Tag Archives: quotes

quotes

Monthly Collected Quotes

How have we got to our last monthly collection of quotes for 2024?

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
[Maxímilíen Robespierre]

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
[Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995]

I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. “All right,” I said, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
[F Scott Fitzgerald; The Great Gatsby]

My naked body is not a sexual display. It is simply a normal, natural, living part of me.
[unknown]

Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.
[Brené Brown; Atlas of the Heart]

I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout in the wind – how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.
[Pierce Brown; Art of Poets]

… understand it as well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.
[Ada Lovelace]

This book is about the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful – showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up – and sometimes unhelpful – when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying the escape routes behind them.
[Angus Deaton]

All things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage. Your house is a garbage processing centre where you buy new things, bring them into your house, and slowly crapify them over time. Objects start at the highest level, visible in a living area. From there it goes down to a closet cupboard or drawer; that’s only why we have these, so we don’t have to see all the huge mistakes we have made. From the closet it goes to the garage – one of the longest phases in trashification; no object has ever made it out of the garage and back into the house – or a personal storage unit. This is the saddest of all. Now instead of free garbage you pay rent to visit your garbage.
[Mike and Joelle; https://www.facebook.com/mikeandjoelleofficial/reels/]

And if you think that a bit of placebo effect, encouragement by equipment sellers, wishful thinking and downright magical thinking was involved I would have trouble disagreeing with you.
[Dr Rowley Cottingham]

quotes

Monthly Collected Quotes

And so to the penultimate collection of quotes for this year …

Monetisation
By Brian Bilston

The advert said
MONETISE YOUR FOLLOWERS
so he thought
he would respond;

by painting them
in the changing light,
like waterlilies
in a pond.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
[Albert Camus]

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.
[EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful]

The floor of the House of Commons is little more than a West End theatre.
[DAT Green, Prospect Magazine; 24/10/2024]

Whether a chemical is man-made or natural fells you precisely nothing about how dangerous it is.
[Dr Mark Lorch, Biochemist, University of Hull]

Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.
[JRR Tolkien]

I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things.
[Richard Feynman]

It was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.
[Anaïs Nin, (1803-1877)]

If someone has terrible principles, they will at least try to abide by them. If someone has no principles at all, there is no limit to what they’ll do.
[Ian Dunt at https://iandunt.substack.com/p/kemi-badenoch-becomes-tory-leader]

When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
[Turkish Proverb]

I heard someone refer to their kids as “sexually transmitted dependents”. I had to turn away before my soda came out of my nose. I thought they were called “crutch goblins”.
[unknown]

Meet me at midnight in the forest of my dreams. We’ll make a fire and count the stars that shimmer above the trees.
[Christy Ann Martine]

Suspending belief because you don’t have enough information does not make you indecisive. Changing your mind when better information comes to light does not make you a hypocrite. Deferring to expertise on complex topics outside your knowledge base does not make you a sheep.
[unknown]

The internet causes village idiots to form entire villages made up only of village idiots who have no idea they are village idiots.
[Vlad Vexler]

quotes

October’s Monthly Quotes

What? We’re into the last quarter of the year! How? Anyway here’s this month’s collection of quotes amusing and thoughtful – with quite a few slightly longer offerings this time around …

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.
[Tony Puryear, https://www.facebook.com/tony.puryear]

This neatly leads us to the Minkowski view of space and time: we live in a four-dimensional space-time, where three of the dimensions are the space we are familiar with, each of which can be measured in metres. The fourth dimension can also be measured in metres, but we are travelling along it at the velocity c, the speed of light, and we interpret that as the world changing, and that gives us the concept of time. Time doesn’t “flow”; it is just us shooting along that fourth-dimensional axis. The section we have just traversed is the past and is fixed, immutable; while the section ahead is the future and is uncertain, described only by a series of probabilities or possibilities, over which we have limited control.
[John Elliott, quoted in https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg26335081-200-what-would-happen-if-time-stopped/]

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]

When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice … the thinker … but the one who is aware of it.
[Eckhart Tolle]

Sometimes those who don’t socialize much aren’t antisocial they just have no tolerance for drama, stupidity, and fake people.
[unknown]

