Here’s this month’s selection of quotes, various, for your delectation.
That gay free-thinker, a fine talker once,
What turns him now a stupid silent dunce?
Some God, or spirit he has lately found;
Or chanc’d to meet a minister that frown’d.
Judge we by nature? Habit can efface,
Interest o’ercome, or policy take place:
By action? those uncertainty divides:
By passions? These dissimulation hides:
Find, if you can, in what you cannot change.
Manner with fortunes, humours turn with climes,
Tenets with books, and principles with times.
[Alexander Pope (1688-1744); Moral Essays, Epistle I]
The great generational divide today is between those who know where they are going and how to get there, and those who know how to enter an address onto their phone.
[Terry Cowan]
Shall I compare thee to a blinkered dog?
Thou hast been lied to by the wealthy pack,
Tough truths do shake the Brexit facts of Mogg
And Nigel’s speech is all too short on fact.
Sometimes too hot the air of Boris seems,
And often is his tousled brain confused;
Though every prophet plays upon your dreams
With rhetoric, or twisted argument abused.
But Europe’s constant peacetime will not fade
Nor lose the vision of cohesive might,
Nor shall Gove brag of benefits to trade
When single markets are so obviously right.
So long as voters breathe they’ll counter May,
So long lives Europe – better with UK.
[Bernard Stacey]
Mary had a little lamb
It ran into a pylon
10,000 volts went up it’s arse
And turned it’s wool to nylon.
1. Apologize to children when you are wrong.
2. Do not assume you’re smarter than a child simply because you’re older.
3. Say thank you to children when they do something for you or others.
4. Admit when you’ve made a mistake and admit it openly to them.
5. Listen to children.
[@BEautifully_C on Twitter]
We schoolmasters must always temper discretion with deceit.
[Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall]
The EU Single Market was largely completed for goods by 1992 but development remains on-going with regard to services. The Single Market enables free movement of goods but also of people, services and capital … It is [a] type of enhanced free-trade area in which goods move freely, but so do services, investment and people. To achieve this … the EU needs to get involved in harmonising regulations across the single market. This is why there are much-maligned rules on, for instance, the efficiency of vacuum cleaners across the EU. In the absence of such regulations there would be a regulatory race-to-the-bottom: countries would compete to produce the cheapest-possible vacuum cleaner across the EU, sacrificing safety in the process. It also explains why there is free movement of people: this allows for the exchange of typically non-tradable goods, such as plumbing.
[http://obiterj.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/trade-bill-vague-amendment.html]
We are just something the sun does to chemicals if you leave it for a few billion years.
[Brad Warner]
The blithe confidence of the British Establishment, which believes that, through bluster, aggression and talking loudly at foreigners, it can achieve anything, however unlikely
[George Monbiot]
The more I look at Brexit, the more it looks like the Iraq War. No one in power can explain why it’s necessary, no one knows how to pull it off, and no one knows how to get out when it goes horribly wrong.
[George Monbiot]
Exciting perks of adulthood:
1. Busy! Busy all the time! What are you even doing? You don’t know!
2. Very tired.
3. Some kinda stomach ache???
4. Definitely sad about something.
5. Bills! Bills all the time! What are you even paying for? You don’t know!
@marcformarc
The Yogacara school [of Buddhism] doesn’t believe that everything in the universe is all in the mind. Not exactly. But they do believe that whatever we know of the universe comes through our minds. They believe there’s no such thing as objective knowledge. This doesn’t exactly mean there’s no objective Truth. Just that we can’t really see the truth as it is without it being coloured by our mental processes. They, therefore, believe that the study of the workings of the mind is the most direct way to understand the universe in which we find ourselves.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/dancing-with-libtards-and-fascists/5778]
What are we to think about witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, 20 or 30 at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive?
[Malleus Maleficarum (1487)]
I have just come across (pun intended) an article for women on how to have better orgasms, which includes the phrases “Sacred Feminine Energy”, “be a goddess”, “awaken your sacral chakra”, “learn ecstatic breathing”, but at no point does it say “wank more”. I GIVE UP.
[Zoe Margolis]
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
[Stephen Hawking]
Thinking how space-time used to be is like a fish trying to imagine steam.
[Dr Daniele Oriti, Max Planck Institute, Germany]
I think the use of time machines will have to be strictly controlled. Because as soon as lots of people have time machines, things will start getting really crazy.
[Brad Warner]
[A]utomation comes for us all eventually. Witness the birth of Goob, the computer-assisted lifestyle magazine from Botnik.org. By training a predictive text generator on a library of material from Goop, Botnik was able to produce an even more adventurous brand. Goob subscribers can browse products such as Chicago Dad Soothing Mortgage Advice Salve (“get back to the realm of your own essence”) and “Cancer Gossip Jeans”, all wrapped up in bold headlines such as “Is the soul more supple when you’ve been divorced? We asked two dogs for some advice.”
[Feedback, New Scientist, 17/03/2018]
He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
[Groucho Marx]