Tag Archives: quotes

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]

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

And it came to pass in this land that the time was accomplished for this month’s periodic collection of quotes.

Why is public nakedness considered sinful or evil? What is so bad about the human body that you have to hide it away from the gaze of others? Why is the slut shaming against naturist women? Is it just because God is a prude? For most of humanity’s history people have gone naked in public all or part of the time. Going naked in the company of others doing the same is a liberating and enjoyable experience. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about the naked body.
[Dr Vian Aziz; https://twitter.com/VIANAZIZFRCOGUK/status/1781845174596886874]

Being in a redwood forest is like going to mass. It’s a genuinely awe inspiring experience that makes so much room in your brain you can’t really contain it all. They’re spaces full of fractured light and dappled spaces, that make you think God might be real after all. There is a strong sense of time out of time.
[Katy Wheatley; https://katywheatley.substack.com/p/road-trip-2]

I do not have ducks. I do not have a row. I have squirrels and they’re at a pagan rave.
[unknown]

Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad, or an economist.
[David Attenborough]

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.
[unknown]

Only a few know how much one must know to know how little one knows.
[Werner Heisenberg]

Love is a lot like a backache. It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.
[George Burns]

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his (or her) eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
[Auguste Rodin]

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
[Leonardo Da Vinci]

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth.
[Jim Harrison]

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.
[AE Housman]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

And so, once more, we arrive at this month’s collection of quotes.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health.
[Noam Chomsky]

I have nothing against football. It just seems very wasteful losing two hours of my life to watch 22 millionaires on TV chasing a bag full of wind in their underwear.
[Guy Martin]

The ethos of naturism is not about renouncing the comforts and advances of modern life. Instead, it challenges us to rethink our relationship with our own bodies and those of others within the context of these advancements. It posits that one can embrace technology, culture, and societal progress while also advocating for a more natural and less inhibited experience of human existence … [N]aturism promotes a lifestyle where equality prevails. In a naturist setting, the social hierarchies and status symbols that often divide us in clothed society … lose their significance. Without these markers, individuals interact as equals, fostering an environment where respect for the individual is paramount, and judgments based on appearance are minimized.
[Nancy M; https://justnaturism.com/understanding-the-difference-between-naturism-and-primitive-living/]

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken”, and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
[Carl Sagan]

The human body is the best work of art … Naturism is not about sex. Naturists vary in their sexual orientation similar to the general population. Naturism does not mean they are all asexual but despite what people think, a gathering of naked people doesn’t make for a sexually charged environment.
[Dr Vian Aziz, https://twitter.com/VIANAZIZFRCOGUK/status/1771956625139441911]

Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.
[John Donne, To His Mistress Going to Bed, 1572-1631]

If you have the power to turn another planet into Earth, then you have the power to turn Earth back into Earth.
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Common sense evolved to help us negotiate the world as we see it – comprising middle-sized objects and low velocities – and we ought not to expect it to help much beyond that domain.
[Eric Schwitzgebel, New Scientist, 23/03/2024]

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
[Denis Diderot]

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
[Richard Dawkins]

Christianity. The popular belief that a celestial Jewish baby who is also his own father, born from a virgin mother, died for three days so that he could ascend to heaven on a cloud and then make you live forever only if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your lord & master so he can remove an evil force from your spiritual being that is present in all humanity because an immoral woman made from a man’s rib was hoodwinked by a talking reptile possessed by an malicious angel to secretly eat forbidden fruit from a magical tree.
[unknown]

Religion. The practice of training your mind to ignore evidence, logic, and reason, while being able to believe in fairy tales based on faith alone … and being proud of it rather than ashamed!
[unknown]

Atheism is not a negation of anything. You don’t have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man’s ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems.
[Madalyn Murray O’Hair]

Science is not about building a body of known “facts”. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.
[Terry Pratchett]

Naked is as modest as you can get! You have nothing to hide or be ashamed of.
[unknown]

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Herewith my latest collection of recently encountered quotes which interested or amused. And a good long list it is this month …

Naturism … is much more than simply shedding one’s clothes. It is a philosophy deeply ingrained in the principles of freedom, equality, and respect. At its core, naturism advocates for the acceptance of the human body in its natural, unadorned state. This acceptance goes beyond mere tolerance, striving to cultivate a sense of self-respect and a respectful acknowledgment of others, regardless of their physical attributes. The movement encourages individuals to view the body as normal and natural, rather than an object of sexualization or shame.
[Nancy M; https://justnaturism.com/understanding-the-difference-between-naturism-and-primitive-living/]

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
[Jerry Seinfeld, American comedian and actor]

Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Education is understanding how millions of ordinary Germans were convinced that it was required. Education is learning how to spot the signs of history repeating itself.
[Noam Chomsky]

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 think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and have been wielding power ever since.
[Tony Benn]

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
[Alan Watts]

Speak to people in a way that if they died the next day you’d be satisfied with the last thing you said to them.
[unknown]

The deep critical thinker has become the misfit of the world, this is not a coincidence. To maintain order and control you must isolate the intellectual, the sage, the philosopher, the savant before their ideas awaken people.
[Carl Jung]

When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.
[Carl Sagan]

Atheism is what happens when you read the bible. Christianity is what happens when somebody else reads it for you.
[Bertrand Russell]

Your call is in a queue. We are experiencing a completely normal volume of calls at the moment, but we don’t see a business benefit in hiring more staff.
[unknown]

The current obsession with nostalgia and remake culture is easy to understand when you realize that it’s a symptom of a culture that isn’t allowed to imagine a future.
[unknown]

I prefer working with women. No one has to win or lose, they just get the job done.
[unknown]

The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. The less you know, the more you think you know everything. Knowledge is humbling. Ignorance is arrogant.
[Richard Feynman]

The only labour-saving invention that reliably works is a general strike.
[Thomas Fuchs, @thomasfuchs.at]

You have to accept the fact that sometimes you’re the pigeon and sometimes you’re the statue.
[Claude Chabrol, French film director]

Collective anger is a form of wisdom in a society plagued by numbness. Stoicism won’t save us. Sometimes the most credible response to the terrors of the world is rage.
[Cole Arthur Riley]

Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.
[Christoper Hitchens]

Christianity did not become a major religion by the quality of its truth, but by the quantity of its violence.
[Michael Sherlock]

The King of England lies dying and one of his sons has been exiled. A princess has vanished. Plague stalks the land and the Treasury has been plundered.
NOW is the time for strange women lying in ponds to distribute swords to form the basis of government.
[Paul Tichonczuk, @paultk@mastodon.social]