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]

My usual but occasional selection of quotes which have interested or amused me recently. In no particular order …

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
[Tom Stoppard]

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think interior decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
[Anna Quindlen]

Prejudice and privilege are why we haven’t just sorted out resources (we have enough, we really do) to ensure that all humans get to eat nutritious food, receive medical care and vaccinations so they can live beyond the age of 5, have access to our bodies of collected wisdom and knowledge, have a safe place to sleep, and get a chance to experience play and pleasure so that we can all live in peace and explore the universe together.
[Maggie Mayhem; What do you care what other people think!]

If you want to understand Dogen’s philosophy you have to accept that there are many real things and phenomena in this universe that we human beings are simply not equipped to perceive, but that these things and phenomena are not parts of some mystical other realm.
[Brad Warner; Dogen for Punks]

Buddhists in the West are often precisely the same personality types you encounter at sci fi and anime conventions or in punk rock clubs. They just have a different kind of thing that turns them on. But they use it in exactly the same way, to help delineate their personality as something different from the mainstream.
[Brad Warner; Dogen for Punks]

You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody, who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody, and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!
[Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) in a letter to his sister Mary, 21 September 1893; quoted in Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll]

[P]hotographs were usually taken outside on a bright day, or at least in a studio with a glass roof … The brightness of the scene had to be judged by eye, since there were no exposure meters and photographers had various dodges by which they could assess the exposure. The Swedish photographer Gustav Rejlander actually used his cat, checking to see how much its pupils were dilated in order to assess how long an exposure to give.
[Jenny Woolf, The Mystery of Lewis Carroll]
[Photo of Charles Dodgson by Rejlander, 1863]

Now isn’t that just a cool use for a cat?

Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.

[Soren Kierkegaard]

Another selection of recently encountered quotes which have amused on enlightened me.

Human Being: A creature that cuts trees to make paper and then writes “save the trees on the same paper”.
[Thoughts of Angel]

The most important lessons I gleaned […] had to do with learning to fail: getting my ass kicked and getting back up, again and again and again, until I mastered a given skill. Why wasn’t I willing to do the same for math?
[Jennifer Ouellette; Make Us Do the Math]

Learning to buckle down and do unpleasant things that don’t come easily to us prepares us for life.
[Jennifer Ouellette; Make Us Do the Math]

Only authoritarian and reactionary politicians benefit from a population for whom abstractions have no meaning. Such a population will be satisfied by sound bites and flag waving and will be placated by bread and circuses while their economy is subverted and their democracy implodes.
[Nick Warner quoted in Jennifer Ouellette; Make Us Do the Math]

Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of content in your writing.
[Randy K Milholland]

Of course I talk to myself … sometimes I need expert advice!
[Thoughts of Angel]

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
[Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993]

The last is sadly truer than many would credit.

Another in our occasional series of quotes encountered recently which interested or amused us …

Northland College Principal John Tapene has offered the following words from a judge who regularly deals with youth:
‘Always we hear the cry from teenagers “What can we do, where can we go?”
‘My answer is this: Go home, mow the lawn, wash the windows, learn to cook, build a raft, get a job, visit the sick, study your lessons, and after you’ve finished, read a book. Your town does not owe you recreational facilities and your parents do not owe you fun.
‘The world does not owe you a living, you owe the world something. You owe it your time, energy and talent so that no one will be at war, in sickness and lonely again. In other words, grow up, stop being a cry baby, get out of your dream world and develop a backbone not a wishbone. Start behaving like a responsible person. You are important, you are needed. It’s too late to sit around and wait for somebody to do something someday. Someday is now and that somebody is you!’
[Source unknown]

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
[Jacques Derrida]

Faith is believing something you know ain’t true.
[Mark Twain]

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
[Henry Ford]

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
[Will Durant]

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
[Rick Cook]

Every harlot was a virgin once.

[William Blake, Innocence]

The usual but occasional round-up of amusing and interesting bons mots.

The Hokey Pokey (Shakespearean Style)
O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke.
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from heaven’s yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke – banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.
[Unknown source]

I got what was rightfully mine.
We deserve a handout.
He committed fraud.
They are thieving bastards.
[Terry Cox on Facebook]

This is a banal accident in which [there was] a breakdown in the interaction between human beings.
[Captain Francesco Schettino commenting on the Costa Concordia shipwreck, quoted in Daily Telegraph]

When you are doing nothing, that is when the work is happening. It does not happen in the front section of the brain. It happens in the back section.
[Kevin Barry; Dark Lies the Island]

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
[HL Mencken]

Despite the almost stifling heat and a mixed odour of humanity and ham, which a sensitive person might have shrunk from, the rough, merry Lancashire folk were happy as may be.
[Guy Thorne, When it was Dark]