“All aboard for another round of monthly quotes! Room for one more on top.”
Ding, Ding!
Boris Johnson shared the medical education [2020 Ig Nobel] prize with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and a choice selection of other world leaders for demonstrating during the Covid-19 pandemic that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.
[From the Guardian]
We must not sacrifice our civilization for the greed of the few. Recent studies suggest that the world is getting close to exceeding its carbon budget. Therefore, this budget must become the most important currency of our time.
[Dalai Lama]
It is a damn poor mind indeed which can’t think of at least two ways to spell any word.
[Andrew Jackson, 7th President of USA]
Our entire bodies and brains are made of a few dollars’ worth of common elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, enough calcium to whitewash a chicken coop, sufficient iron to make a two-inch nail, phosphorus to tip a good number of matches, enough sulphur to dust a flea-plagued dog, together with modest amounts of potassium, chlorine, magnesium and sodium. Assemble them all in the right proportion, build the whole into an intricate interacting system, and the result is our feeling, thinking, striving, imagining, creative selves. Such ordinary elements; such extraordinary results!
[James Hemmings]
Those who are always praising the past and especially the time of faith as best ought to go and live in the Middle Ages and be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.
[Stevie Smith]
Humans uniquely know that they have been born … and that they will die. We understand that we, as individuals, had a beginning, and that we will not endure for ever … [All] religion is, at its roots, at its foundations, concerned with giving us solace in the face of this frankly unimaginable – but at the some time, incontestable and unavoidable – fact.
[Prof. Alice Roberts]
People sometimes say to me, “Why don’t you admit that the hummingbird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?” And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also mode that little worm.
[David Attenborough]
The closer you get to real matter, rock, air, fire, wood, the more spiritual the world is.
[Jack Kerouac]
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and every thing unutterably mall or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
[Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882]
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
[Pierre Simon Laplace, 1814]
Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
[William Shakespeare, Hamlet]
How a government treats refugees is instructive – it shows how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.
[Tony Benn]
If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present.
[Bertrand Russell]
Peace and quiet are the things a wise man should cherish.
[Taoist proverb]
[Femto Fiction (or Micro-Micro Fiction) is that which, while looking like a short book title, with almost no imagination tells you the whole story. Genre of work in brackets.]
