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]

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.