There is a version of you re-created in the minds of everyone you’ve ever met.
Category Archives: quotes
Monthly Quotes
So here we are with the first round up of quotes for 2020. And it’s an action-packed issue!
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; 1649]
As you close your eyes and inhale frankincense oil, you see yourself walking in a pine and eucalyptus forest, your steps taking you to a sun-bathed clearing. Here, a steamy spring welcomes you in its warm and surprisingly citrus-scented water. While you thought you couldn’t be more relaxed, a misty incense smoke spreads around you, balancing and settling your mind.
[Cosmetics company Lush]
People take way more pictures of giraffes than they do of boring rocks or bushes. As a result, AIs seem to have leaned that giraffes are everywhere. If they’re not sure what’s in a picture – and they do get confused a lot – they’ll often guess “giraffe”.
[Janelle Shane; New Scientist; 21 December 2019]
Someone once trained a neural net to place bets on horseraces. Its winning strategy? To place zero bets.
[Janelle Shane; New Scientist; 21 December 2019]
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
[Susan Sontag]
Every age has its own Fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own will. There are many ways of reaching this point, not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of the privileged few depended on the forced labour and the forced silence of the many.
[Primo Levi, 1974]
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.
[Shunryu Suzuki]
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly … is a movie about cowboys – that is to say, misogynistic, murdering, rootin’-tootin’ gunmen who meander about 19th-century American Wild West in search of a credit sequence.
[Feedback; New Scientist; 04 January 2020]
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let each new year find you a better man.
[Benjamin Franklin, 1755]
How do we preserve Britain as a tolerant place when we don’t have Europe to blame for our problems any more? … How [do] we keep the flexibility of an unwritten constitution, but maintain certainty in human rights and control executive power?
[Gina Miller; Guardian; 11 January 2020]
Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.
[John Barrymore (1882-1942)]
Everyone has ancestors and it is only a question of going back far enough to find a good one.
[Howard Kenneth Nixon (1927-2009)]
The fundamental defect with fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
[Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)]
Foure things make us happy here
Health is the first good lent to men;
A gentle disposition then:
Next, to be rich by no by-wayes;
Lastly, with friends t’enjoy our dayes.
[Robert Herrick (1591–1674)]
Get naked, drink mead and party like a Pagan because a Christmas spent queuing at Argos is just bollocks.
Only at Christmas?
Quote: Everything
You can’t have everything – where would you put it?
[Steven Wright]
Monthly Quotes
OK, so we’ve got to the last round-up of iinteresting and/or amusing quotes for this year. So here goes …
Firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.
[Eihei Dogen]
When an animal is being particularly busy underneath a few leaves, thinking very deeply about things, giving himself up to very serious reflection, he does not want to be disturbed.
[AA Milne]
Preparation and precaution were, however, the natural flowers of Mr Mudge’s mind, and in proportion as these things declined in one quarter they inevitably bloomed elsewhere. He could always, at the worst, have on Tuesday the project of their taking the Swanage boat on Thursday, and on Thursday that of their ordering minced kidneys on Saturday. He had, moreover, a constant gift of inexorable inquiry as to where and what they should have gone and have done if they had not been exactly as they were.
[Henry James, In the Cage]
Science is not a system of beliefs. According to the philosopher Karl Popper, science is the search for truth, not the search for certainty. It is an iterative process of posing a question, designing a controlled experiment to test the question, and making interpretations based on experimental outcomes.
[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-do-we-know-what-we-know/]
Last sleep in day of holiday
White linen sheets
In an all white room
Two stir slowly
As winter day breaks
Fingers trace along lines
Till hands open unto curves
Skin awakens before eyes
Warmth beckons our movement
As instinct guides
On a January morn
[KiraLili; Slow January Morn]
eyes slurred dews cherry
kisses and masturbations
a high school story
[Rajat Kanti Chakrabarty; A High School Story]
late at night
a shepherd
woke his wife
I saw … heard
angels sing
in the sky!
it’s the wine
she mumbled
or UFOs!
