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]

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.

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]

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.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

[William Blake ]

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]

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]

Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn’t need if you had stayed single.

[Source unknown]

Well yes, these quotes do explain a few things …

Here’s all you need to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
[George Carlin]

You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.
[William Blake, Proverbs of Hell]

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
[Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003]

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
[HL Mencken]

Warm-heartedness reinforces our self-confidence – giving us not a blind confidence, but a sense of confidence based on reason. When you have that you can act transparently, with nothing to hide! Likewise, if you are honest, the community will trust you. Trust brings friendship, as a result of which you can always feel happy. Whether you look to the right or the left, you will always be able to smile.
[Dalai Lama]

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet you’d best take it out and teach it to dance.
[George Bernard Shaw]