A florilegium is a collection of useful or valuable quotes from any number of sources. Usually it refers to a medieval compilation.
This florilegium is a modern one, a collection of quotes from the Internet and other sources which seem to me to embody humor and wisdom, which should go together more often than they do today. As G.K. Chesterton said, "Funny is not the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny."
Share and enjoy!
A man who attempts to carry a cat home by the tail will
get information which will be valuable to him all his life.
--Mark Twain
Magnus Itland (itlandm@online.no) wrote:
And nobody will ever be allowed to inject me with nanites programmed
in LISP, even if my life is already forfeit.
Intellectual dishonesty in religion only increases the number of smart
and angry atheists. This is not especially a good thing. -- Louann Miller
The problem with most religious arguments is that no one is convinced of
anything that they didn't believe when they started and the arguments tend
to get more extreme instead of coming closer together.--William A. Wenrich
You know, one of the most consistent aspects to organizations is that they try
to survive even if the initial reason for the creation is gone.
Another aspect of organizations is one I see in NOW. As the crying needs get
met (the ones you mentioned), the easily satisfied drop out. The more
progress that is made, the more of the mainstream that drops out. The end
result is that your organization survives, but becomes MUCH more radical to
the point where original supporters are horrified.
Ol' Lazarus Long says:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion,
butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance
accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give
orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem,
pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,
die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
If at first you don't succeed, well, so much for skydiving.
DATA is not
Information is not
Knowledge is not
Understanding
> "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
> will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.
>
> "Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
>
> - Professor Robert Silensky
> California University
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's easier to
harass rich women than motorcycle gangs."
"I know the old saw about 'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make
him drink'... but I believe you can hold the horse's head underwater and make
him think about it for a while." -- Dr. Jane Walters, my high school principal
The problem with a system that needs competent managers
is that it needs competent managers.--Graydon Saunders
John Dilick wrote:
> You might want to remove that large chip from your shoulder -- it seems to
> be weighty enough to have gained its own gravity well and is sucking your
> brain right out of your ear.
"God does not want to do everything Himself, and thus deprive us
of our free will, and that share of the glory that is rightfully
ours" -- Niccolo Macchiavelli
Faith is not belief without proof, but rather trust without reservation.
"We have been fortunate enough to live to a time when virtue, though it
does not triumph, is nevertheless not always tormented by attack dogs."
--Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago.
Few of us are anywhere near as saintly as we wish our neighbors were.
--Kierestelli Aradia Morgan
Or, to put it another way, a libertarian has been defined as a person who
believes the police are a criminal gang, but that in the absence of police,
criminals would not gather into gangs.
-- S.M. Stirling
"Blessed are they who learn from their mistakes, for they shall make,
if not necessarily fewer of them, different and more interesting ones."
--Dorothy J. Heydt
People would worry a lot less about what others thought of them if they
realized that others didn't think of them very often.
--Don Cicchetti, La Sierra University Media Services
"In headlines today, the dreaded killfile virus spread across the
country adding aol.com to people's usenet kill files everywhere.
The programmer of the virus still remains anonymous, but has been
nominated several times for a Nobel peace prize." -Mark Atkinson
"A man who wishes to serve the cause of religion ought to hesitate
long before he stakes the truth of religion on the event of a
controversy respecting events in the physical world. For a time
he may succeed in making a theory which he dislikes unpopular
by persuading the public that it contradicts the Scriptures and
is inconsistent with the attributes of the Deity. But, if at last
an overwhelming force of evidence proves this maligned theory to be
true, what is the effect of the arguments by which the objector has
attempted to prove that it is irreconciliable with natural and
revealed religion? Merely this, to make men infidels. Like
the Israelites, in their battle with the Philistines, he has
presumptuously and without warrant brought down the ark of God
into the camp as a means of ensuring victory :-- and the
consequence of this profanation is that, when the battle is
lost, the ark is taken.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Sadler's Law of Population",
July 1830. Published in the 1897 Edinburgh Edition (London :
Longmans, Green, and Co.), v. 5, p. 429.
