like mathematics. That would interest me. — Bob Dylan
  • … a somewhat fantastic brotherhood of overspecialized cranks, not to be trusted out of sight except under the restraining hand of safe and sane businessmen. — 19th century economist, Thorstein Veblen on engineers. Is it any wonder we chafe under management?
  • What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work; and most of us, I suspect, would be well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any obviously trying strain upon his faculties. — Thomas Huxley, Administrative Nihilism (1871)
  • The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is that rank which he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters. — Thomas Huxley, Administrative Nihilism (1871)
  • Everything that can be invented has been invented. — Charles H. Duell, US Office of Patents Commissioner, 1899 (but probably falsely attributed)
  • The odds are good, but the goods are odd. — Jorge Cham, PhD Comics, 11/5/1997 on the subject of a woman looking for romantic partners in her technical discipline
  • So many people are Out-Of-The-Box thinkers these days that perhaps we should check the box to see if there's not a dead cat inside. — Keith Kisser
  • To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measures of His purpose. — Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)
  • Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. — H.G. Wells
  • One should no more rack one's brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle. — Wolfgang Pauli (on the quantum measurement problem but, as usual, applicable elsewhere)
  • If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: "Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?" — David Hilbert
  • Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. ("He is lucky who can know the cause of things.") -- Publius Virgilius Maro, Georgics
  • Everything in biology that isn't molecular biology is just stamp collecting. — Francis Crick (Revising Lord Rutherford, who said: "Everything in science is either physics or stamp collecting.") You may think they're wrong, but at least they know what they like. Rutherford seems to have set the standard for arrogance in physics; for what is Crick setting the standard?
  • A sentence I never thought I'd hear: "I once set out to crochet a set of my favorite marine invertebrates, but got only as far as Vampyroteuthis infernalis." — A comment in GrammarPolice. The rest of the entry points to a nice set of crocheted examples of spaces of negative curvature (pseudospheres, for example).
  • I finally understood what serendipity meant: it's when you go looking for a needle in a haystack and you find your grandmother. — unknown Japanese bioinformaticist, quoted by Ewan Birney in his ISCB Overton Prize keynote address at ISMB 2005

Copyright © 2006, Steve Rowley. As if you care.

And regardless of what your browser says up there, the true root of this site is http://alum.mit.edu/www/sgr/. Also, not wishing to be a twit, these pages have been validated with an HTML checker and a CSS checker (sooner or later the link checker, too). See for yourself using the buttons on the right.