Our usual collection of quotes encountered.

Conspiracy is the default explanation of a mystery when you’re looking for meaning. Uncertainty is the default when you’re looking for truth.

[A molecule called Celastrol] does all kinds of stuff in cell assays and animal models … and you can basically find papers that will illustrate it doing anything you feel like seeing – antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antidiabetic, antioxidant, insecticide, you name it. It’s probably a decent floor polish, although I’m not sure I’d recommend its use as a dessert topping.
[Derek Lowe; https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fun-protein-degradation]

I don’t think that AI is going to provide answers … any time soon – largely because the difficulty is lack of knowledge in the first place. You can’t expect the software to take a bunch of used pizza boxes and find a route to convert them into gold jewellery, and unfortunately a lot of our knowledge (when you look at it on the absolute scale) is at the used pizza box stage.
[Derek Lowe; https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-patent-system]

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will
[Antonio Gramsci]

Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, “Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Linsey Lohan. Why is that?”
[John Green]

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor.
[Oscar Wilde]

When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
[Epicurus, died 270BC]

You are not lazy, unmotivated, or stuck. After years of living your life in survival mode you are exhausted. There is a difference.
[Nakeia Homer]

The Brexit agreement was written in English so they could understand it.
[Ursula von de Leyen, EU President]

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
[Bertrand Russell]

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
[TS Elliot]

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.
[Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald]

The human body is the best work of art.
[Jess C Scott]

This month’s selection of quotes encountered.

In every way, the notion of women’s unsuitability didn’t just happen. It was systematically and consciously created. And, of course, another way of keeping women in their place is to insist that their minds just don’t allow them to inhabit traditional male bastions.
[Prof. Stephen Reicher]

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[George Orwell]

The most amazing thing about the human mind is that you literally never have to stop putting things into it; you can always learn more if you want to, and there is always more to learn.
[Katie Mack]

[T]here are parts of your own body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of Mars. Most researchers I talked to blamed this dearth of knowledge on the black-box problem: the female body is considered more complex, more obscure, with much of its plumbing tucked up inside. To get inside it, we’ve needed high-tech imaging tools, tools that have only come around in recent decades. When I heard these answers, I couldn’t help thinking of what science has done in the twenty-first century: put a rover on Mars, made a three-parent baby, built an artificial sheep uterus. And we couldn’t figure out the composition of vaginal mucus?
[Rachel Gross; Vagina Obscura]

For centuries, science has been treating women as walking wombs, baby machines and incubators of new life. This narrow perspective has prevented us from asking questions and making advancements that could help all of us live longer, healthier lives. It’s time for a paradigm shift. We need to finally see the female body for what it truly is: a powerful constellation of interlocking elements, each part indivisible from the whole, that work together to support our health from cradle to grave. As we fill in the missing parts of this picture, we will undoubtedly expand our understanding of all bodies.
[Rachel Gross; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/09/the-big-idea-why-we-need-to-rewrite-the-history-of-female-bodies]

We have the most profound and bizarre psychological block against providing assistance to people in need in cash. We insist against all evidence that they will mostly waste it. In fact cash is the single most practical, efficient and effective intervention for improving lives.
[Rory Stewart]

Listen carefully to everything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big.
[Catherine M Wallace]

Life. One long panic punctuated by cups of tea.

The goddess [Kali] symbolises, we are told, evil being cut away, hypocrisy undone, abusive powers crushed. I rather hoped the necklace of severed male heads she wears might be portraits of well-known oppressors, but no, they mostly look like Salvador Dalí.
[Marina Warner; https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/may/16/goddesses-marina-warner-volcanic-power-of-witches-she-devils-divinities-british-museum]

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 75^th 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]

This month’s selection of interesting, amusing and thought-provoking quotes encountered …

There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.
[Walt Whitman]

We had an opportunity to be the most influential country in Europe, but our very marginal decision to leave the EU, based on a combination of simple ignorance and some sort of myopic xenophobia, has weakened both this country and the whole of western Europe. Even so, Europe remains the most culturally interesting continent and the one where the finest wines in the world continue to be made …
[Charlie Boston; Understanding European Wines]

Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies. It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.
[https://knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2022/fun-facts-about-bones-more-just-scaffolding]

London Zoo at half-term is a cheerful cacophony with blue macaws out-screaming six-year-olds.
[Emma Beddington; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/06/the-zoologist-sticking-her-neck-out-in-the-battle-of-the-sexes]

The majority of spiders are sexual cannibals … the big spiders in the middle of webs [are] always female; males are basically wandering useless sacks of sperm.
[Lucy Cooke; quoted by Emma Beddington at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/06/the-zoologist-sticking-her-neck-out-in-the-battle-of-the-sexes]

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away … The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.
[Terry Pratchett]

Always keep a bottle of Champagne in the fridge for special occasions. Sometimes the special occasion is that you’ve got a bottle of Champagne in the fridge.
[Hester Browne]

When the rich rob the poor it’s called business. When the poor fight back it’s called violence.
[unknown]

Sexuality is completely natural, however mainstream culture and society have falsely turned it into something considered to be controversial and perverse. We should never condemn, fear or distort any of the beautiful and sacred properties of Nature.
[Damien Carrion]

That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

Compassion is to have a sense of concern for others and the community. Look at today’s world—we are interdependent. We can’t think only of my nation’s interests. We have to take the whole world into account. Let us live happily together, helping each other rather than fighting.
[Dalai Lama]