Here is this month’s selection of interesting or amusing quotes. In no particular order …
Grassi, in theorizing about heat, relied on … ancient authors when he claimed that Babylonians could cook eggs by whirling them around at the ends of slings … Galileo’s retort … translates to: “If we do not achieve an effect which others formerly achieved, it must be that we lack something in our operation which was the cause of this effect succeeding, and if we lack one thing only, then this alone can be the true cause.”
The ball thus teed up, Galileo swings away: “Now we do not lack eggs, or slings, or sturdy fellows to whirl them, and still [the eggs] do not cook, but rather cool down faster if hot. And since we lack nothing except being Babylonian, then being Babylonian is the cause of the egg hardening.”
[Steve Mirsky; Scientific American; 07/2020]
What is to be expected of [the English ruling class] is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable.
[George Orwell, 1941]
Mr Speaker the figures I gave that the Prime Minister says are inadvertently misleading are the slide at his press conference yesterday!
[Keir Starmer MP, at PMQs, 24 June 2020]
To think that we are supposed to live this life without asking for help and without being interconnected is insanity.
[Amanda Palmer]
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
[George Santayana (1863-1952)]
O sophisticated drinkers –
you unthirsty thyrsus-linkers
down your rounds, ignore the blinkers,
bent on being wineglass-clinkers! …
If you can’t brook a libation,
get out of our celebration!
Out! Begone! Why in tarnation
Stay? We don’t host moderation.
[Carmina Burana]
The custom of shaking hands originated in the ancient and universal practice of grasping the weapon hand during a truce as a precaution against treachery. So we see that from a comparatively dark and illiterate period a custom having a rational origin, which rationale dwindled into nothingness during its spread and migration through successive centuries, was ushered into our glorious civilization, unnecessary in its essence, devoid of all intelligence, and positively injurious to public health.
[Nathan Breiter, Medical Record, 1897]
Extremely into this explanation of sinning by senses from the 15th century Krumlov Miscellenea: “[I have sinned b]y my hands, touching my body wrongly and vainly or touching other persons’ breasts or crotch forcing to commit an evil act, arousing myself or someone else to sin.”
It’s a great reminder of the idea of the conception of the contagious nature of sex. You grab someone’s crotch and BLAM, they pretty much have to have sex because that is just way too hot. (At least that is what happens when I do it.)
But it is also a great reminder of the medieval conception of sodomy, (or what we would call foreplay cuz we basic), as medieval people were like “Hell yeah hand stuff? That is the sex worth risking the death of my immortal soul for.”
[Dr Eleanor Janega, @GoingMedieval, on Twitter]
I think there’s something fundamentally disrespectful about someone who can’t be bothered to take their socks off if they think they’re going to get some.
Make a bloody effort … It’s all very well jumping on your Raleigh Chopper with a come hither look in your eye, but if … you’ve got your football socks and Birkenstock on, it’s a stone cold passion killer and no mistake.
[Katy Wheatley]
It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are … if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
[Richard Feynman]
The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.
[Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, on the Trinity nuclear test, 1945]
Being wrong is not a bad thing like they teach you in school. It is an opportunity to learn something. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error.
If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it. The best way to learn is to teach.
[Richard Feynman]