So here is this month’s un-Christmas-y selection of recently encountered quotes.

I put friend coins in the woman and sex didn’t come out – I think she may be broken.
[unknown]
(Sadly still an all too common belief.)

I’m not an atheist because I’m ignorant of the reality of scripture. I am an atheist because religious scripture is ignorant of reality.
[unknown]

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
[Alan Watts]

A contempt for expertise is inevitably expressed by those who, without experts contributing to society as they do, would be lucky to have a voice to speak with, let alone a platform on which to use it. Expertise, like democracy, is far from infallible; each, however, is always preferable to the alternative.
[David Bennum; Guardian; 31/11/2018; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/30/brexit-britain-crisis-uk]

Don’t think about what can happen in a month. Don’t think about what can happen in a year. Just focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be.
[unknown]

First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to zip up your fly; and then you forget to unzip your fly.
[unknown]

The person we’re … working for is so cool, laid back and unconcerned, I seriously wonder if he moonlights as a jazz correspondent.
[Andrew J Baker]

Asking Maradona what he thinks about Mexican second division football is like asking Beethoven what he thinks about Girls Aloud.
[Adrian Chiles]

My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.
[Boris Johnson]

The idea that winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had 18 different words for snow. (All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.)
[Terry Pratchett, The Wyrd Sisters. H/T June Laurenson]

Science is the most beautiful and elegant tool that humanity has yet developed with which to actually investigate the physical universe, to measure it, to test it. Science evolved out of magic.
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

If you think that every second is eternal, don’t do anything that you can’t live with forever.
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

What if there were creatures, entities, that were made up purely of ideas, purely of language or something – wouldn’t that explain everything from Smurfs to gods, to demons, to angels, to leprechauns, to all of this nonsense that we have been obsessed with throughout our development as a species?
[Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, in New Scientist, 8 December 2018]

The Fates permitting, we’ll see you on the other side of the festivities.