Theoretically, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
History doesn't always repeat itself... sometimes it just
screams "Why don't you listen when I'm talking to you?" and
lets fly with a club. --John W. Campbell, Jr.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked ...A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over,
beginning with a working simple system.
-- Grady Booch
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and
it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too
powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all
strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when
the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because
they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their
tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments.
--Neal Stephenson, "In the Beginning was the Command LIne."
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and
by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate
the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the
case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations
which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are
like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they
require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
"There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The
opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite
of a great truth is also true." -- Niels Bohr
>> I've always wondered--why do Catholics say ten times as many
>> prayers to Mary as to God?
>
> If you're trying to convince a nice Jewish boy to do you a favor, it
> only makes sense to enlist his mother's help.
"I do know that the worst sin--perhaps the only sin--passion can
commit, is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter
or make its bed in hell--there is no middle way..."
--Lord Peter Wimsey, _Gaudy Night_, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Reading bad criticism is, of course, like reading Basque computer
manuals while chewing broken glass, only less useful.
--Kenneth Hite, LHN
"There are those in the world who dare to speak out in defiance of all
that is holy, and who disdain the use of the serial comma. They are
blasphemers and the spawn of evil. Do not succumb to their ways." --
Lawrence Watt-Evans
"I save about twenty drafts [...] and the last one contains all the final
alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers,
there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future,
try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped." -- Terry Pratchett
"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do
not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your
religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of
your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have
been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis,
when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the
good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
--Buddha
Justice is when you get what you deserve.
Mercy is when you don't get what you deserve.
Grace is when you get what you don't deserve.
>In principio erat verbum
>et verbum erat ciocolatum
>et ciocolatum erat bonum
>-- Confectio IV oz, CCXL calorii
>
>or for the bad punsters among us
>
>Copulato ergo Sum. ~);^)
>
>Richard A. Macdonald, CPA/EA
"I tried sleep-teaching myself heraldry. Didn't help
me, but now my cats sort their food so the red bits
are on the white floor and the yellow bits stay in
the blue bowl."
Mark Atwood wrote:
> I see yet another irregular form
>
> I am different.
> You are odd.
> They are repugnant.
>>The ultimate "means of production" is human action directed by the human mind.
>>To control the "means of production", the state must control all human action,
>>and ultimately all human thought as well.
>
>Jordan, there are times when you get things exactly right.
>--
>
>Pete McCutchen
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains
undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if
justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters
above everything.--Confucius
"It was half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold"
--Hunter S Tolkien "Fear and Loathing in Barad Dur"
I belong to a bizarre cult which engages in weird
ceremonies including ritual cannibalism, and
decorates its temples with pictures and statues
of a man being tortured to death. I got into it by
meeting some people in college, and my mother
was very upset about it. It's called the Episcopal
Church.
--
John Fast
>In article <8ljrph$5i1$1@agate.berkeley.edu>,
>David Goldfarb wrote:
>>
>>"You fool. No living man may harm me."
>>"No living man am I! You face a woman!"
>>
>>I've read the books over a dozen times, and that confrontation yet
>>seems to me the most thrilling moment in the trilogy.
>
>The best part about it is the way Tolkien covered his bets from a
>linguistic standpoint.
>
>The word "man" in English has been made to stand in for what were
>originally two words: _mann_ meaning "a man, as distinguished
>from an animal, demon, or god" (compare Latin _homo_, Greek
>_anthropos_), and _wer_ meaning "a man, as distinguished from a
>woman or a child" (Latin _vir_, Greek _aner, andros_).
>
>If Eowyn and the Witch-King had been pedants like the herb-master
>of Minas Tirith, the dialogue might have gone more like this:
>
>"You fool, no living man may harm me."
>
>"_Distinguo_, Sir, I am not _vir_ but _femina._ Prepare to die."
>
>"Excuse me, your Westron is so imprecise. I did not mean _vir_,
>I meant _homo_."
