Category Archives: quotes

quotes

Monthly Quotes

This month’s selection of quotations encountered.

War against a foreign county only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
[George Orwell]

One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
[CS Lewis]

Some people have no idea what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.
[George Carlin]

When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archaeological dig. I was talking to one of the archaeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favourite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theatre, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes. And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure to someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with
the myth of Talent, that l thought it was only worth doing things you could “Win” at.
[Kurt Vonnegut]

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they‘ll hate you.
[Don Marquis]

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well.
[Mark Twain]

It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.
[Nikola Tesla]

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.
[Julian Barnes]

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
[Michelangelo]

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]

It’s the invention of clothes, not nature, that made “private parts” private.
[Mokokoma Mokhonoana]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here’s this month’s collection of quotes …

What a con these “so-called” cats are. They’re supposed to have been domesticated since 7500BC. In that time, we humans have come up with the wheel, medicine, aeroplanes, art, the internet and much more. Yet cats are still shitting in flowerbeds and bringing us half-chewed mice as gifts. You’d think that with the thick end of 10,000 years of living with us under their belts, they’d have learned to occasionally bring us a nice bottle of wine or even an Amazon voucher or something to show their appreciation.
[Private Eye?]

The air in a man’s lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived – Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
[Jacob Bronowski]

We need to reduce production of private jets, SUVs, commercial airlines, mansions, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, arms, cruise ships – there are huge chunks of our economy that are mostly organized around capital accumulation, and are wasteful and destructive and totally irrelevant to human well-being. We can also ban the practice of planned obsolescence and introduce policies to expand product lifespans. When products last twice as long, we will need half as many. Finally, we urgently need to cut the purchasing power of the rich, using basic sensible policy tools such as wealth taxes and maximum income ratios.
[Prof. Jason Hickel]

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class – the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
[George Carlin]

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
[Carl Sagan]

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
[Johannes Kepler]

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[Douglas Adams; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]

Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is – absurd.
[Richard Feynman]

The physical act of passing through a doorway is the reason why you often walk into a room and completely forget what you were doing. Because going through a door signifies the beginning or end of something, this creates an “event boundary” within your mind. Basically, every time you go through a doorway, your brain starts filing away thoughts from your previous location to make room for a new group of memories in the next.
[unknown]

In the Ramtop Village they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock he wound up winds down – until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
[Terry Pratchett]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
[George Whitman]

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
[Voltaire]

Every child needs to learn how to cook, learn how to cultivate a garden, plant seeds, learn about sustainability, be taken to a garden and be able to put their hands in the earth.
[Alice Waters]

Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?
[Ancient Roman saying]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

So here we are with this mo0nth’s collection of quotes. Lot’s of “sound bite” sized ones this time.

Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
[Aristotle]

Progress is made by trial and failure; the failures are generally a hundred times more numerous than the successes; yet they are usually left unchronicled.
[William Ramsay]

The very nature of the quantum theory forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.
[Niels Bohr]

There was no “before” the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.
[John D Barrow]

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
[Albert Einstein]

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
[Plato]

We hang petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public offices.
[Aesop]

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.
[Marshall McLuhan]

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
[Oscar Wilde, De Profundis]

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
[Charles Darwin]

A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.
[Aristotle]

Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.
[Noam Chomsky]

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
[Carl Sagan]

A major character in A Psalm for the Wild-Built [by Becky Chambers] is a “tea monk”, a person who bikes around the countryside, accompanied by a nature-loving robot, with the goal of making people really nice cups of tea.
[Annlee Newitz; New Scientist; 13 May 2023]

No invention – good or bad – has ever come from one individual’s brain. They always need other people’s ideas. Acknowledging all those contributors would improve the scientific process, and might help with workers’ rights too. If we want a solid plan for where we are going next, as humans and as a planet, we can’t stuff our minds with endless tales of mass destruction. We also need stories about people who do science collectively, while taking a lot of tea breaks, alongside stories about what it is like to accomplish a few constructive things despite living in civilisations that are often unjust and downright nasty. We need good science and tech, but first we need good inspiration.
[Annlee Newitz; New Scientist; 13 May 2023]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

