Category Archives: quotes

amusements, quotes

Quotes : Terry Pratchett

Just for a change I thought that for something different this time around we would have a few choice quotes (from among so many) from Terry Pratchett.

Granny grasped her broomstick purposefully. ‘Million-to-one chances,’ she said, ‘crop up nine times out of ten.’
[Equal Rites]

Few religions are definite about the size of Heaven, but on the planet Earth the Book of Revelation (ch. XXI, v.16) gives it as a cube 12,000 furlongs on a side. This is somewhat less than 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic feet. Even allowing that the Heavenly Host and other essential services take up at least two thirds of this space, this leaves about one million cubic feet of space for each human occupant- assuming that every creature that could be called ‘human’ is allowed in, and the human race eventually totals a thousand times the numbers of humans alive up until now. This is such a generous amount of space that it suggests that room has also been provided for some alien races or — a happy thought — that pets are allowed.
[The Last Hero]

[…] discredited gods and unlicensed thieves, ladies of the night and pedlars in exotic goods, alchemists of the mind and strolling mummers; in short, all the grease on civilization’s axle.
[Equal Rites]

‘Look at the bird.’
It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like … a crude gearwheel? But why —’
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo.’
[Thief of Time]

‘Maybe there are things worth putting up a fight for.’
‘And they are —?’ said Pestilence, looking round.
‘Salad-cream sandwiches. You just can’t beat them. That tang of permitted emulsifiers? Marvellous.’
[Thief of Time]

quotes

Quotes : Deep Thought

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]

quotes

Quotes

Another ragbag selection of quotes which amused or interested me over the last week or so …

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
[Clive James]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]

The entrée wasn’t tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn’t have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place.
[Clive James]

No, you can’t deny women their basic rights and pretend it’s about your ‘religious freedom’. If you don’t like birth control, don’t use it. Religious freedom doesn’t mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.
[Barak Obama]

[S]ome insect penises come equipped with hooks that enable the ensconced male to grab a previous suitor’s sperm packet and remove it from the female. I suggest that these hooks be called cuckholders.
[Steve Mirsky; Scientific American, July 2012]

No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores. The Inland Revenue is not slow – and quite rightly – to take every advantage which is open to it under the taxing statutes for the purpose of depleting the taxpayer’s pocket. And the taxpayer is, in like manner, entitled to be astute to prevent, so far as he honestly can, the depletion of his means by the Revenue.
[Lord Clyde in Ayrshire Pullman Motor Services & Ritchie v Commissioners of the Inland Revenue (1929) 14 TC 754]

For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
[Winston Churchill]

Sunday went as Sunday’s should, soporifically and full bellied into the evening.
[Katy Wheatley, http://katyboo1.wordpress.com]

You see, stand here long enough and all life will pass before you.

quotes

Hamlet of the Day

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But come;
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself,
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on,
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
With arms encumber’d thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know,’ or ‘We could, an if we would,’
Or ‘If we list to speak,’ or ‘There be, an if they might,’
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me: this not to do.

[Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5]

quotes

Quotes : Philosophy

I seem to have accumulated a number of philosophical-type quotes recently. So here’s today’s selection of brain-fodder:

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
[AA Milne]

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
[Oscar Wilde]

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

Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
[Franklin P Jones]

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
[George Orwell]

The thing about smart people is that they seem like crazy people to dumb people.
[unknown]

Agree? Well maybe not with all of them? But one can see where the authors are coming from. And they’re food for thought nonetheless.

current affairs, quotes

Greecing History

Well, well, well. This blog gets more and more like the 38 bus. Nothing for ages and then three come along at once. But to the point …

There was a super article in the comment columns of the Daily Telegraph written by Mayor of London, Boris Johnson: Dithering Europe is heading for the democratic dark ages.

Whether you like the guy, or whether you think he’s a dangerous buffoon, the article is extremely well written. He makes his case that “A Greek economy run by Brussels will ignore the lessons of history, leading to more misery“.

But it also contains some lovely touches. Just his opening sentences are a masterpiece:

It is one of the tragic delusions of the human race that we believe in the inevitability of progress. We look around us, and we seem to see a glorious affirmation that our ruthless species of homo is getting ever more sapiens. We see ice cream Snickers bars and in vitro babies and beautiful electronic pads on which you can paint with your fingertip and – by heaven – suitcases with wheels! Think of it: we managed to put a man on the moon about 35 years before we came up with wheelie-suitcases; and yet here they are.

He goes on:

Aren’t they grand? […] Isn’t that what history teaches us, that humanity is engaged in a remorseless ascent?

On the contrary: history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence. The Romans gave us roads and aqueducts and glass and sanitation and all the other benefits famously listed by Monty Python; indeed, they were probably on the verge of discovering the wheely-suitcase when they went into decline and fall in the fifth century AD.

History teaches us many things and we fail to learn most of its lessons.

Boris concludes:

If things go on as they are, we will see more misery, more resentment, and an ever greater chance that the whole damn kebab van will go up in flames. Greece will one day be free again […] for this simple reason: that market confidence in Greek membership is like a burst paper bag of rice — hard to restore.

Without a resolution, without clarity, I am afraid the suffering will go on. The best way forward would be an orderly bisection into an old eurozone and a New Eurozone for the periphery. With every month of dither, we delay the prospect of a global recovery; while the approved solution — fiscal and political union — will consign the continent to a democratic dark ages.

As it happens I agree with him. But that’s not the point. I was struck, first and foremost, by Boris’s excellent and amusing prose. Silver spoon or not, he’s well educated, intelligent, amusing and can look at the world from a fresh perspective. The world needs more like him, and in positions of power and influence, just without the party political agenda.

quotes

Quotes : Recent Amusements

The irregular collection of quotes seen recently and which hare amused or interested me:

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
[Indira Gandhi]

[P]remature births are increasing in rich countries because of obesity, smoking, IVF and older women having babies, and in poor countries owing to malnutrition, teen pregnancy and lack of contraception …
[New Scientist, 05/05/2012]

Duh!

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

We are not retreating — we are advancing in another direction.
[Douglas MacArthur]

If we put all Parliament through a mincer and sorted the good bits, would there be enough to build just one competent prime minister?
[Andrew Baker on Facebook]

The main aim of education should be to send children out into the world with a reasonably sized anthology in their heads so that, while seated on the lavatory, waiting in doctors’ surgeries, on stationary trains or watching interviews with politicians, they may have something interesting to think about.
[Sir John Mortimer]

quotes

Quotes : On People

The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I`m talking about.
[Al Pacino]

There’s no point in constantly worrying about everything. What will happen will happen anyways. So breathe, look on the bright side, have some laughs, fall in love, accept what you can’t change, and carry on. To actually live is courageous. Most people exist, that is all.
[unknown]

Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90 … time is a concept that humans created.
[Yoko Ono]

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
[John Wooden, basketball coach]

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
[Pablo Casals]

More people have poor taste than good taste. They come to their opinions quickly and without any thought, like a small child. That’s why there’s fast food. And moronic reality television shows. And people who follow Paris Hilton. More people will enjoy crack than Proust’s novels. Ergo, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or worthwhile. Too many people just love bad shit because they don’t know any better.
[HyperSexual Girl at Love & Lust]