>
>"Ah, point taken! In that case, permit me to point out that
>Meriadoc, who is not _homo_ but _dimidiulus,_ a Halfling, has
>just introduced an Arnorian blade into your knee."
>
>
>Dorothy J. Heydt
Attributed to the monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona; unable to identify
published source [apparently it's a hoax, but the quote is still
worth having]:
"For him that stealeth a book from this library, let it change into a
serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck by palsy and all his
members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let
there be no surcease for his agony until he sink to dissolution. Let
bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the worm that dieth not, and when at
last he goeth to his final punishment let the flames of hell consume him for
ever and aye."
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't
believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug."--Mark Twain
"Since we are assured that an all-wise Creator has observed the
most exact proportions, of number, weight, and measure, in the
make of all things, the most likely way therefore, to get any
insight into the nature of those parts of the creation, which
come within our observation, must in all reason be to number,
weigh, and measure." - Stephen Hales
As I let go of my feelings of guilt, I am in touch with my inner sociopath.
--"Life Affirmations that are Attainable"
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-- James D. Nicoll
...philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy.
--G.K. Chesterton, "Introduction to the Book of Job."
The plural of anecdote is not data.
[nifty insult]
"festering, bubbling pile of vulture vomit, buzzard barf and hyena
diarrhea, a gibbering, squamous non-Euclidean mound of misspent
protoplasm, a living proof of reverse evolution, and a disgrace to
sub-humanity."
>> We're also, incidentally, heir to the combined herbalistic knowledge of _all_
>> prior civilizations.
>
>Unfortunately, much of that knowledge is not very accessible. All those
>medieval manuscripts in monastery libraries all over Europe, e.g.
>
>You can't grep dead goats.
In article <99dh75$2r9$1@news.panix.com> erkyrath@eblong.com "Andrew Plotkin" writes:
> Vlatko Juric-Kokic wrote:
> > Cue the usual "books falling apart" thread.
>
> Turning, pages turning in the widening bath,
> The spine cannot bear the humidity.
> Books fall apart; the binding cannot hold.
> Page 129 is loosed upon the world.
>
> --Z (the best lack all resale value, while the worst
> are full of pulpitous acidity)
And what rough book, its hour come round at last
slouches towards Gutenberg to be printed?
ObSF: _The Armageddon Rag_
"In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is
determining which is which."-- George R.R. Martin, interviewed by Nick Geyvers.
Theatre is life; film is art; TV is furniture.
Graydon wrote:
> As he has missused words, and abused words, and used words to no good
> or courteous purpose, let be laid on Mr. Steinberg the Curse of
> Dennett's Library: that wheresoever he is, waking or sleeping, well
> or ill, still or hastening, he shall have always at the edge of his
> sight and mind and hearing all the possible better words he might have
> choosen, a torrent of whispering in his ears and his thoughts and his
> eyes all his days, that he shall ever hear and never once remember,
> not for the writing of the letters of it on his flesh with fire,
> though he shall know anew with each breath as a thing more certain
> than death or gravity that the better words were there, and always
> what worth the words he has himself chosen have beside those words
> which shall ever escape him.
Chance is distinguishable from Providence only in retrospect.
--John S. Novak, III
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the
night to visit violence on those who would harm us.
-- George Orwell
The real danger of lying to kids is not that they'll find out you lied and
stop trusting you; it's that they'll believe the lies and try to live by them.
--Eileen Lufkin
Economics is not a zero-sum game, and the belief that
it is is at the root of all kinds of wickedness and nonsense.
--Firebug
Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be
persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right.
--Robert Park
Reputation is a side effect of conduct; the notion that it can be
created as a direct effect of promotion is one of those unfortunate
ills of thought plaguing the 20th century.
-- Graydon Saunders
Power does not corrupt; it merely fails to purify.
-- John Hasler
Perfect consistency is possible only for the Almighty . . . and a
careful reading of scripture will indicate that even he failed to
attain it in all cases.
