So here we are, round to our monthly selection of recently encountered quotes.

We are a species poised between an awareness of our ultimate insignificance and an ability to reach far beyond our mundane lives, into the void, to solve the most fundamental mysteries of the cosmos.
[Katie Mack; The End of Everything]

Throughout history there have been non-religious people who have believed this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives – using reason and humanity to guide us. These people have looked to scientific evidence and reason to understand the world. And they’ve placed human welfare and happiness – as well as the welfare of other sentient animals – at the heart of how they choose to live their life. Today people who hold these beliefs and values are called humanists. There are millions of individuals around the globe who share this way of living and looking at the world – even if they haven’t heard of the word “humanism” and realised that it describes what they believe.
[Prof. Alice Roberts at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/31/alice-roberts-atheism-humanism]

Atheism is defining yourself by an absence of something. Humanism is a positive choice to base your morals on your own human capacity.
[Prof. Alice Roberts at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/31/alice-roberts-atheism-humanism]

The UK is the only country in the world apart from Iran that reserves places in its legislature for clerics, with 26 Church of England bishops sitting by right in the House of Lords. And yet we think of ourselves as a progressive nation!
[Prof. Alice Roberts at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/31/alice-roberts-atheism-humanism]

A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.
[Molière]

So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables us to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to.
[Benjamin Franklin]

Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest”, but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.
[Sydney J Harris, journalist and author (1917-1986); h/t John Monaghan]

“Avocado” comes from the Aztec “ahuacatl”, which also meant “testicle”. The name was given to the fruit because of its shape.
[@susie_dent on Twitter]

On the subject of Scottish notes, you can often find a Scot attempting to pay with one in an English shop, informing the dubious cashier “I think you’ll find pal, that’s legal tender!” Well, I’m sorry to say that they are not. Scottish and Northern Irish notes are in fact not legal tender anywhere in the UK and do not have to be accepted.
[Tom Currie at Historic London Tours Blog; see also the Bank of England’s What is legal tender? page]

More next month, the Fates permitting.

Our monthly collection of recently encountered quotes …

We as humans are built to ignore big problems.
[Katie Mack at https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/space-the-nation-katie-mack-the-mansplainer-slayer-on-getting-science-right]

It’s very hard to just tell someone, “This is a thing” and have that change their mind … just presenting facts, just throwing facts in people’s faces does not change their minds.
[Katie Mack at https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/space-the-nation-katie-mack-the-mansplainer-slayer-on-getting-science-right]

Almost all of ordinary matter (99.9999999% of it) is empty space. If you took out all of the space in our atoms, the entire human race (all 7 billion of us) would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

“My dog does magic tricks.”
“Really? What breed is he?”
“He’s a labracadabrador.”
[Stolen from Twitter]

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
[Enoch Powell]

Vice, if you gild it lavishly enough, is always attractive … thoughts of the aftermath rarely intrude themselves on such occasions.
[Sidney Felstead]

“Si quis sederet super pellem leonis recedent ab illo emorroides”
If someone sits on a lion’s skin their piles will go away.
[Ortus sanitatis, 1499. “Description of the properties of lions”. Quoted by Katie Birkwood at https://twitter.com/Girlinthe/status/1290593981424902144]

We’ve become incredibly entomologically dumb. We just don’t distinguish the dangerous from the harmless from the helpful. The average kid can probably distinguish more makes of cars or superheroes than insects.
[Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming]
In Maine, selling weed is illegal but it’s legal to have and use. So there are these guys who run a “psychic” location service and for a fee they will find your lost weed and deliver it to you.
[Twitter]

The best food ever is nonexistent or you will never find it. My reason for this, is that people create new food all the time. Also you have to try every thing that ever existed since the beginning of time. And the reason is that you would have [to] eat things, that you can’t eat, like dark matter. Even if you figured out how to fly around, eating every single quark and lepton you [would] eventually explode because you would contain the whole universe. So, in conclusion don’t try to find the best food in the world because you will explode.
[Anonymous 10-year old asked to write about the best food in the world; quoted on Twitter]

The cult of female modesty is as much part of ““patriarchy” as anything else – it gives men power to shame and demean women … As ever, that modesty cult claims to be in a woman’s own interest.
[Dr Victoria Bateman]

Orange and gold carp.
Living beneath the ice.
Uncaring of the world above,
sustained by the water below.
[Deng Ming-Dao]

There is no greater enemy to dictators than people actually being allowed to vote.

Here is this month’s selection of interesting or amusing quotes. In no particular order …

Grassi, in theorizing about heat, relied on … ancient authors when he claimed that Babylonians could cook eggs by whirling them around at the ends of slings … Galileo’s retort … translates to: “If we do not achieve an effect which others formerly achieved, it must be that we lack something in our operation which was the cause of this effect succeeding, and if we lack one thing only, then this alone can be the true cause.”
The ball thus teed up, Galileo swings away: “Now we do not lack eggs, or slings, or sturdy fellows to whirl them, and still [the eggs] do not cook, but rather cool down faster if hot. And since we lack nothing except being Babylonian, then being Babylonian is the cause of the egg hardening.”
[Steve Mirsky; Scientific American; 07/2020]

What is to be expected of [the English ruling class] is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable.
[George Orwell, 1941]

Mr Speaker the figures I gave that the Prime Minister says are inadvertently misleading are the slide at his press conference yesterday!
[Keir Starmer MP, at PMQs, 24 June 2020]

