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]

The faster you admit to not having an answer for something, the more time you have to find one.

[Unknown]

Our regular selection of quotes which have amused us or made us think. And this week we concentrate on the latter with some interesting perspectives.

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
[Isaac Asimov]

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
[Bertrand Russell]

Everything has changed save our way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
[Albert Einstein]

The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
[Woodrow Wilson]

Affection and a calm mind are important to us. A calm mind is good for our physical health, but it also enables us to use our intelligence properly and to see things more realistically. Affection too is important because it counters anger, hatred and suspicion that can prevent our minds from functioning clearly.
[Dalai Lama]

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
[George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946]