[Paul Callus, A Light-Hearted Christmas]
What if Dogen was, like, right about all that “there are millions of eyes everywhere” stuff? What if, like, the universe is the Ultimate Surveillance State?
[Brad Warner]
To an astonishing degree, nature is the way it is because it couldn’t be any different.
[Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine]
All that was required of them (ie. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.
[George Orwell]
That’s all for now. Have a good Christmas and New Year and we’ll see you with more quotes in January.
Quote: Power
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Monthly Quotes
So here’s this month’s collection of quotes – some interesting, some amusing …
No Park – no Ring – no afternoon gentility –
No company – no nobility –
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease
No comfortable feel in any member –
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flow’rs, no leaves, no birds,
November!
[Thomas Hood (1799–1845), No!]
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
[Alan Moore, V for Vendetta]
Government ministers are like economists – ask two of them this question and you get three different answers.
[Graham Page]
When I ceased to accept the teachings of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed.
[Leslie Stephen]
I tend to become uncomfortable around all ideologies that brand themselves as “the truth” or “the way”. This not only includes most religions, but also atheism, radical bi-partisan politics or any system of thought, including “woke” culture, that finds its energy in self-righteous belief and the suppression of contrary systems of thought. Regardless of the virtuous intentions of many woke issues, it is its lack of humility and the paternalistic and doctrinal sureness of its claims that repel me.
Antifa and the Far Right, for example, with their routine street fights, role-playing and dress-ups are participants in a weirdly erotic, violent and mutually self-sustaining marriage, propped up entirely by the blind, inflexible convictions of each other’s belief systems. It is good for nothing, except inflaming their own self-righteousness.
[Nick Cave at https://reason.com/2019/10/21/nick-cave-slams-woke-culture-as-self-righteous-and-suppresive/]
Some of us … are of the generation that believed that free speech was a clear-cut and uncontested virtue, yet within a generation this concept is seen by many as a dog-whistle to the Far Right, and is rapidly being consigned to the Left’s ever-expanding ideological junk pile.
[Nick Cave at https://reason.com/2019/10/21/nick-cave-slams-woke-culture-as-self-righteous-and-suppresive/]
Cat: a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs and patronizes human beings.
[Oliver Herford (1863-1935)]
Saw someone with a shirt saying:
Truth + God = Life
I hope they realise that it also follows …
Truth = Life – God
God = Life – Truth
Seriously, do the maths people.
Europe is not a market, it is the will to live together. Leaving Europe is not leaving a market, it is leaving shared dreams. We can have a common market, but if we do not have common dreams,
we have nothing. Europe is the peace that came after the disaster of war. Europe is the pardon
between French and Germans. Europe is the return to freedom of Greece, Spain and Portugal. Europe is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe is the end of communism. Europe is the welfare state, it is democracy.
[Esteban González Pons on the 60th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome]
When I talk to managers I get the feeling they are important. When I talk to leaders I get the feeling that I am important.
Psychopathic traits such as risk taking, overconfidence and superficial charm can make men more attractive to romantic partners, despite them having little interest in committed relationships, researchers at Canada’s Brock University have found.
[Science Focus magazine, 12/2019]
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.
[PJ O’Rourke, writer (b.14 Nov 1947)]
Quote: Reality
The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Monthly Quotes
This month’s selection of recently encountered quotes …
As someone who escaped the lurid treadmill of life in a circus family I have always had the most disagreeable fear that one day the exploding clown car would come back to haunt me.
[Sir John Major]
Anglo-Saxon words
Refuted by my scrabble app:
Cunt. Quim. (Frig’s OK.)
[@19syllables; https://twitter.com/19syllables/status/1176959628925636608]
Magnus nodded sagely. “The more you see of the world, Alva, the more you will find the line blurred between right and wrong. People move about, taking with them their beliefs, their customs, their language. They blend and meld with the places they settle until it is difficult to determine Viking from Anglo-Saxon, pagan from Christian. We are all growing and changing with every passing moment. And I am by your side. We will be changed by this together.”
