Tag Archives: quotes

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]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here goes with this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes …

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
[Shakespeare; The Tempest]

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
[TS Eliot]

Attacking the rich is not envy, it is self-defence. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it and maintain it.
[Jodie Foster]

Anybody who pretends that it’s a hardship for billionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes so that a single mom gets childcare support or so that we’re doing something about climate change … That’s an argument that is unsustainable.
[Barack Obama]

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.
[Robert G Ingersoll]

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
[Edgar Allan Poe]

[T]he greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
[Aldous Huxley]

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
[Hannah Arendt]

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
[Frank Zappa]

Fools multiply when wise men are silent.
[Nelson Mandela]

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
[Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher]

Humanity has an ambition to try to understand everything in its World, and that now has become everything in its universe. We’re a very bold group of people living on a planet that’s a relatively tiny part of everything.
[Paul Halpern; interviewed in Scientific American, July/August 2024]

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
[George Bernard Shaw]

It is well known that skewed Bhattacharyya distances between the probability densities of an exponential family amount to skewed Jensen divergences induced by the cumulant function between their corresponding natural parameters, and that in limit cases the sided Kullback-Leibler divergences amount to reverse-sided Bregman divergences.
[Frank Nielsen in journal Entropy; quoted in New Scientist, 29/06/2024]

And finally, remember …
If they can prove you wrong you’re not being vague enough.
[unknown]

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

So once more it is time (where is the year going?) for this month’s selection of quotes.

A politician … is a man who thinks of the next election; while a statesman thinks of the next generation.
[James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)]

He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything – that clearly points to a political career.
[George Bernard Shaw]

We need to stop just pulling people out of the river. Some of us need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in.
[Desmond Tutu]

As a thinking, breathing, acting human you constantly generate a three-dimensional ripple of information from the moment you are born … It is the evidence of your existence, radiating from you into the universe. In some small way (infinitesimal, perhaps, but never zero), the heat of your body, the gravitational pull of your mass, the electromagnetism of your thoughts, and everything else you do touch all of reality around you … Everything in the universe that is touched by your ripple could potentially be aware of you. So, for instance, if you are 40 years old, extra-terrestrial beings on a planet that is 40 light years away from us would just now be entering the ever-expanding, spherical information-ripple of your existence … You don’t need to look far out into space to experience this kind of universal connection. As a ripple of information, you are entangled with everything closer to home as well: your immediate surroundings, your neighbourhood, your planet. Whatever happens to Earth and its inhabitants, you are a part of it.
[Corey S Powell at https://invisibleuniverse.substack.com/p/you-are-a-ripple-of-information]

His head was an hourglass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time.
[Mark Twain]

I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we have gone, our voices will linger in these walls.
[unknown]

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
[Yogi Berra]

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
[Pablo Casals]

More people have poor taste than good taste. They come to their opinions quickly and without any thought, like a small child. That’s why there’s fast food. And moronic reality television shows. And people who follow Paris Hilton. More people will enjoy crack than Proust’s novels. Ergo, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or worthwhile. Too many people just love bad shit because they don’t know any better.
[HyperSexual Girl; Love & Lust]

“All right, class, have we all remembered to bring a potato?”
About three quarters of them held up a potato. I sighed and lifted the shopping bag I’d spent my own money on for this inevitability.
“All right, come get one if you forgot. You too Jason, that’s a carrot.”
“Aw Miss mum said it would be fine.”
“You can’t install Linux on a carrot, Jason, the beta-carotene causes row faults in the DRAM.”
I held up my own potato, showing the genesculpt needles embedded firmly in its flesh. “Now, last week we compiled our VHDL to mRNA, this week we are going to implant it and then incubate our veggies until next week.”
[Christopher Biggs; https://aus.social/@Unixbigot/112628440884924735]

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone 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]