-- Poul Anderson, quoted by David Weber
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the
ability to learn from the experience of others, are also
remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
--Douglas Adams
Your crypto-asceticism is not my emergency.
--Eric Oppen, on vegetarian diets
Delusion, precisely because it is delusion, has a stronger hold on human
minds than mere fact. Delusions are produced by strong, innate mechanisms
built into every human mind; facts are outside of us and need to be
hunted down.
--Christopher J. Hinrich
By the time the Sun's power output starts dropping noticeably,
the human race will probably have advanced technologically to the
point where practical fusion power is only 15-30 years off.
--Wim Lewis, in a discussion of alternate energy on rec.arts.sf.written
The realization that nature views contraception as censorship and
routes around it should be obviously self-evident.
--Ool.
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts.
Study hard. Be evil.
I find it faintly amusing that you seem to think that I'm unaware that
I've stated my personal opinion rather than a fact of natural law.
--Doug
A good essay is like a good mini-skirt: Long enough to cover the
subject, but short enough to keep it interesting.
Give a hobbit a fish and he eats fish for a day.
Give a hobbit a ring and he eats fish for an age.
True communication is possible only between equals, because
inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their
superiors pleasant lies than for telling the truth.
--Principia Discordia
BLACK: Race originating in Africa, so called because of the skin
colour, which ranges from pale ivory to dark brown.
RED: Race originating in North America, so called because of the skin
colour, which ranges from pale ivory to dark brown.
WHITE: Race originating in Europe, so called because of the skin
colour, which ranges from pale ivory to dark brown.
YELLOW: Race originating in Asia, so called because of the skin
colour, which ranges from pale ivory to dark brown.
--Poul Anderson (paraphrased)
A quotation from my previous agent: 'Before you write, consider. Would
the tree give greater glory to God in its original form?'
--Cherith Baldry
"If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we must at least
consider the posibility that we're dealing with a small aquatic
bird of the family anatidae."
--Sean O'Hara
When enlightened men go on arguing for a long time, there is a distinct
possibility that the question is not clear.
--Voltaire, _The Age of Louis XIV_
If you don't have time for frivolities, you aren't doing it right.
--Annie Jason Masmajean (Janet Kagan, _Mirabile_)
Any sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Languages let you stay on good terms with your
neighbours so they don't come and burn 'em down.
--James M. Bryant
The first rule is, you must not fool yourself. And you are the
easiest person to fool.
--Richard Feynman
Science: The theory can't be valid because the evidence contradicts it.
Dogmatism: The evidence can't be valid because it contradicts the theory.
--Beverly Erlebacher
A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart, seldom fails to
make those worthy of it to whom it is given.
--J.A. Froude, "England's Forgotten Worthies"
In general, the fact that noise inevitably comes along with signal does not
mean that signal is noise.
--Matt Gerber
Evil is best recognized not by its objectives but by the methods it is
willing to contemplate in pursuit of them. --Eric S. Raymond
Criticism is easy; art is difficult.--Philippe Destouches, Le Glorieux, 1732.
One of the more obnoxious new age beliefs is the one that says that if
enough people just want something, and think hard enough about it, then
it will happen without anyone actually having to get their ass in gear and
actually do something about it.--Steven Den Beste
If anything, being beaten with a message that I already agree with is
even more annoying than one with which I disagree.
--Ross TenEyck, on _Tehanu_
Roughly speaking, light fantasy is that in which magical healing
that works is more common than magical curses that work.
-- John Schilling, discussing Jo Walton's Arthurian novels
The big argument against democracy is that it prevents handing a whole
lot of power for a long time to a really good leader. It has turned out
that being able to routinely get rid of bad leaders is more important.
--Nancy Lebovitz
Blessed are they that have nothing to say, and who cannot be
persuaded to say it. -- James Russell Lowell
The power of any data-capture tool is its ability to exclude
extraneous information, not its power to capture relevant information.
