Category Archives: quotes

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

And for the final time this year, here’s our monthly round-up of quotes interesting and amusing.

The philosopher Diogenes (c.412-323 BCE) was described by Plato as “a Socrates gone mad”. He lived in a barrel & believed man must embrace nature & reject shame. He openly masturbated in public, saying “If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly”.
[@WhoresofYore on Twitter]

The two greatest defences against infectious diseases are:
1. Clean water
2. Vaccines – the the single most life-saving medical innovation in the history of medicine.
[Prof. Alice Roberts]

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
[Robert M Pirsig]

Each person has come into manifestation for a certain purpose and that purpose will be accomplished whether he considers himself to be the actor or not.
[Ramana Maharshi]

The present is no more a real feature of the world than the deliciousness of haggis. It is just a feature of how we experience time.
[Will Bynoe; Logic and Monsters]

A corollary of “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is that actually coaxing that technology into functioning properly is indistinguishable from spell-casting.
[Katie Mack, @AstroKatie on Twitter]

My standard response to tech complaints is “have you painted yourself blue & turned 3x widdershins while saying an incantation?” Response “No” of course. Me: “Then you haven’t tried *everything*.”
[@WTEDyke on Twitter]

The eminent seat of delectation in women when they engage in venery.
[16th-century Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo on the clitoris]

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
[Carl Sagan]

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[Douglas Adams]

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.
[George Carlin]

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We’re only one God away from total agreement.
[Michael Shermer]

Sex at 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
[George Burns]

Stars, too, were time travellers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries – but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
[Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

And lo, they said it is time for our monthly round-up of quotes, interesting and amusing.

In February 1881 William Cox was charged with bigamy, having married Caroline in 1875 and Rosina in 1880. In his defence, evidence was given that Caroline had married George in 1873, which would have made her marriage to William void and his marriage to Rosina valid. But it was then proved that George had also been married before, which would have made his marriage to Caroline void, her marriage to William valid, and William’s marriage to Rosina void! At this point the magistrates seem to given up, and simply discharged William, who was to be found living with Rosina at the time of the subsequent census.
[Rebecca Probert; Divorced, Bigamist, Bereaved? The Family Historian’s Guide to Marital Breakdown, Separation, Widowhood, and Remarriage: from 1600 to the 1970s]

If you can imagine something, then someone in history has carved, drawn, painted, etched, handwritten, collaged and sewn it into pornography. 
[Hannah Rose Woods; https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/poking-fun]

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
[Donald Robert Perry Marquis, American Journalist (1878-1937)] (h/t John Monaghan)

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease; or was it made to preserve all her children?
[Gerrard Winstanley; 1619; Founder of The True Levellers]

If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.
[Blaise Pascal; mathematician; Lettres Provinciales; 1657]

In some sense, the problems of the world are me. The world I live in is a reflection of me. If the world is in a state of panic, it must be because that state of panic exists within me. Therefore, I attend closely to the state of panic I feel in myself. I don’t try to force it to stop … knowing that it has always been futile …
[Brad Warner, “Responding to Fear” at http://hardcorezen.info/responding-to-fear/6862]

I also believe in karma. I know it’s somewhat controversial. But I believe that things will turn out for me precisely as they are meant to. There is only one thing I can do to avoid whatever pain or difficulty is in store for me, and that is to do as much good as I can whenever I have an opportunity. That is the only sort of activity that might change the course of my own life . In that sense, I have nothing at all to fear. Fear is just something extra that gets in the way of my being able to offer help when help is needed.
[Brad Warner, “Responding to Fear” at http://hardcorezen.info/responding-to-fear/6862]

The idea of two people spending their lives together was invented by people who were lucky to make it to thirty without being eaten by dinosaurs.
[Kevin Dolenz, St Elmo’s Fire; 1985]

5.5 million is an decent estimate of the number of insect species (8mil+ not unrealistic according to some). There are around 6500 species of mammal. So, for every mammal species there are likely ca.1000 insect species. Worth thinking about next time you watch a nature documentary.
[Prof. Adam Hart; @AdamHartScience on Twitter]

If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.
[Cicero]

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
[George Orwell]

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
[Borges]

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
[Stephen Hawking]

Or in the words of George Bernard Shaw:
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

“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]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

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.

quotes

Monthly Quotes

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.