To think that we are supposed to live this life without asking for help and without being interconnected is insanity.
[Amanda Palmer]

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
[George Santayana (1863-1952)]

O sophisticated drinkers – 
you unthirsty thyrsus-linkers
down your rounds, ignore the blinkers, 
bent on being wineglass-clinkers! …
If you can’t brook a libation,
get out of our celebration!
Out! Begone! Why in tarnation 
Stay? We don’t host moderation.
[Carmina Burana]

The custom of shaking hands originated in the ancient and universal practice of grasping the weapon hand during a truce as a precaution against treachery. So we see that from a comparatively dark and illiterate period a custom having a rational origin, which rationale dwindled into nothingness during its spread and migration through successive centuries, was ushered into our glorious civilization, unnecessary in its essence, devoid of all intelligence, and positively injurious to public health.
[Nathan Breiter, Medical Record, 1897]

Extremely into this explanation of sinning by senses from the 15th century Krumlov Miscellenea: “[I have sinned b]y my hands, touching my body wrongly and vainly or touching other persons’ breasts or crotch forcing to commit an evil act, arousing myself or someone else to sin.”
It’s a great reminder of the idea of the conception of the contagious nature of sex. You grab someone’s crotch and BLAM, they pretty much have to have sex because that is just way too hot. (At least that is what happens when I do it.)
But it is also a great reminder of the medieval conception of sodomy, (or what we would call foreplay cuz we basic), as medieval people were like “Hell yeah hand stuff? That is the sex worth risking the death of my immortal soul for.”
[Dr Eleanor Janega, @GoingMedieval, on Twitter]

I think there’s something fundamentally disrespectful about someone who can’t be bothered to take their socks off if they think they’re going to get some.
Make a bloody effort …  It’s all very well jumping on your Raleigh Chopper with a come hither look in your eye, but if … you’ve got your football socks and Birkenstock on, it’s a stone cold passion killer and no mistake.
[Katy Wheatley]

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are … if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
[Richard Feynman]

The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.
[Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, on the Trinity nuclear test, 1945]

Being wrong is not a bad thing like they teach you in school. It is an opportunity to learn something. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error.

If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it. The best way to learn is to teach.
[Richard Feynman]

Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes.

Humans construct stories to wrangle meaning from uncertainty and purpose from chaos. We crave simple narratives.
[Ed Yong; “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing”; The Atlantic; 29/04/2020; https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/]

And the desire to name an antagonist … disregards the many aspects of 21st-century life that made the pandemic possible: humanity’s relentless expansion into wild spaces; soaring levels of air travel; chronic underfunding of public health; a just-in-time economy that runs on fragile supply chains; health-care systems that yoke medical care to employment; social networks that rapidly spread misinformation; the devaluation of expertise; the marginalization of the elderly; and centuries of structural racism that impoverished the health of minorities and indigenous groups.
[Ed Yong; “Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing”; The Atlantic; 29/04/2020; https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-confusing-uncertainty/610819/]

The relationship between sound and time is one woven deep in our culture.  Andrew Marvell, in To His Coy Mistress, hears “time’s winged chariot”. Justice Shallow has heard “the chimes at midnight”.  Anthony Powell writes of A Dance to the  Music of Time.  Nineteen Eighty-Four opens with the brilliantly unheimlich detail of the clocks “striking thirteen”.  And TS Eliot, in The Waste Land describes London commuters flowing “up the hill and down King William Street,/To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours/With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine”.  Time is, as scientists know, a very strange thing indeed.
[Sam Leith; TLS; 6 June 2020]

Technological advances in the detection of radiation, from X-rays to optical light to radio waves, and great improvements in computing power and storage [allowed scientists] to deal with the vast amount of data they produced. The technology was by and large developed for other purposes – it is what gave us people walking about looking at their smartphones instead of where they are going – and was adapted by inventive astronomers for cosmological tests.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 6 June 2020]

We haven’t been issued a guarantee that we can make sense of the physical world around us … But lest there be doubt about how well physics has been doing so far, consider how successfully scientists and engineers can command the behaviour of electrons, atoms and molecules, as well as electric and magnetic fields, in cellphones. All of this has been done based on incomplete approximations.
… … …
My point is that all of physics is incomplete. I certainly don’t mean wrong, I mean that it can all be improved. Maybe there is a final theory of physics, or maybe it is approximations all the way down.
[Prof. Jim Peebles; New Scientist; 6 June 2020]

She drew the epigraph from Proust: “Les gens du monde se représentent volontiers les livres comme une espèce de cube dont une face est enlevée, si bien que l’auteur se dépêche de ‘faire entrer’ dedans les personnes qu’il rencontre”.  (“Society people think that books are a sort of cube, one side of which the author opens the better to insert into it the people he meets”.)
[Angela Thirkell]

Ninety percent of what’s wrong with you
could be cured with a hot bath,
says God through the manhole covers,
but we want magic, to win
the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
(Tenderly, the monks chant,
embrace the suffering.) The voice never
panders, offers no five-year plan,
no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy
white beard hooked over ears.
It is small and fond and local. Don’t look for
your initials in the geese honking
overhead or to see through the glass even
darkly. It says the most obvious shit,
ie. Put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
[Mary Karr; VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God]

Some believed eels were born of sea-foam, or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew that covered lakeshores and riverbanks in the spring. In the English countryside, where eel fishing was popular, most people adhered to the theory that eels were born when hairs from horses’ tails fell into the water.
[Patrik Svensson; The Book of Eels]

More next month. Be good!