--Steven den Beste
"Tradition is not the worship of ashes,
but the preservation of fire." (Gustav Mahler)
Personally, I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia,
because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more
likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten
the process. --James Lileks
Quoth Boudewijn Rempt:
These days I hold myself to the rough and ready rule of thumb: if it
fires my imagination really easily, it's probably bad science.
Justin Fang wrote:
> "A barbarian should be able to swing a sword, shoot a bow, ride a horse,
> escape from slavery, lead an army, loot a temple, rescue a princess,
> battle a wizard, slay a dragon, defeat an eldritch horror, gamble a
> fortune, besiege a fortress, seize a throne, rule a kingdom, and enjoy
> what is good in life.
>
> Specialization is for weak decadent civilized men who you will crush and
> drive before you while listening to the lamentations of their women."
File this one either under "things that make you go hmmm," or
"random conspiracy theories caused by lack of afternoon coffee"
--asparagirl
Canada could also build a doomsday device (Any wealthy nation could since
doomsday devices are not that expensive or hard to build) but it might prove
to be unusable as a threat in many situations since no reasonable nation
would use it to, eg: get an odious tariff on steel removed, since the
negative economic effects of destroying all non-burrowing mammalian life
on Earth is arguably greater than the negative effects of a tariff.
--James Nicoll
Peace means something different from 'not fighting'. Those aren't
peace advocates, they're 'stop fighting' advocates. Peace is an
active and complex thing and sometimes fighting is part of what it
takes to get it. (Jo Walton)
What we have then are two positions about the nature of speech. The
postmodernists say: Speech is a weapon in the conflict between groups
that are unequal. And that is diametrically opposed to the liberal
view of speech, which says: Speech is a tool of cognition and
communication for individuals who are free. -- Stephen Hicks
When money is involved, people who act like they have something
to hide usually have something to hide. -- Derek Lowe
It's not like marriage, you know; you're *allowed* to love more than one
book. Simultaneously, even.
--Lois McMaster Bujold
The first rule for dealing with cannibals, is to establish that you
are not food.
--Cato the Youngest
Good engineers tend to be pragmatists. Idealistic engineers don't ship, and
that's the worst crime an engineer can commit.
Someone wrote to me a couple of days ago and asked me the difference between
scientists and engineers. The short answer is that scientists try to learn
interesting things, and engineers try to do useful things. Our job as
engineers is to solve problems, and our solutions can't be used unless we
finish them and ship.
Of course, it's also helpful if they actually work.
--Steven den Beste
A good thing about xenophobia, in so far as it has a good thing, is that it
applies to the unknown. Once you get anyone close up and know them, it has
to vanish. --papersky
It is my firm belief that there is no belief so asinine, no course of
action so bizarre, that it can not have a half dozen web sites strongly
devoted to its practice. If their maintainers ever learned to check
their spelling, we might be in real trouble. --Jeff Vogel
Religion is the opiate of the people. Communism is the angel dust,
with an airplane glue chaser.--Jeff Wiel
Though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of day and night,
yet light and darkness are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable.
--Edmund Burke
As I recall from one version of the christian heaven, watching the
sufferings of the Damned is supposed to be part of the joys of the
Blessed. I never believed this until the current fad for Reality TV.
--Mary Gentle
In Common Carrier cases the larger the number of footnotes the greater
the prestige of the writer. I wonder how this worked when it was
multiple copies in carbon and no erasures. Incidence of secretarial
murder of smart-ass junior attorneys probably the cause of the
popularity of duplicating machines and printing from computer text.
Also for the relatively small number of footnotes in presentations
before technology. --Jack Linthicum, replying to Doug Muir
"We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
--Tombstone epitaph of two amateur astronomers, quoted in
Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_.
"Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up
a statue in honor of a critic."
- Jean Sibelius
If you can't read in a checkout line and continue reading as you walk or
take the bus home, you are lacking in basic survival skills. If you were
foolish enough to *drive* to the bookstore, well, let that be a lesson to
you. -- Mike Schilling
Any candidate with whom you agree 100% is probably unelectable.