“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing that you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse … It is near impossible to be happy and mentally healthy if you’re spending all your life thinking you’re a failed horse, having others tell you you are a failed horse, when all along you could be thriving and understood if everyone, including you, just knew you were a zebra.
[Quoted in https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/this-is-bleak-you-have-been-warned]

If something won’t matter in 5 years, don’t waste more than 5 minutes worrying about it now.
[unknown]

Brains get good at what they do. Negative thoughts create ‘channels’ in your brain. This way of thinking can become your default. If you do a lot of negative thinking, you wire your brain to be good at producing negative thoughts. Your brain also gets good at seeing things to think negatively about. One of the many byproducts of negative thinking is stress, which then leads to more negative thinking.
[unknown]

Royals have always been terrible people who are mostly just good at stealing money.
[Eleanor Janega, https://going-medieval.com/2024/09/27/on-side-hustles/]

Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible – from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.
[Dwight D Eisenhower]

If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality
[Charlie Warzel at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/10/hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation/680221/]

When stripped of local symbolism and terminology, all systems [of belief] show a remarkable uniformity of method. This is because all systems ultimately derive from the tradition of Shamanism.
[Peter Carroll, quoted in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_magic]

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
[George Carlin]

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
[JRR Tolkien]

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries – the realists of a larger reality.
[Ursula K Le Guin]

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.
[Atul Gawande; Being Mortal]

Empathy requires being attuned to the patient’s perspective and understanding how the illness is woven into this particular persons’ life. Last – and this is where doctors often stumble – empathy requires being able to communicate all of this to the patient.
[Danielle Ofri; What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine]

Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.
[Oliver Sacks; On the Move]

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead … Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.
[Neil Gaiman; Neil Gaiman’s Journal]

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

So here we are with this month’s selection of recently encountered quotes.

Five signs I’m probably a dragon:
• I hoard useless shiny things
• I eat too much
• I sleep too much
• I don’t like leaving my cave
• I have an excessive desire to flame annoying humans
[unknown]

I’m not angry, I am overstimulated.
I am not in a mood, I am recharging my limited social battery.
I am not being difficult, I need to understand the full context before I participate.
[unknown]

We are all meant to be naturalists, each in his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant & animal life and to care for none of these things.
[Charlotte Mason]

Unfortunately some people were not put here to evolve. They are here to remind you what it looks like if you don’t.
[unknown]

Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape – for which they are in no small part responsible – to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.
[Local Cranky IT Guy, via @adub, https://kolektiva.social/@adub]

In the thorny acacia trees of the Kalahari Desert, avian construction crews are hard at work.
[https://www.popsci.com/environment/bird-culture/]
That should be a great opening sentence for a Terry Pratchett novel!

The world is very very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much.
[David Hockney]

Don’t think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make more art.
[Andy Warhol]

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
[Denis Diderot, French philosopher]

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
[David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish Philosopher]

But, good God! what an age is this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.
[Samuel Pepys]

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
[Henry David Thoreau]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

This month’s collection of quotes is mostly short sound-bites.

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
[Niccolò Machiavelli]

People often mistake me for an adult because of my age.
[unknown]

Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity.
[Carl Sagan]

Evangelical Christianity is just Radical Islam with pork and beer.
[unknown]

If you cannot question it, it’s not science, it’s propaganda.
[unknown]

One of the greatest tragedies in mankind’s entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion.
[Arthur C Clarke]

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people.
[Tony Benn]

Don’t regret anything. Everything that you’ve done was the best you knew at that time. The thought of what could have happened won’t change a thing at this moment. You can only control your actions now. Let go off the worries about the past, and focus on creating a beautiful future for yourself. May inner peace and love always be with you and guide you.
[unknown]

The policies of grievance are very easy to sell; easiest trick in the book. Any fucker can do it. Building something based on hope is much harder.
[Jess Phillips MP]

A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.
[Andrew Carnegie]

If animals could speak, mankind would weep.
[Anthony Douglas Williams]

It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticise those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.
There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.
If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the “medicine closet”‘ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!
Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.
[Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books]

Once you hit a certain age life is just a delicate balance of trying to stay awake and trying to fall asleep. While slowly getting worse at both.
[unknown]

Gossip dies when it hits a wise person’s ears. Rumours are started by haters, carried by fools, and believed by idiots.
[unknown]

Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.
[Richard Feynman]