So here we go with this month’s assemblage of quotes which have caught my eye recently. And it’s lots of soundbites in this collection.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
[Khalil Gibran]

Money can’t buy you happiness but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
[Spike Milligan]

[Death is] not a beginning, it’s the real end, there will be nothing afterwards, nothing. I feel you must look truth right in the eyes … To deny death and its power is useless. Deny it or not, you’ll die anyway … It’s stupid to protest against death as such, but you can and must protest against violent death. It’s bad when people die before their time from disease or poverty, but it’s worse when a man is killed by another man.
[Dmitri Shostakovich]

Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
[Eleanor Roosevelt]

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so uneducated people won’t be offended.
[unknown]

We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.
[Kurt Vonnegut, American writer and novelist (1922-2007)]

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.
[Donald E Knuth]

Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering.
[Marie Skłodowska-Curie]

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
[Stephen Hawking]

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.
[BF Skinner]

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
[Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time]

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
[George Orwell]

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don’t come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity.
[Isaac Asimov]

Don’t worry about siding for or against the majority. Worry about taking up any of their irrational beliefs.
[Marcus Aurelius]

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
[Douglas Adams]

Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot.
[Richard Feynman]

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
[Sigmund Freud]

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
[Margaret Mead]

Open-minded people do not care to be right, they care to understand. There is never a right or wrong answer. Everything is about understanding.
[unknown]

What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
[WB Yeats]

Those who will not reason, are bigots; those who cannot, are fools; and those who dare not, are slaves.
[Lord Byron]

God is a mathematician of a very high order. He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
[Paul Dirac; theoretical physicist; 1902-1984]

Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
[Benjamin Franklin]

I don’t believe the universe contains supernatural forces, but I feel it might. This is because the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go so far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood.
[Paul Broks, “Are Coincidences Real?”, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/13/are-coincidences-real]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

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It’s time, again, for this month’s collection of quotes both amusing and thought-provoking.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.
[Richard Feynman]

Go outside and let your breath be stolen away.
Find the forests, seek the seas,
meditate on the mountains, mist covered from morning.
We are nurtured by nature, born for the wild places;
we’ve no business in cities, in buildings taller than trees can grow.
Go outside and begin living again.
[Tyler Knott Gregson]

Consider soulmates to also be in the form of friends and animals, the wind, the tides, the plants, pieces of art, and the moon. Great love lives everywhere.
[Victoria Erickson, Edge of Wonder]

Nature is wiggly. Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles. And for some reason or other, we find wiggly things very difficult to keep track of.
[Alan Watts]

If you’re going to be weird, he confident about it.
[unknown]

Why do humans need jobs? Why can’t I just sit on a beach with my tits out and stare into the ocean until I die?
[unknown]

I use a neuroparasitological framework to argue that a superficially enticing set of idea pathogens have parasitised countless people in the West leading us resolutely towards the abyss of infinite lunacy.
[Prof. Gad Saad, quoted in New Scientist, 25 February 2023]

Every living thing possesses its own instincts and intuition. Humans are the only ones who – willingly or unwillingly – ignore theirs.
[Econudist]

If it makes you happy it doesn’t have to make sense to others.
[Richard Feynman]

What you learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance.
[David Eagleman]

Bodies are not inherently sexual but they CAN be sexual, and sex isn’t inherently immoral to show or talk about. Likewise, nudity is not pornography, but when created and depicted ethically, pornography is not inherently immoral either.
[Econudist]

You can lead a human to knowledge but you can’t make it think.
[unknown]

The universe is a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere.
[Paraphrase of Blaise Pascal]

The elephant is a pretty bird, it flits from bough to bough.
It makes its nest in a rhubarb tree, and whistles like a cow.
[unknown]

Yes, in fact everything in physics is made up to make the math work out.
[Katie Mack, @AstroKatie, Science Focus, 3 March 2023]

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.
[Socrates]

Eating fruit is the most magical part of the earthbody experience. Things that taste delightful to our tongues just grow out of the dirt. They don’t have to taste good but they do. We don’t have to have taste but we do.
[Econudist]

When it comes down to it, the only knowledge that really matters is, how to purify water, how to grow your own food, how to cook, how to build, and how to love. And funnily enough, we’re not taught any of it in school.
[unknown]