--James Lileks
> Physics is the science of determining which subset of mathematics the
> universe respects.
--John Schilling
It is one Thing, to show a Man that he is in an Error, and another, to
put him in possession of Truth. (John Locke)
Be careful what you preach -- someone might believe you.
--one of Donald Sensing's seminary professors
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that one's work is terribly important."
~ Bertrand Russell
Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play
and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion,
Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time,
to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion
in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies
in the ears.
--Neal Stephenson, _Quicksilver_
Mark Atwood wrote:
I am a supporter of the post-"post-modern" artistic movement known
as the "Derriere Guard":
"Art that people like to look at,
music people like to listen to, and
buildings that people like to be in."
There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that
periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation.
--Eric S. Raymond, on Thomas Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_
Brian Pickrell wrote:
Has it ever occurred to you that the reason you've never been able to
convince anyone of your opinions is because your opinions are stupid?
"History will be kind to me. I intend to write it."
--Sir Winston Churchill
All my clothes go into the warm wash cycle together. Any garments
that can't cope with that are weaklings and are culled from the herd.
I've got better things to do with my time than sort laundry into little
piles.
--Ross TenEyck
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real
civilisation. (from the preface to _English Social History_, 1942)
--George Macaulay Trevelyan
I've always been mildly irritated by the kind of deliberate primitivism
in art that's hard to distinguish from never having learned to draw.
--Teresa Nielsen Hayden
"Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Yeah, and?
You're complaining about entropy? Things are always falling
apart, and it's up to us to be always putting them back together.
--Derek Lowe, reacting to Yeats' "The Second Coming"
Much of what are called "social problems" consists of the fact that
intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this
they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.
--Thomas Sowell
Not that I exactly _object_ to buying books, mind you, but for a purely
electronic form of entertainment this blogging hobby amazingly encourages
the acquisition of pounds and pounds of dead tree media.
--Moe Lane
Everything you know is wrong. But some of it is a useful first
approximation.
-- Eric S. Raymond
We do not like to see French words introduced into English composition;
but, after all, the first law of writing, that law to which all
other laws are subordinate, is this, that the words employed
shall be such as convey to the reader the meaning of the writer.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay, review of Lord Mahan's "History of the
the War of the Succession in Spain"
Verbal fluency is a good measure of how verbally fluent you are, not
how smart or competent, or how well you make decisions. It is the
conceit of academics and journalists that the one talent they all
have in spades is the one that is absolutely necessary for any
important job. -- Jane Galt
Almost all the best writing advice is simple. The trick is to learn
to take it. -- SF editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden
There's a special word for people who set up recorded messages
telling you that "your call is important to us" every five
minutes for two hours. That special word is "liar."
-Patrick Nielsen Hayden
"If being information-rich were all it were cracked up to be,
then librarians would be the most powerful people on the planet.
Clearly librarians are not, so there's something besides information
governing the distribution of power. My experience of power politics
has been pretty limited, but I would suggest that great whopping heaps
of money has a lot to do with it." -- Bruce Sterling
In the Hard SF family, biology is the child who shows up at
school with mysterious bruises and the occasional broken bone.
--James Nicoll
I'm a pessimist. Always have been. I don't see the glass as just
being half-empty, I also believe that evaporation is continually
emptying the glass. Sure, it's negative, but I'm rarely disappointed.
And I am often pleasantly surprised. -- Dale Franks
The more insular a group is, the more it ludicrous it becomes. All
groups need the healthy tonic of outside challenge to keep themselves
from becoming moronic.
--Ace of Spades HQ
Of Chomsky, it was once written in The Nation that to fail to read him is
"to court genuine ignorance." In a manner of speaking, this is quite true.
One can certainly go through life ignorant of the ways in which logic and
reason can be abused in order to make a polemical point.
