Here be this month’s collection of quotes miscellaneous.
Words transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.
[Ursula K Le Guin]
There is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale … What appears [in the media] is generally at best a collection of trivial and almost unrelated fragments, while at worst, it can often be a really harmful source of confusion and misinformation.
[David Bohm, 1917-92]
The scientist is engaged in a … “dialogue” with nature (as well as with his fellow human beings). Thus, when a scientist has an idea, this is tested by observation. When it is found (as generally happens) that what is observed is only similar to what he had in mind and not identical, then from a consideration of the similarities and the differences he gets a new idea which is in turn tested. And so it goes, with the continual emergence of something new that is common to the thought of scientists and what is observed in nature.
[David Bohm, 1917-92]
Robert Conquest’s Third Laws of Politics: The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Even when she is perfectly at home on the wheel [bicycle], she should remember her sex is not intended by nature for violent muscular exertion … And even when a woman has cautiously prepared herself and has trained for the work, her speed should never be that of an adult man in full muscular vigour.
[Just Championnière, French surgeon, 1895 in Scientific American]
We are living in a time that requires inventiveness and imagination. It is this kind of creative inspiration that is indigenous to PANTONE 18-3838 Ultra Violet, a blue-based purple that takes our awareness and potential to a higher level. From exploring new technologies and the greater galaxy, to artistic expression and spiritual reflection, intuitive Ultra Violet lights the way to what is yet to come.
[Leatrice Eiseman, Executive Director of the Pantone Colour Institute, on the Pantone Colour of 2018]
Religions are just ways people have come up with to deal with the fear of death and the necessities of civilization. On the philosophical side, it’s driven by the knowledge that all of us, some day, are going to die. We’re not sure if any other animals know this. Maybe they do. Elephants seem to have rituals around death. Other animals may have their own ways of understanding it that we just can’t comprehend. On the social and ritual side, the purpose of religion is to get everyone in a close-knit community on the same page about following the rules that are necessary to keep their society from collapsing into chaos and disorder.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/merry-christmas-2017/5673]
God is kind of like aliens. Either he exists right now, or he doesn’t. Whether we believe in him or not, won’t change the fact.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/merry-christmas-2017/5673]
Perhaps in a democracy the distinctive feature of decadence is not debauchery but terminal self-absorption – the loss of the capacity for collective action, the belief in common purpose, even the acceptance of a common form of reasoning.
We listen to necromancers who prophesy great things while they lead us into disaster. We sneer at the idea of a “public” and hold our fellow citizens in contempt. We think anyone who doesn’t pursue self-interest is a fool.
… … …
A decadent elite licenses degraded behaviour, and a debased public chooses its worst leaders. Then our Nero panders to our worst attributes – and we reward him for doing so.
[James Traub, http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-reached-last-stage-before-collapse-2017-12]
Here is something genuinely new about our era: We lack not only a sense of shared citizenry or collective good, but even a shared body of fact or a collective mode of reasoning toward the truth.
A thing that we wish to be true is true; if we wish it not to be true, it isn’t. Global warming is a hoax. Barack Obama was born in Africa. Neutral predictions of the effects of tax cuts on the budget must be wrong, because the effects they foresee are bad ones.
… … …
Your story fights my story; if I can enlist more people on the side of my story, I own the truth.
[James Traub, http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-reached-last-stage-before-collapse-2017-12]
The reduction of all disagreeable facts and narratives to “fake news” will stand as one of Donald Trump’s most lasting contributions to American culture, far outliving his own tenure.
[James Traub, http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-reached-last-stage-before-collapse-2017-12]
The worship of the marketplace, and thus the elevation of selfishness to a public virtue, is a doctrine that we associate with the libertarian right. But it has coursed through the culture as a self-justifying ideology for rich people of all political persuasions &ndsh; perhaps also for people who merely dream of becoming rich.
[James Traub, http://uk.businessinsider.com/us-reached-last-stage-before-collapse-2017-12]
The passage of time is an illusion and life is the magician, because life only lets you see one day at a time. You remember being alive yesterday, you hope you’re going to be alive tomorrow, so it feels like you are travelling one to the other but nobody’s moving anywhere! Movies don’t really move, they’re just pictures – lots and lots of pictures, all of them still, none of them moving, just frozen moments. But if you experience those pictures one after the other, then everything comes alive.
[Dr Who, Series 10, Episode 1. Quoted at http://hardcorezen.info/doctor-who-dogen-and-the-fermi-paradox-or-happy-new-year-2018/5677]
When I make myself a sandwich I am amazed that sandwiches exist. How improbable is that? How astonishing is it that, in the vast universe, I exist in a place in which there are sandwiches? Throughout most of this endless universe, there are no sandwiches. Sandwiches can’t even exist on most planets.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/doctor-who-dogen-and-the-fermi-paradox-or-happy-new-year-2018/5677]
If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.
[Richard Feynman]
Remember also that once your house is spotless, there will be no food inside for any insect that happens to stray inside and it might die of starvation. Therefore it is an act of kindness to leave directions to the nearest food bank for them.
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/07/a-monks-guide-to-a-clean-house-and-mind-by-shoukei-matsumoto-digested-read]
The Axehandle Hound has a hatchet-shaped head, a handle-shaped body, and stumpy legs. This North Woods dachshund eats only the handles of axes.
Among the fish of this region we find the Upland Trout. They nest in trees and are good fliers but are scared of water.
[Jorges Luis Borges; The Book of Imaginary Beasts]
When it is so dark you cannot identify members of the same species, never mind the same sex, glowing genitals are presumably a very handy thing to have!
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/dec/19/glow-in-the-dark-sharks-discovered-in-hawaii-etmopterus-lailae]
Boom! Boom!

Here’s this month’s round up of interesting and amusing quotes.
Since 2011, under David Cameron and Theresa May, life expectancy has flatlined. The latest figures, published by the Office for National Statistics in September, are for the period 2014-16. Women can now expect to live for 83.06 years and men for 79.40 years. For the first time in well over a century the health of people in England and Wales as measured by the most basic feature – life – has stopped improving. Just as Macmillan had done, the government initially tried to blame the figures on flu deaths. But as the years have passed and life expectancy continues to stall it has become clear that flu isn’t the culprit. The most plausible explanation would blame the politics of austerity, which has had an excessive impact on the poor and the elderly; the withdrawal of care support to half a million elderly people that had taken place by 2013; the effect of a million fewer social care visits being carried out every year; the cuts to NHS budgets and its reorganisation as a result of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act; increased rates of bankruptcy and general decline in the quality of care homes; the rise in fuel poverty among the old; cuts to or removal of disability benefits. The stalling of life expectancy was the result of political choice.
[Danny Dorling at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n22/danny-dorling/short-cuts]
Currently my pekin bantams get up around 11:30 and go to bed at 4:30. Between those times they eat, nap and chase crows. I fully approve of this approach to November.
[Emma Beddington, @BelgianWaffling]
37% of respondents in the UK said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. But people working in bullshit jobs need to do something. And that something is usually the production, distribution and consumption of bullshit.
[André Spicer in The Guardian, 23/11/2017]
As so often happens circumstances were not other than they were.
[PG Wodehouse, Company for Henry]
That on 7th July 17 Eliz. [1575], one Robert Lowes of Glawstrie co. Radnor, gent., Meredith ap Thomas ap Harry … Robert ap Griffithe ap Lewes, Robert William & Edward Smithe, in the company of one Sybell Lewes, wife of Jenn Lewes, Esq., “and also being very lighte, lewde, wylde, ryotous and disordered persons & common quarrellers”, with other evil disposed persons to the number of at least 40, being all armed with swords, etc., walked up and down the town of Huntington for three hours at least, espying some person to take revenge upon.
[AD Powell, “Abstracts from Miscellaneous Star Chamber Cases of the Radnor-Hereford Border”, Transactions Radnorshire Society, 35 (1965), 36-42]
The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.
[Kurt Vonnegut]
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad.
[Alan Watts]
What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.
Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.
[Seneca]
The next fear is that men will get so nervous that they’re going to be accused of harassment that they will simply stop hiring, meeting or socialising with female colleagues. There are reports this is already happening. We will get shut out of the room where important decisions are made because men fear our presence? How ironic would that be? …
The backlash fear [is] this could quickly become a vendetta in which lots and lots of men are implicated and punished. Men will be seen as the bad guys simply for the crime of being male.
Already men are nervously asking what’s acceptable and what’s not. Is all flirting now banned? Is a pat on the back OK, but a pat on the bottom always a sackable offence? This confusion could fast turn to anger.
The risk is that men, feeling under siege, kick back … Then we risk losing the support and sympathy of our male colleagues. We do indeed become seen as witch hunters, or worse, as witches. To be clear, men who have sexually abused and harassed women should be called out. But [a] backlash now against women would be the worst thing that can happen, it would shove this topic back under the carpet for years.
[Katty Kay at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42200092]
The problem is, unraveling the ultimate purpose of life, the universe, and everything may be forever beyond the reach of the human mind. I can’t know what the meaning of life is because the very nature of the meaning of life is unknowability. Knowing is a way of limiting things, yet the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is limitless.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/is-it-better-to-have-never-been-born/5654]
Gladstone … spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question …
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[WC Sellar, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England]
Not that it’s been a shit day, but I am left wondering why gin doesn’t come in Jeroboams.
[@ianvisits]
Statistics … suggest it is truly dismal these days to have a Y chromosome.
[Mark Rice-Oxley in The Guardian; 21/11/2017]
When he is in sycophancy mode rather than treachery mode, Mr Gove could give tutorials in how to be oleaginous to Uriah Heep.
[Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian; 10/12/2017]
This outbreak of delirium ought to make us extremely suspicious. Everyone cannot be happy. Someone is deluding themselves about what has been agreed – or they are trying to fool us.
[Andrew Rawnsley in The Guardian; 10/12/2017]
Unless the GOP tax scam is being produced as a coloring book, Trump has NO idea what’s in it!
[Amy Siskind on Facebook; 19/12/2017]
More after the break!

This month’s collection of thoughtful, or laughable, quotes encountered.
Do the characters we inhabit in dreams have dreams of their own when we’re awake? Are we characters they inhabit?
[Brad Warner]
Tony’s parents had settled in a flat a short walk away at Clarence Terrace, a dubious blessing in their son’s view, but a long lease on the new house would scarcely have been possible without help from his father. “I suppose one oughtn’t to grumble as he does cough up quite a lot of the necessary,” Tony eventually conceded, “but he has a wonderful air of conveying that he is a mixture of General Gordon and Saint Francis of Assisi and that one is a compound of King John and Titus Dates.”
[Hilary Spurling; Anthony Powell]
The life of the series is generated within it … Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists. In the Music of Time we watch through the glass of a tank; one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or tail, they are off into the murk. That is how our encounters occur in real life. Friends and acquaintances approach or recede year by year … Their presence has no particular significance. It is recorded as part of the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard which is the essence of Mr Powell’s art.
[Evelyn Waugh on Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time]
Sheldrake plays accordion in a band called the Gentle Mystics, whose tracks include a trance epic called “Mushroom 30,000”, and whose musical style might best be described as myco-klezmer-hip-hop-electro-burlesque. Once heard, bewildered. Twice heard, hooked.
[From https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web/amp]
Trying to control leads to ruin. Allow your life to unfold naturally, knowing that it too is a vessel of perfection
[Lao Tzu]
There is a mysterious place
Behind the Great Pyramid’s face
Which physicists found
By looking around
Assisted by muons from space.
[@Limericking on Twitter]
We are cast by chance into an age in which nothing is worse than to be openly ignorant, nothing more rare than to be fully learned.
[John Donne, Introduction to Catalogus Librorum Satiricus, ca.1600]
Most content in the news media consists of propaganda generated by the rich and powerful. But when the launch of an advert becomes the news, the mask falls off entirely.
[George Monbiot on Twitter; 10 November 2017]
[Trump] got elected when I was two years into the album [Utopia] and I felt like, OK, it’s really important now to be intentional. If you feel this world is not heading the right way, you have to be DIY and make a little fortress, over here to the left.
[Björk; https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/12/bjork-utopia-interview-people-miss-the-jokes]
Scientists are skeptics. It’s unfortunate that the word “skeptic” has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it’s just thoughtful inquiry.
[Michael Shermer]
They were not life forms. They were … non-life forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell. And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]
Rates of sexual offending go down as people in a society have more access to pornography. This is research that has been replicated in the United States and around the world. People don’t talk about this because they don’t want to acknowledge what it means. Porn is good for society. A society with more access to porn is a sexually safer society.
Access to pornography may decrease rates of juvenile sex offending even more. If pornography were a moral-altering thing, turning weak-minded people into rapists and paedophiles, it would have a greater negative effect on teen boys. And it doesn’t. Just the opposite. Gay men watch more porn than straight men. But rates of rape and sexual violence in gay men are lower than in heterosexuals.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]

