Here we are again with the month’s collection of interesting, thought-provoking or just amusing quotes. And we have a big selection this month.
[Medieval belief was that] the sexual pleasure that women experienced as a result of their openness was not simply one that came from a desire to fill a void, however. Instead, women were also seen as unhealthily interested in having sex, and more specifically the sort of sex which would result in men ejaculating inside of them. This is because they were drawn to the masculine qualities that were inherent in semen. Women, from a humoral standpoint, were to be understood as cold and wet, whereas men were hot and dry. Being hot and dry was necessarily a better state of being because being masculine was necessarily better, and women were sort of like lizards, but for jizz instead of the sun.
[Eleanor Janega; https://going-medieval.com/2022/03/24/on-women-pleasure-and-semen/]
Combining reason with empathy is a powerful force for good. It’s both logical and morally right to see all humans as equal, regardless of sex, gender, race, religion, or worldview.
[Prof. Alice Roberts, President, Humanists UK]
Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
[unknown]
Mothering Sunday – an expression so cloyingly Edwardian, a tinted daguerreotype of an Angel in the House caressing the rosy cheek of a sturdy sort in frilly bloomers, it makes my teeth ache.
[Emma Beddington; https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/27/mapping-out-my-life-in-mothers-days-emma-beddington]
The internet has taken over the role of the village elder, dispensing easy-to-share, not-quite-right information written in Pinterest-friendly fonts to ever insular echo chambers.
[Alex Krotoski; Science Focus; March 2022]
Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.
[Terry Pratchett, Hogfather]
Bergstrom sees social media … through an evolutionary lens. The popular platforms exploit humanity’s need for social validation and constant chatter, a product of our evolution … He compares it to our craving for sugar, which was beneficial in an environment where sweetness was rare and signalled nutritious food, but can make us sick in a world where sugar is everywhere. Facebook exploits humans’ thirst for contact … allowing people to connect with others in larger numbers during a single day than they might have over a lifetime in humanity’s past.
[Kai Kupferschmidt; quoted by Derek Lowe at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/misinformation-and-its-spread]
I believe that the thing above all which ruined Pompey was the shame he felt to think that in having elevated Caesar the way he did, that he had lacked foresight. He accustomed himself to the idea as late as possible; he neglected his defence in order not to avow that he had put himself in danger; he maintained to the Senate that Caesar would never dare to make war; and because he had said it so often, he went on saying it always … Whether or not Montesquieu was right about Pompey … he was right about you and me. Once we invest our opinion, we hang on to the investment; so the more we have at stake the more we risk, even by doing nothing. And the more powerful we are the more likely we are to stick to our rusty guns: because it was firmness of purpose that made us powerful.
[Clive James; quoted by Derek Lowe at https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/misinformation-and-its-spread]
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
[Rory Sutherland]
People often don’t think what they feel, don’t say what they think, and don’t do what they say.
[https://www.londonreconnections.com/2022/nudging-public-transport-transport-for-humans-book-review/]
No. They have a right to be ignorant. Knowledge only means complicity in guilt; ignorance has a certain dignity.
[@YesSirHumphrey on Twitter]
Never argue with the ignorant. They are correct as per their intellect. Let them have their satisfaction. Never challenge or oppose them.
[Nisargadatta Maharaj
If there had been investigations, which there haven’t, or not necessarily, or I’m not at liberty to say whether there have, there would have been a project team which, had it existed, on which I cannot comment, would now have been disbanded, if it had existed.
[@YesSirHumphrey; https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1511318058127740934]
Delivering the speech is just a formality you’ve to go through in order to get the press release into the papers. We can’t worry about entertaining people. We’re not script writers for a comedian. Well, not a professional one anyway.
[@YesSirHumphrey; https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1512526014370435074]
When a regime has been in power too long, when it has fatally exhausted the patience of the people, and when oblivion finally beckons – I am afraid that across the world you can rely on the leaders of that regime to act solely in the interests of self-preservation, and not in the interests of the electorate.
[Boris Johnson; Daily Telegraph; February 2011]
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free, like a country dance of Mozart’s. To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding. There is no place here for the possessive clutch, the clinging arm, the heavy hand, only the barest touch in passing. Now arm in arm, now face to face, now back to back – it does not matter which because they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.
The joy of such a pattern is … the joy of living in the moment. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes … But how does one learn this technique of the dance? Why is it so difficult? What makes us hesitate and stumble? It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next. [And fear] can only be exorcised by its opposite: love.
[Ann Morrow Lindbergh; A Gift from the Sea]
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncy-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
[Salman Rushdie]