--Pejman Yousefzadeh
You cannot tell a man that saving him and his family from torture,
humiliation and death was a mistake and it should've not been done
because it's illegal. -- Omar (Iraq the Model)
God judges by what happened. Man must judge by what can be proven. Any
man who sets out what should happen to criminals without all these legal
technicalities thinks that he is God. He is wrong.
--Uther Pendragon
One of the hardest things about ensuring that public policy is based
on sound science is that sound science inherently involves uncertainties.
--Rand Simberg
However absorbed a Commander may be in the elaboration of his own
thoughts, it is necessary sometimes to take the enemy into consideration.
--Winston Churchill, _The World Crisis_.
In the recent Times poll, 57 percent of the respondents said Kerry
hadn't made his plans for the country clear, and 63 percent believed
he said what he thought people wanted to hear, rather than what he
actually thought. This reflected savage Republican attacks on Kerry's
character, to be sure, but it probably also had something to do with
the fact that he hadn't made his plans clear and seemed to be saying
what he thought people wanted to hear.
--Matt Bai
One way to determine whether an argument is bogus is to present the
opposite set of facts and see if a person draws exactly the same
conclusion. --Jonah Goldberg
Grand romantic gestures are wonderful, but one must draw the line
when it comes to permanently maiming yourself.
--Ace of Spades HQ
Custom is a grievous thing, terrible to supplant, and hard to guard
against, and it often attacks us unwilling and unknowing; therefore in
so far as thou knowest the power of custom, to such an extent study to
be freed from any evil custom, and transfer thyself to any other most
useful one.
--St. John Chrysostom, _Instructions to Catuchemens_
"First," said William Shakespeare, "let's kill all the lawyers." No
doubt a worthy goal, but I challenge the Immortal Will's priorities.
Killing the lawyers can wait as long as the world remains infested
with such a pestiferous horde of hacks writing bad management books.
--Jane Galt
The kingdom of the world values you for what you do, while the kingdom
of heaven values you for what you are. -- camassia
Under a unified government all wars are civil wars and civil wars are ugly.
--Natalie Solent
The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art --
which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as
surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have
meanings -- and that consequences come from using them.
--Cold War historian John Lewes Gaddis,
on Bush's 2004 inaugural speech
Lenin was wrong; communism is not socialism plus electricity, it's
electricity plus mountains of corpses -- Arthur Chrenkoff
Any organization will, in the end, be run by those who stay awak
in committee -- Tim Worstall
...civilization is not self-perpetuating. It takes a conscious
decision on the part of many people, a constant effort to be guided
by conscience, a determination to struggle against barbarity.
--Pundita
It frequently takes more than one ugly fact to slay a beautiful theory.
--Chad Orzel
If we confuse Christian obedience with Christian faith, then we are
liable to make a logical but erroneous connection: that the more
obedient we are the more faith-filled we must be. --Donald Sensing
John Paul taught that the mark of original sin was the loss of the
apprehension of God as Father. When a culture is dominated by
original sin and gives in to the abandonment of God, they don't get
nothing--they get the apprehension of God as Master.
--Mark Shea
Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means
that something else happens. (Christopher Hitchens, on Darfur)
Online plagiarizing is easy to do, but even easier to catch.
--Paleojudica
When it comes to titles, if the book lists "Ph.d." after the
author's name, run the other way.
--Marginal Revolution
My information does not want to be free; it wants to pay my mortgage.
--John Scalzi
Any action that Congress takes with near unanimity is presumptively
foolish.
--Tom Veal, Stromata
Real men take responsibility for what matters in their lives. And fix
things. Everything else is quibbling over habits and hobbies.
--Sgt. Mom
If you're going to try and develop parliamentary democracy, it really
does make sense to do it on an island. Makes it harder for interested
neighbors to join in when the inevitable civil war happens.
(via Moe Lane)
Do not ask a Librarian for advice, for she will say both No and Yes,
and Have you checked this source?
Civilizations fall because people bitch and complain when the
electricity is off for fifteen minutes, and never give a thought to
the fact that _it has been on for their entire lives_.
