Category Archives: quotes

freedom of speech, people, quotes, science, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

Slightly thin pickings this week as I’ve been flattened by some nasty flu-cum-bronchitis-bug-thingy all week which has precluded almost everything except lying in bed being date expired.

In the past, when marriage was a more pragmatic institution, love was optional. Respect was essential. Men and women found emotional connection elsewhere, primarily in same-sex relationships. Men bonded over work and recreation; women connected through child rearing and borrowing sugar.
Esther Perel; Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss]

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]

We still live in a world where progress only happens with funerals.
[Violet Blue]

Every law is an infraction of liberty.
[Jeremy Bentham]

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
[Rita Rudner]

amusements, environment, memes, quotes, topographical

Facts of the Week

This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series highlighting unexpected, unusual or just amazing facts I come across. It is really for curiosity value rather than a resource of those who take part in pub quizzes. Wherever possible I will, as always, provide a source for the information. So here is the first selection of factlets …

Each year, an estimated 10,000 shipping containers fall off container ships at sea.
Between five and six million containers are in transit at any given moment.
[]

The Sendai earthquake shifted the earth’s figure axis by about 17 cm and moved the main island of Japan [Honshu] around 2.4 metres.
[US Geological Survey]

The Sendai earthquake also shortened our day by about 1.8 milliseconds (thousands of a second).
[NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]

The original Polynesian and South Pacific origin of the word ‘tabu’ actually refers to that which is sacred: the application of a taboo actually designating that which is holy.
[OED]

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

A good selection of amusements amongst this week’s quotes …

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
[William Gibson]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
[Thomas Jefferson]

Society places a great deal of importance upon “being concerned” about this, that or the other terrible thing going on somewhere in the world. I agree that a bit of this concern is useful in helping alleviate suffering in those places. But it strikes me that the vast majority of what we call “being concerned” involves getting into our own heads, turning over the information, imagining whatever we want to imagine, working up our emotions, wallowing in our feelings like a pig in mud. For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend very clearly this makes us look good socially, like we’re doing the right thing. But I’m unable to see how watching endless reports […] about a disaster really helps anything.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/]

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
[George Mikes, How to be Decadent]

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
[Jeff Valdez]

Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise. But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease.
[Brad Warner on the Sendai Earthquake at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake.html]

Every mountain; every rock on this planet; every living thing; every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space.
[Prof. Brian Cox; Wonders of the Universe; BBC2 TV, 13 March 2011]

I hear the argument, and it is an ingenious argument only a lawyer of his brilliance could make …
[David Cameron replying in House of Commons to Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Never play with a dead cat and above all never make friends with a monkey.
[Osbert Sitwell, quoting his father in Tales My Father Taught Me. Thanks to Katyboo for this one.]

The natural world is a living erotic museum filled with variations in male genitalia, illustrating how natural selection has paid nearly as much attention to the male member as Catholic priests have.
[http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/]

To you , I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
[Woody Allen]

“Are there circumstances in which the government might …?”
“Well there could be circumstances. To answer your question in any other way would preclude all possibilities.”
[William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, answering a question from the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee; 16/03/2011]

amusements, quotes

You Just Can't Get the Staff

Yesterday we received a communication from the Civil Service Club in London. In this they advertise their Annual Dinner as follows …

Three course dinner with Champagne reception & Canopies, with the Committees guest speaker.

How many committees? And whose marquees?

amusements, people, quotes, thoughts

Marriage Quotes

Yesterday I came across these Marriage Quotes from Kids. As always there’s more than a grain of truth in them!

Question: How can a stranger tell if two people are married?
You might have to guess based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids.
[Derrick, age 8]

Question: What do most people do on a date?
Dates are for having fun, and people should use them to get to know each other. Even boys have something to say if you listen long enough.
[Lynnette, age 8]

Question: Is it better to be single or married?
It’s better for girls to be single but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them.
[Anita, age 9 ]

beliefs, medical, personal, quotes, science, sexuality

Quotes of the Week

Another weekly selection of esoterica …

Anyone who tells you that your body is anything other than the beautiful, glorious MIRACLE that it is is, as they say in “Princess Bride”, probably selling something.
[Emily Nagoski at ]

[E]ach of us has the job of finding the beliefs we’re not interested in carrying with us any more, uprooting them, and finding something new and healthier to take their place. This process is neither easy nor painless. But it is a path to the confidence and joy I advocate everyone bring to bed with them every night.
[Emily Nagoski at ]

Men always fall into the absurdity of endeavouring to develop the mind, to push it violently forward in this direction or in that. The mind should be receptive, a harp waiting to catch the winds, a pool ready to be ruffled, not a bustling busybody, for ever trotting about on the pavement looking for a new bun shop.
[Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation, 1894]

Sex ought to be a wholly satisfying link between two affectionate people from which they emerge unanxious, rewarded, and ready for more.
[Alex Comfort]

The debate [in 1907 American Medicine about the weight of the soul] went on from the May issue all the way through December, whereupon I lost the thread, my eye having strayed across the page to “A Few Points in the Ancient History of Medicine and Surgery,” by Harry H Grigg, MD. It is with thanks to Harry H Grigg that I can now hold forth at cocktail parties on the history of haemorrhoids, gonorrhoea, circumcision, and the speculum.
[Mary Roach; Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers]

Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
[Henry Miller]

A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are.
[Victor Lownes]

We do not remember. A certain group of our little people do this for us. They live in that part of the brain which has become known as the ‘fold of Broca’ … There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory … Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.
[Thomas Edison; Diaries]

amusements, beliefs, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of the good, the bad and the ugly …

Relationships are like a card game where you start with two hearts and a diamond, but end up needing a club and spade.
[Tony Green on Facebook]

Every concept the mind can create includes its opposite. No thought is ultimate because each idea depends on every other idea it might possibly contrast with for its apparent self existence. Our own existence as individuals is dependent upon all of creation. This does not negate our individual existence. It is an attempt to see our individual existence in a different light.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com]

When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?
[Montaigne]

Urethane treatment is standard on all products (with exceptions)
[Amtico Flooring Brochure]

Comedians really aren’t that different from scientists. They look at the world and question why things are as they are and try to find an answer. It’s just that scientists do it with far more rigour and the possibility that humanity will be much improved by their discoveries. Perhaps comedians are just lazy scientists. Very, very lazy, stupid scientists.
[Robin Ince, The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]

And finally, dreadful joke of the week …

Why did the scarecrow win a Nobel prize?
Because he was out standing in his field.
[The Times Eureka Supplement; March 2011]

Bring back Basil Brush, all is forgiven!

amusements, books, history, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, here’s this week’s selection of oddities encounter in the last few days …

‘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.’
[Terry Pratchett; Thief of Time]

Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.
[George Orwell]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]

beliefs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, guys & gals, here’s this week’s selection of wacky words …

Come on, Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul! It’s just something they made up to scare kids, like the Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.
[Bart Simpson]

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

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what’s right.
[Isaac Asimov]

I’ve come to believe quite strongly that monogamy is not at all the natural condition of human beings, despite what we’ve been told for so many years. For some people it comes effortlessly. For others it is absolutely impossible. I think for most of us it is possible, but extremely difficult. When I hear that someone has failed at it I am never shocked or surprised.
[Brad Warner; at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/02/disrobing-genpo–brad-warner/]

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.
[Sir John Mortimer, Murderers & Other Friends]

We will have to build … devices that will store and release time to where it is needed, because men cannot progress if they are carried like leaves on a stream. People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time and buy time.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]

Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]