[God] just seems very man-made to me. There are so many theories, and not everyone can be right. It’s human nature to need a religious crutch, and I don’t begrudge anyone that. I just don’t need one.
[Janeane Garofalo; Showbiz; 1995]
The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd … The one who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been.
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
[PG Wodehouse; The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology]
Don’t worry … we will be what we need for each other. We will become who we need to be to give each other light.
[Gesshin Claire Greenwood; https://medium.com/@clairegesshin/facing-the-end-of-everything-c3056f44e836]
Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, and the eyes of a baby … life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.
[Thich Nhat Hanh; Being Peace]
If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.
[Nikola Tesla]
Whether the weather be hot,
Or whether the weather be not,
We’ll weather the weather
Whatever the weather
Whether we like it or not!
[unknown]
The standard business model for corporations is to lie, confuse and deny anything that may threaten their profitability.
[Steven Magee]
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 Kerr; VI. Wisdom: The Voice of God]
When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.
[Lin Yutang]
Monthly Quotes
Here’s this month’s collection of amusing and thought-provoking quotes …
[T]he most obvious, and most sensible conclusion is that there is no meaning to anything, no purpose for anything, no salvation, no nothing. This isn’t at all emotionally pleasing. And so, the materialists say, we want to and reject that reality in favour of more pleasing alternative explanations based in superstition and wishful thinking. The reason for religion, then, is as a coping mechanism, to deal with how brutally pointless everything actually is when we’re honest about it.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/the-meaning-of-life/6481]
Science is, after all, the deep study of sensory experience. It measures sensory experiences, compares them to other sensory experiences that have been had by other human beings. It correlates the sensory experiences of many humans and says that if many humans report more-or-less the same sensory experience, that sensory experience must therefore be real. But it does all of this in one slice of reality, the realm of sensory experience.
[Brad Warner; http://hardcorezen.info/the-meaning-of-life/6481]
“Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science” [James Clerk Maxwell] … And so this is the kind of ignorance that I’m talking about, not the common usage of the word “ignorance”, not stupidity or wilful indifference to fact or logic – you know who I’m talking about. But rather this thoroughly conscious kind of ignorance that can be developed … The big question for me really is we’ve gained some knowledge, what does one do with that knowledge? And the purpose of that knowledge in my opinion is to create better ignorance, if you will. Because there’s low-quality ignorance and high-quality ignorance … science, in my opinion, is the search for better ignorance.
[Stuart Firestein]
Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.
[Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly’s]
Earth water fire and air
Met together in a garden fair
Put in a basket bound with skin
If you answer this riddle
You’ll never begin.
[Incredible String Band]
There are two things, to be and to do. Don’t think too much about to do – to be is first. To be peace. To be joy. To be happiness. And then to do joy, to do happiness – on the basis of being.
[Thich Nhat Hanh]
I never married because there was no need. I have three pets at home which answer the same purpose as a husband. I have a dog that growls every morning, a parrot that swears all afternoon, and a cat that comes home late at night.
[Marie Corelli (1855-1924)]
St Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
[Bertrand Russell]
Under this window in stormy weather
I marry this man and woman together;
Let none but Him who rules the thunder
Put this man and woman asunder.
[Jonathan Swift]
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
[Robert M Pirsig]
Teenagers are how they are because it was evolutionarily useful. Long term, sticking to the safe and familiar can lead to stagnation and extinction. Having individuals strike out on their own can refresh the gene pool and uncover useful information. Hence, teens reject authority, crave independence, take risks and so on. Far from being a constant annoyance, teenagers may be the reason humanity is as smart and successful as it is.
[Dean Burnett; New Scientist, 14 September 2019]
Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn’t, they don’t certainly know that, although you probably wouldn’t, there is no probability that you certainly would.
[Yes Minister]
Quote: Obscenity
Without obscenity, our cities are dreary places and life is bleak.
[Nobuyoshi Araki]