Welcome to this month’s collection of quotes gleaned from my delvings into obscure knowledge.

We are self-centred and selfish, but we need to be wisely selfish, not foolishly so. If we neglect others, we too lose. We have to support others. We can educate people to understand that the best way to fulfil their own interest is to be concerned about the welfare of others.
[Dalai Lama]

There are no ends in administration. Only loose ends. Administration is eternal.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1394387572533743621?s=09]

England’s response to this public health crisis has been characterised by a lack of transparency – or, even worse, a deliberate suppression of material that is at odds with the Government’s narrative.
[Editorial in British Medical Journal; https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/05/28/the-uks-response-to-new-variants-a-story-of-obfuscation-and-chaos/]

Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life – perhaps the best liar ever to serve as prime minister. Some of this may have been a natural talent – but a lifetime of practice and study has allowed him to uncover new possibilities which go well beyond all the classifications of dishonesty attempted by classical theorists like St Augustine. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie.
[Rory Stewart, former Tory MP and minister]

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
[Terry Pratchett]

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.
[William James, American philosopher]

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
[Joseph Campbell]

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
[George Bernard Shaw]

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
George Burns, American comedian]

Who also said …

Sex after 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope. Even putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
[Mark Twain]

The Bible is the charter of women’s serfdom, and, as a consequence, of man’s degradation. It, like all superstitious God-books, is the outcome of ignorance ruled by selfishness.
[Lady Florence Dixie, 1855-1905]

Religion says this is the law of God; I say it is that of man. Superstition declares it to be a divine ordinance; I maintain it is a barbaric one. Superstition and barbaric law go hand in hand. It is the former which creates the latter.
[Lady Florence Dixie, 1855-1905]

This month’s selection of quotes which caught my attention …

No one ever commanded a cat. You can shout at a cat, and it may vanish through the window, or ignore you and begin washing its tail, or stare at you in pained surprise. But it will never apologise, never promise not to do it again.
[CR Milne]

Three articles of Civil Service: it takes longer to do things quickly; it is more expensive to do them cheaply; it is more democratic to do them in secret.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1384965488317435911]

[T]oxic masculinity is stopping the servant day labourers of a dying empire from picking out the right avocados for me.
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387525646658777093]

… the normalisation in big cities of getting a grocery servant to pick out whatever you want to cook for lunch that day …
[https://twitter.com/SzMarsupial/status/1387476900499570691]

Freckles, moles, scars, cellulite, scabs, pimples, textures, broken capillaries, stretch marks, loose skin, pigmentation, redness, dark circles, birth marks, hair … all belong as a part of the experience of skin. Our skin is alive, dynamic, changing, fascinating and weird. Our surfaces are unique works of art just as they are.
[Ashlee Bennett]

My goal is not just to feel comfortable in my skin. My goal is to feel *so* comfortable in my skin that the patriarchy gets confused, can’t compute, malfunctions, and spontaneously combusts.
[@EmilyDFitness]

Date someone you can be weird as hell with who at the end of the day still wants to get naked with you.
[unknown]

[There’s been] this separation of humanity from nature, mind from body, spirit from intellect, and that we had moved away from this more holistic, spiritual way of seeing the world. Lovelock’s idea of the biosphere as a self-regulating system was antithetical to the view that we could dissect the world and understand all the parts in a deterministic way.
[Suzanne Simard; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033320-900-suzanne-simard-interview-how-i-uncovered-the-hidden-language-of-trees/]

Everything had to always be as it is, Parmenides reasoned, because nothing could come to be out of nothing – nonexistence could not produce existence, because there is no such thing as nonexistence, by definition of existence. Reality consisted in an ever-present, unchanging, unmovable mass of undifferentiated sameness that filled all of space.
[Tom Siegfried; https://www.sciencenews.org/article/anaxagoras-science-athens-history-philosophy]

The one who plants trees, knowing that he or she will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
[Rabindranath Tagore]

None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean. Say the truth that you’re carrying in your heart like hidden treasure. Be silly. Be kind. Be weird. There’s no time for anything else.
[Anthony Hopkins]

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
[Often wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, but who first said it?]

