So here we go with this month’s assemblage of quotes which have caught my eye recently. And it’s lots of soundbites in this collection.
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
[Khalil Gibran]
Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
[Spike Milligan]
[Death is] not a beginning, it’s the real end, there will be nothing afterwards, nothing. I feel you must look truth right in the eyes … To deny death and its power is useless. Deny it or not, you’ll die anyway … It’s stupid to protest against death as such, but you can and must protest against violent death. It’s bad when people die before their time from disease or poverty, but it’s worse when a man is killed by another man.
[Dmitri Shostakovich]
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so uneducated people won’t be offended.
[unknown]
We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.
[Kurt Vonnegut, American writer and novelist (1922-2007)]
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.
[Donald E Knuth]
Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering.
[Marie Skłodowska-Curie]
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
[Stephen Hawking]
The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
[BF Skinner]
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
[Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time]
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
[George Orwell]
There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
[Isaac Asimov]
Don’t worry about siding for or against the majority. Worry about taking up any of their irrational beliefs.
[Marcus Aurelius]
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
[Douglas Adams]
Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.
[Richard Feynman]
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
[Sigmund Freud]
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
[Margaret Mead]
Open-minded people do not care to be right, they care to understand. There is never a right or wrong answer. Everything is about understanding.
[unknown]
What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
[WB Yeats]
Those who will not reason, are bigots; those who cannot, are fools; and those who dare not, are slaves.
[Lord Byron]
God is a mathematician of a very high order. He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
[Paul Dirac; theoretical physicist; 1902-1984]
Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
[Benjamin Franklin]
I don’t believe the universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go so far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood.
[Paul Broks, “Are Coincidences Real?”, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/13/are-coincidences-real]