--Bill Whittle
Socialists have always spent much of their time seeking new titles
for their beliefs, because the old versions so quickly become
outdated and discredited.
--Margaret Thatcher, _Statecraft_
Christianity has gotten into as much trouble embracing scientific
theories that turned out to be false as it has by rejecting ones
that turned out to be true.
--Camassia
It takes an adolescent to think that people who believe in
nothing are the best judges of those who believe in something.
--James Lileks, on cynicism
If I can't see as far as others, it's because giants have
stood on my shoulders
--Jenni Subriar
The Interweb gives you the power to get a lot of information on a topic
very quickly. (Understanding that information is something else again;
that's what this whole "education" business is about.) --Doug Muir
If I have to express What Went Wrong in a few sentences (ones that would
require several lifetimes of scholarship to fully explain), it's this: By
no later than the time of Spinoza, a general but very potent plan was laid
out for the reconstruction of human culture in the light of reason. But
that program required far, far more information -- factual information --
that was available at the time to undertake on a broad and deep basis.
Unfortunately, the promise of the program of rationally rebuilding human
culture was so exciting and obvious that people rushed to complete it
prematurely across a broad front.
The humility that lies at the center of the scientific method was forgotten,
and the great gaps were filled in with unsubstantiated speculation and wishful
thinking masquerading as science. Those sketchy but emotionally satisfying
leaps of imagination contained the seeds of horror. At each step of the
process, ghosts from our animal past and the premodern history of our
civilization were inserted into the program of rational, scientific cultural
reconstruction and injected seeds of destruction.
--Greg Burch
Doves think the choice is between fighting or not fighting. Hawks think
the choice is between fighting now or fighting later.
--Bill Whittle
When I was born, we knew very little about the actual behavior of
other primates. Some of what we have learned isn't pleasant but it
is informative. While it is true that this new knowledge carries
with it the inevitable doom of a thousand bad analogies based on a
superficial understanding of bonobo behavior, this can be addressed
with education and stout clubs.
--John C. Wright
What is the difference between an ideal and a policy? No one is willing
to die for a policy.
--John C. Wright
When the safety people say too few kids are falling out of trees,
you know caution has gone too far. -- Joanne Jacobs
Contrary to popular opinion, most adults worldwide did not achieve
that advanced state of being by skipping the intermediary step of
being a teenager. We understand what it's like to be a teenager
just fine. -- John Scalzi
Political positions are correlated with value systems, not
intelligence. People who don't understand that fundamental
premise have a pretty shallow understanding of human decision
making and motivation.--AT
Beer and power tools (much like beer and off-highway recreational
vehicles, beer and firearms, and beer and sub-zero temperatures)
_do not mix._ -- James MacDonald
I've found that people who are great at something are not so much
convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else
seems so incompetent. -- Paul Graham
Anything your kid does is normal human development.
Anything my kid does is proof of supernatural intelligence.
--John Scalzi
O, how comely it is, and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long oppressed,
When God into the hand of their deliverer
Puts invincible might. -- Milton, _Samson Agonistes_
Remember, a terrorist attack is just a badly-placarded HAZMAT incident.
--James McDonald (Yog-Sysop)
Science Fiction is the serious realm of speculative literature
that deals with such interesting speculations as aerospace travel,
intelligent life on other planets, futuristic weaponry, and
speculations into areas otherwise taboo, such as an enlightened
approach to sexuality, that other genres shy away from.
Sci-Fi is the pulpish hack writing that deals with such geekish ideas
as rocketships, bug-eyed aliens, rayguns, and orgies with glamorous
space-babes!
Clearly, there is no relation whatsoever between the two.
--John C. Wright
The poison of dreams is called irony.
--John C. Wright
I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second
of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic
cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes
indistinguishable from a death ray. --Charlie Stross
A good workman doesn't complain about his tools because a good
workman picks good tools.
Even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless
nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone's attention
full-time for the rest of their life.
--Patrick Nielsen Hayden
The trouble with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they
are incomplete, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said recently.