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
[Edward Teller; Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics]

Humans are not optimized for intelligence. Rather, we are the first and possibly dumbest species capable of producing a technological civilization.
[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
[unknown]

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.
[unknown]

Being naked starts with your spirit. If you are not allowing yourself to be naked spiritually, being naked physically is significant.
[Stephanie McManus]

Sex is more than an act of pleasure, it’s the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.
[pleasure_portraits; https://www.instagram.com/p/COyilOuBpDD/?igshid=xbn7yul1eb9z; NSFW]

This month’s round up of miscellaneous quotes …

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. Technical developments frequently have environmental, social and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the technical devices.
[Melvin Kranzberg, computing historian]

At Eton I used to play rugger
At Oxford I learned how to punt
Some say I’m a bit of a bugger
But most people think I’m a fool
[https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson_MP/status/1373592915130380291]

The gloating on this side of the Channel cannot disguise for long that Brexit is an unmitigated disaster, from which all this “Global Britain” stuff is a pathetic distraction.
[William Keegan; Guardian; 21/03/2021]

The behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
[Robert Conquest’s third law of politics]

[Renee] Cox [a NY artist] credits her French husband’s family for giving her an ease with her body. “When I met him … his parents were naturists. We spent six weeks in a nudist camp in Corsica. The first three days were a little bizarre. After that, you don’t even pay attention to it any more.”
[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/mar/03/pubic-hair-paintings-living-room-womens-sexuality-right-to-pleasure-camera-vagina]

He can … spend his time figuring out just what it is that grown men do dressed in Alan Partridge style sports casual clothing wandering around with a bag of sticks.
[Katy Wheatley; https://katyboo1.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/monday-29th-march-2021/]

Of course, what people seem to forget about reshuffles is that politicians are essentially interchangeable government marketing units.
[https://twitter.com/YesSirHumphrey/status/1378321711486095363]

Golf: a plague invented by the Calvinistic Scots as a punishment for man’s sins.
[James Barrett Reston]

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
[Shelly, Ozymandias]

Do as your heart commands while you are upon the earth [because] mourning rescues no man from the netherworld!
[Ancient Egyptian funerary song]

Make merry,
Do not weary of it!
Look, no one is allowed to take his possessions with him.
Look, no one who departs returns!
[Ancient Egyptian funerary song]

Linear time just seems so restrictive, even wasteful … We may have grown accustomed to strict chronological oppression, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
[Katie Mack, The End of Everything]

Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn’t try it on.
[Billy Connolly]

Here is my collection of interesting, thought provoking and amusing quotes for March.

Chivalry and the chivalric code has fuck all to do with women at all. It’s a bunch of rules about how to conduct yourself if you are a rich dude, with a horse, a lot of weapons, and time on your hands. Saying that you treat women well because of chivalry makes about as much sense as saying you treat them well because of the highway code.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]

Anything slightly about women in concepts of chivalry is the same old creepy-ass courtly love stuff, and mostly is just about keeping your boner in your pants while your boss is looking.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]

I do advocate that men keep their boners in their pants unless otherwise requested, however, and it will probably save you grief with HR if you commit to this at work at the very least.
[Dr Eleanor Janega at https://going-medieval.com/2017/12/07/thats-not-what-chivalry-is-but-ok/]

I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we have gone, our voices will linger in these walls.

Lies are noisy and the truth is very quiet. Listen carefully.
[Brad Warner; https://twitter.com/BradWarner/status/1369776251796254722]

In 1786 [Lord George] was excommunicated from the Church of England for refusing to appear before an ecclesiastical court … [He] responded that “to expel him from a society to which he never belonged, was an absurdity worthy of an archbishop”.
[Metropolitan, v7, n2]

Axolotls are amphibious organisms that live in rivers in Mexico. The water they live in is iodine deficient therefore they have hypothyroidism. This is why they have a distinctive half finished metamorphic appearance (gills + lungs). If you put them in iodine rich water as tadpoles then they ‘finish’ metamorphosis and become salamanders.
[@_captainscience; https://twitter.com/_captainscience/status/1371199557338562560?s=09]

This … was famously expressed by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in pictorial terms. Before we observe it, the wave function of a cat might be a superposition of a sleeping cat and an awake cat (in Schrödinger’s version, the cat was dead or alive, but it isn’t nice to joke about dying cats).
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]

[Niels Bohr] wrote “the description of a quantum system cannot be separated from the measuring instruments that interact with it” … [this] is misleading because it seems to make “measuring instruments” necessary … [the] observation needs to be generalised and the need for a measurer removed. This can be done by saying that the description of a physical system cannot be separated from the other physical systems that interact with it … Properties of a quantum system exist only at the point of interacting with something else.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]

If we think of the physical world as if it were made by little stones each with its own properties, the jump from this picture to the subjective experience of mental phenomena is huge. But if the physical nature of the world is better described in terms of how physical systems, simple [and] complex … affect one another, perhaps the disjoint will appear less dramatic: products of the mind are just the complex phenomenon formed by the tangled and richly interwoven interactions between the world and the brain.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]

We shouldn’t force what we have discovered about nature to align with [our] prejudices: rather, our prejudices should be modified by our discoveries about nature.
[Carlo Rovelli; New Scientist; 13 March 2021; https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933250-500-quantum-weirdness-isnt-weird-if-we-accept-objects-dont-exist/ (£££)]

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
[Borges, Essay: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins]