Happy New Year to all our readers. Here’s hoping your 2013 is better than 2012!

I thought we’d start the new year with a few quotes encountered over the holidays.

[E]ven in these reduced days the British crown retains technical sovereignty over a number of desolate penguin colonies.
[The Heresiarch at Heresy Corner]

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
[George Bernard Shaw]

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[George Orwell]

To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick; How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978]

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
[Mark Twain]

And now on a lighter note …

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.
[Fran Lebowitz, quoted in Jane Brook, Kitchen Wit, Quips and Quotes for Cooks and Food Lovers]

And finally perhaps the best advice for the new year …

Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again.
[Robert A Heinlein]

More in our occasional series of quotes we met but to which you may not have been introduced …

Household tasks are easier and quicker when they are done by somebody else.
[James Thorpe]

What we call “Progress” is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
[Havelock Ellis]

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
[Henrik Tikkanen]

The storm will pass. The spring will come.
[Robert H Schuller]
Compare with Anthony Powell’s I’ll pass, Sir, like other days in the Army and Shakespeare’s Time and tide wait for no man.

A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong.
[Thomas Szasz]

Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.
[Arnold H Glasow]

In love there are two things — bodies and words.
[Joyce Carol Oates]

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
[Thomas J Watson Sr, Founder of IBM, 1874-1956]

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
[Thoughts of Angel]

Evil is about choice. Sickness is about absence of choice.
[Lindsey Fitzharris; Guardian Science Blogs; 17/12/2012]

Surely the answer to every difficult question in life is “woof”.
[Lucy Stiles on Facebook]

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
[Rod Serling]

Everything changes but change itself. Everything flows and nothing remains the same … You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go flowing ever on.

[Heraclitus]

Another toffee-bag of recently encountered quotes. This selection seems to be mostly from the cynical and philosophical jars.

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
[PJ Plauger]

Reality is something you rise above.
[Liza Minnelli]

War is organised murder, and nothing else.
[Harry Patch; last surviving soldier of WWI]

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
[Voltaire]

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
[George Santayana]

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
[Herbert Spencer]

Finally a gob-stopper from the jar of amusements …

Judge: There’s a certain light connotation attached to the word panties. Can we find another name for them?
Prosecution: I never heard my wife call them anything else.
Judge: Mr. Biegler?
Biegler: I’m a bachelor, your Honor.
Judge: That’s a great help. Mr. Dancer?
Dancer: I was overseas during the war, your Honor. I learned a French word. I’m afraid it might be slightly suggestive.
Judge: Most French words are.
[Wendell Holmes, Anatomy of a Murder; with thanks to Barnaby Page]

Another occasional round-up of recently-encountered quotes which have interested or amused me.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
[Aldous Huxley]

He is a vegetarian; I don’t know whether from principle or from gourmandaise. One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.
[Karel Čapek on George Bernard Shaw in Letters from England]

He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
[Saki]

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.]

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
[Peter Drucker]

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
[Novelist Chuck Palahniuk. Shades of X Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time]

Everyone should be responsible and if they do visit a wood just make sure they wash their boots, wash their dog, whatever’s been running around the leaves, wash their child, to make sure they don’t transfer to the next wood.
[Owen Patterson, UK Environment Secretary, talking about how people can help prevent the spread of the fungus which is killing ash trees; quoted in the Daily Telegraph]

Recent interest or amusement from my reading …

Education is the proper way to promote compassion and tolerance in society. Compassion and peace of mind bring a sense of confidence that reduce stress and anxiety, whereas anger and hatred come from frustration and undermine our sense of trust. Because of ignorance, many of our problems are our own creation. Education, however, is the instrument that increases our ability to employ our own intelligence.
[Dalai Lama]

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called ‘rain’.
[Michael McClary]

You may delay, but time will not.
[Benjamin Franklin]

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
[Aldous Huxley]

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
[Bertrand Russell]

Common sense is like deodorant; those that need it don’t use it.
[Thoughts of Angel]

I ask her if she would like a cup of coffee. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to go to all that trouble.  I’ll just have half a cup.’
[Alan Bennett, The Lady in the Van; quoted by Katyboo]

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

[Harold Pinter]

Another selection of interesting and/or amusing quotes.

Why is it that in every single place I’ve ever worked, the photocopier has special needs?
[Hails at Coffee Helps]

I just love the idea of copies being “special needs”, but it’s absolutely right, they are!

His grace doesn’t half sound in a wax this morning, ducks.
[Julian Maclaren-Ross, quoted in DJ Taylor, What You Didn’t Miss]

Most of what gets marked down as ‘poetry’ these days is simply prose chopped up into irregular lines.
[DJ Taylor, What You Didn’t Miss]

Imagine the surprise of David Purdy on receiving a special offer of the Family Tree Maker program at less than half price. How could he resist the chance to “find out whether any of your descendants were on the Titanic”?
[Feedback, New Scientist, 22/09/2012]

In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape have full swing … Publicity is the very soul of justice … it keeps the judge himself, while trying, under trial.
[Jeremy Bentham, political and legal philosopher, 1748-1832]

Our political masters need to sometimes keep this in mind, and the following …

[T]he judge should have the last word … under the procedure devised in the Bill the judge does have the last word. The only difficulty is that that word is dictated to the judge by the Secretary of State. First, the judge can make a decision only if the Secretary of State makes an application … Secondly, when the judge does come to consider it, it is not for him to weigh up the relative merits of … or to decide what the fairest way would be to decide the case. The judge’s hands are effectively tied. If there is disclosable material that impacts on national security … the judge is required to agree … The judge “must” order a closed material procedure … the government have given formal effect to the requirement that the judge should have the last word, but in substance the Secretary of State continues to pull the strings.
[David Anderson QC, Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, on the Justice and Security Bill; quoted on the Law and Lawyers Blog]

Which reminds me of this insult I once heard hurled at some fiasco or other:

A ball-withering succession of cock-ups

Somehow it also reminds me of Borges …

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopaedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
{Jorge Luis Borges, Essay: The Analytical Language of John Wilkins]

Another collection of quotes recently encountered which have amused or inspired me.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
[Robertson Davies]

Love all, trust a few. Do wrong to none.
[William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 1 Scene 1]

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
[Fred Allen]

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
[Albert Einstein]

Word verification — an updated version of mediaeval trial by ordeal
[Tim Atkinson, at Bringing up Charlie]

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
[HL Mencken]

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
[CS Lewis]

The Puerarchy … “Extended Adolescence” … the tendency for young men to spend a decade or so getting drunk, high, laid, and wiped out from video game exhaustion and porn marathons instead of applying nose to grindstone, getting a college education that will allow them to support their future ex-wives … No one seems to like these guys — the Left condemns them as slacking losers who won’t grow up, and the Right condemns them as dope-smoking losers who won’t grow up.
[Ian Ironwood at The Red Pill Room]