Category Archives: quotes

medical, quotes, science, thoughts

Gardening the Mind

I came across the following quote from Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight on the interwebs the other day. It seems a good take on personal development and personal responsibility.

I view the garden in my mind as a sacred patch of cosmic real estate that the universe has entrusted me to tend over the years of my lifetime. As an independent agent, I and I alone, in conjunction with the molecular genius of my DNA and the environmental factors I am exposed to, will decorate this space within my cranium. In the early years, I may have minimal input into what circuits grow inside my brain because I am the product of the dirt and seeds I have inherited. But to our good fortune, the genius of our DNA is not a dictator, and thanks to our neurons’ plasticity, the power of thought, and the wonders of modern medicine, very few outcomes are absolute.

Regardless of the garden I have inherited, once I consciously take over the responsibility of tending my mind, I choose to nurture those circuits that I want to grow, and consciously prune back those circuits I prefer to live without.

Although it is easier for me to nip a weed when it is just a sprouting bud, with determination and perseverance even the gnarliest of vines, when deprived of fuel, will eventually lose its strength and fall to the side.

amusements, quotes

Quotes : Stop and Think

Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
[Emo Phillips]

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

The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.
[Henry J Tillman]

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
[Mark Twain]

I see no way out of the problems that organised religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves … we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilisation but we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.
[EO Wilson; New Scientist, 21/04/2012]

quotes

Weekly-ish Quotes

A few more quotes which I come across recently and which amused or otherwise hit me over the head.

Now that there is a hosepipe ban, does that mean colonic irrigation is now illegal?
[Thoughts of Angel]

The word “politics” is derived from the word “poly”, meaning “many”, and the word “ticks”, meaning “blood sucking parasites”
[Thoughts of Angel]

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty … And how few by deceit.
[Noel Coward]

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. In Republics, the great danger is, that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood. Liberty may be endangered by the abuse of liberty, but also by the abuse of power.
[James Madison]

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have. I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
[Thomas Jefferson]

There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
[Thomas A Edison]

quotes

Quotes : On People

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
[Sir Winston Churchill]

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
[Benjamin Franklin, 1759]

Whatever you are, be a good one.
[Abraham Lincoln]

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
[Mark Twain]

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
[Sigmund Freud]

amusements, quotes

Quotes : On Intelligence

Another in our occasional series of apposite aphorisms.

The time it would take a gang of geriatric virgins [the Roman Catholic hierarchy] to understand and define marriage is longer than the projected lifespan of the universe. It would be a shock if they did have anything coherent to say on the subject after only 2000 years of uninformed speculation from their armchairs.
[WoollyMindedLiberal in a comment on Heresy Corner]

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
[F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up]

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
[Henry Adams]

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

I’m designed intelligently? As far as I can see, I was designed by an idiot. My parts are neither interchangeable nor replaceable. I could use a new ankle right now, and almost everything I do injures my back. Some of my internal organs are useless, and can even kill me. My risk calculation engine is useless. I am afraid to eat beef, but have no problem catapulting myself down tree-lined roads on my motorcycle. My judgement is so bad I can be convinced to send my life savings to a complete stranger with just one phone call. The final stake in the heart of intelligent design is that there are people we might otherwise consider intelligent, who, in the face of all this, maintain we are functioning as intended.
[Eric Dietiker]

quotes

On Humanity

Several recently noticed quotes on various aspects of humanity.

One cannot usefully legislate against an attitude or a belief, but one can legislate against criminal behaviour that might result from an attitude or a belief … It is the duty of governments to protect their citizens from harm. It is not government’s task to protect its citizens’ sensitivities, however justifiable and acute, from peacefully expressed views, however bizarre.
[William Saunderson-Meyer at Thought Leader]

When asked What thing about humanity surprises you the most?, the Dalai Lama answered: Man … Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
[Dalai Lama quoted on Only Dead Fish]

To be human is to have a human body. To be ashamed of one’s body is to be ashamed of being human … Nudity is the default setting for all of us. It’s wrong to let ourselves be bullied or shamed into taking the action of hiding behind clothing. A society in which individuals are free to be as dressed or undressed as they wish would be my ideal.
[“Naked Andy” at iNAKED]

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
[Robert Benchley]

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
[Dr Seuss]

books, quotes

History of English

I’ve just finished reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter. It’s a very interesting, although slightly confusing, book about the history of English. That’s English as in the language “what I speak”.

Interesting because in it McWhorter tries to demonstrate that the early (as in mostly pre-Medieval Old English) history of the English language is far more complex but understandable than most scholars are prepared to admit.

Confusing in that as a non-linguist and someone who was never hot on the technicalities of grammar (the one probably because of the other) I don’t easily appreciate the niceties of some of his argument and examples. I would undoubtedly benefit from re-reading it.

It’s a short book but it covers an immense amount of ground. McWhorter starts with the argument that English was moulded by interaction with the Welsh and Cornish languages (all display features found nowhere else in the world). He ends with the suggestion that Proto-Germanic (the root of all modern Germanic languages including English) is a bastard off shoot of Proto-Indo-European made that way by interaction with Phoenician language(s). His concluding paragraphs give you a flavour:

English … [a]n offshoot of Proto-Indo-European borrowed a third of its vocabulary from another language. That language may have been Phoenician … Its speakers submitted the Proto-Indo-European offshoot to a grammatical overhaul … they could not help shaving off a lot of its complications, and rendering parts of the grammar in ways familiar to them from their native language. This left Proto-Germanic a language both mixed and abbreviated before it even gave birth to new languages – and meant that it passed this mixed, abbreviated nature on to those new languages.

One of them was Old English, which morphed merrily along carrying the odd sound patterns, vowel-switching past marking, and mystery vocabulary from Proto-Germanic … Old English was taken up by speakers of yet another language … Celtic ones. As Celts started using English more and more over the decades, English gradually took an infusion of grammatical features from Welsh and Cornish, including a usage of do known in no other languages on earth.

Not long afterward … Vikings speaking Old Norse picked up the language fast, and gave it a second shave … English’s grammar became the least “fussy” of all of the Germanic languages …

The result: a tongue oddly genderless and telegraphic for a European one, clotted with peculiar ways of using do and progressive -ing – with … a great big bunch of words from other languages. Not only Norse, French, Latin, and Greek, but possibly Phoenician …

The vanilla version of The History of English will live on. But its proponents have not had occasion to engage with the underground stories I have attempted to share with you, or, having done so briefly, have opted to sweep them under the rug …

… English is … Interesting.

Interesting indeed!