So here we are again with this month’s selection of interesting and amusing quotes.
Visitors should bear in mind that architects can become extremely excited by plasterboard-wrapped columns, structural grids & road markings.
[Olly Wainwright]
The barn-owl turns in the darkness of an oak, and floats forward over fading giraffe-skins of light and shade …
[JA Baker, September]
In the real world, we have to talk about things and find ways to respect each other’s opinion, even when we disagree. A healthy, mutually satisfying relationship involves celebrating the things you love about each other and ignoring, whenever possible, those quirks that you can’t change.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
When people tell you to be afraid, in an ambiguous, unclear situation, you need to wonder why they want you to be afraid, and what they intend to do with that fear of yours.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Part of the problem here is that our media thrives on instilling fear and inadequacy in people. They want you to be afraid, to feel anxiety, so that you read their article or watch their television show, all so they can sell you shit via advertisements and commercials. Fear about sex and health are two of their main strategies.
[David J Ley, Ethical Porn for Dicks]
Our freedoms and privileges in a liberal democracy are ultimately guaranteed by the willingness of the state to use violence to protect them … Is an open society that tolerates dissent even possible without its being underwritten by violence?
[Stephen Batchelor quoted at http://hardcorezen.info/the-zen-buddhist-who-advises-trump-about-nukes/5561]
Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.
[Dalai Lama]
If you want to go bomb somebody, there’s remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist suffering people, then suddenly we become very cost-conscious.
[Andrew J Bacevich, American historian]
The West won the world by applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grand-children’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
[Carl Sagan, in 1996]
Parenting to grow our sons’ relational capacities is all about staying in conversation with them over the years to help them see how powerful their capacities for communication and expression are. It’s about getting them to that tipping point whereby they commit to their own voice over the scripted silences of traditional manhood.
[Mark Greene; “Why Do We Murder the Beautiful Friendships of Boys?” at https://medium.com/@remakingmanhood/why-do-we-murder-the-beautiful-friendships-of-boys-3ad722942755]

So here’s this month’s selection of interesting, amusing or thought-provoking quotes.

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no-one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no-one knows why.
[unknown]

The execution of Brexit has been [the government’s] real undoing, for the simple reason that nobody with the competence to do it has any enthusiasm for it, and nobody with the enthusiasm has any competence. It’s not a bad working definition of the worst idea ever, but that’s democracy. It is fitting that the party that put it on the menu should have to cook it.
Theresa May’s early flirtation with a Kim Jong-un Brexit (we do it my way, and nobody needs to know what that way is because I am glorious) has left her rather weakened, but even that isn’t the problem. Her job now is to manage down expectations, and maturely present a series of choices which are hard because they are all suboptimal.
[Zoe Williams, Guardian]

“Having sex for money is bad because it is counterfeiting feelings” wow dude, I have bad news about every other customer service job ever.
[someone unknown on Twitter]

The academies send more people out into the world with their heads full of inanities than any other public institution.
[Kant to his pupils]

Love is not about sex, going on fancy dates, or showing off. It’s about being with a person who makes you happy in a way nobody else can.
[unknown]

The Bill weaves a tapestry of delegated powers that are breathtaking in terms of both their scope and potency …
It is a source of considerable regret that the Bill is drafted in a way that renders scrutiny very difficult, and that multiple and fundamental constitutional questions are left unanswered.
[House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, Interim Report on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, September 2017]

I am not a liberal snowflake. My feelings aren’t fragile, my heart isn’t bleeding. I am a badass believer in human rights. My toughness is in tenderness. My strength is in the service of others. There is nothing more fierce than formidable, unconditional love. There is not a thing more courageous than compassion. But if my belief in equity, empathy, goodness, and love indeed makes me or people like me snowflakes, then you should know – winter is coming.
[unknown]

He [George Rapp] believed that a prolonged practice of celibacy would restore man’s ability to multiply himself alone, according to God’s original plan for Adam.
[William E Wilson; The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony]
Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.
[Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence]

They were not life forms. They were … non-life forms. They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell. And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, such as imagination, pity, hope, history and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]

Woke to hear Aunt Leonie this morning talking in a low voice as she’s got something floating loose in her head & does not want to disturb it.
[Marcel Proust]