Saturday, August 9. 2014
-Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
-The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
Douglas Adams
Friday, August 8. 2014
"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
John Adams, 1814
Sunday, July 27. 2014
"Fishiest of all fishy paces was the Try Pots, which well deserves its name, for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, til you begin to look for fish bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clamshells. Mrs. Hussey wore a necklace of polished codfish vertebrae and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark skin. There was a fish flavor to the milk, too, which I could not account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fisherman's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slipshod, I assure ye."
Herman Melville, Moby Dick. It is The Great American Novel. There is no need to try to compete with him, so don't bother trying. Give up. That job is done.
Friday, July 25. 2014
Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.
Thomas Jefferson (H/t Remus)
Tuesday, July 22. 2014
“Nice is different from good.”
Stephen Sondheim, as quoted in Is the Quest to Build a Kinder, Gentler Surgeon Misguided?
Friday, July 18. 2014
Millionaires don’t use Astrology, billionaires do.
J.P. Morgan.
I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.
Arthur C. Clarke.
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
Tuesday, July 15. 2014
"Everything government touches turns to crap."
Ringo Starr
Monday, July 14. 2014
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."~Alberto Brandolini
Brandolini was on to something.
Friday, June 27. 2014
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (h/t Ace)
Wednesday, June 18. 2014
If the young are to be instructed at all, it seems to me that they ought to be instructed in the high human value of this toleration. They should be taught what they learn by experience in the school yard: that human beings differ enormously, one from the other, and that it is stupid and imprudent for A to try to change B. They should be taught that mutual confidence and good will are worth all the laws ever heard of, ghostly or secular, and that one man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.
H.L. Mencken, via Cafe Hayek
Friday, June 6. 2014
Somebody really should start calling it "Income Diversity". How could Progressives be against it then?
Friday, May 2. 2014
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Wiki says that Gibran is the third best-selling poet of all time, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu. I happen to be one of those who does not like The Prophet very much.
Saturday, April 26. 2014
"Don't immanentize the eschaton."
William F. Buckley Jr. - His campaign slogan when he ran for mayor if NYC, and yes, it was on bumper stickers
Friday, April 11. 2014
“We love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us.”
St. Augustine
Thursday, March 13. 2014
Kimmel: "You once shot a coyote while jogging."
Texas Gov. Rick Perry: "True."
Kimmel: "You jog with a gun?"
Perry: "I do interviews with a gun."
(h/t, SDA)
Wednesday, March 5. 2014
"Can libertarians and social conservatives ever get along? It depends. Both groups could begin to focus on what they have in common more than where they disagree.
A good start would be to stop looking to government to validate our personal beliefs or solve every problem."
Julie Borowski
Sunday, March 2. 2014
There is no end to learning. When we feel that we have learned everything, it means that we have learned nothing.
Kensho Daniel Furaya
Kensho Daniel Furuya
There
is no end to learning. When we feel that we have learned everything, it
means that we have learned nothing. - See more at:
http://www.medrants.com/archives/5674#sthash.0B4zSIcF.dpuf
Thursday, February 20. 2014
"Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."
Charles Krauthammer, MD, previously a Mass. General Psychiatrist, via Driscoll's Kirsten Powers Meets Krauthammer’s Law
Saturday, February 1. 2014
"The American Medical Association has its 3As for a successful private practice: Ability, Affability, and Availability."
That via our medical friend CT Azeff. Probably applies to most things in life.
Thursday, January 23. 2014
Italian Alzheimer's: A neurological disorder that causes you to forget everything but your grudges.
Stolen and adapted from Dr. X
Friday, January 10. 2014
"...our operating, unchallengeable baseline is that anthropogenic global warming (which we now call “climate change” so as to be more encompassing) is behind every weather phenomenon that has ever happened since we decided that there’s something called anthropogenic global warming. . . . er, climate change.”
Andrew Freedman, science writer, via Bookworm. It's a fascinatingly ahistorical view that weather began in the 1990s. You have to like that "unchallengeable."
Tuesday, January 7. 2014
"There were no resources available to send me to college, and if there were, I did not have the GPA to justify it. I have never been college material. But I was raised to solve problems. I did that, and life has been good to me. I am not a candidate to be interviewed on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs…although, I should be, and if it were to happen, I would consider it a very high honor. I do not wear my first name on a badge on my shirt. Although, in my mind’s eye, I do. I do not think of computer programming as any kind of white-collar, let alone savant-intellectual, affair. I never have. I have always thought of it as on par with stacking lumber. Just problem-solving. Nothing more than that. More blue-collar than white-collar. Just implementing stuff, so that the people way-up-there who have to make real decisions, can concentrate on those decisions, after I make sure the machines do what they’re supposed to be doing. All these years, on some level, I’ve always thought of myself as a sort of janitor or something.
And, I’ve always thought of myself — always had to think of myself — as the beneficiary of an uncommon bit of good fortune. No, wait. That is an understatement. An historical bit of good fortune. Fantastic fortune. Like, you fire a bullet out of your gun, someone else fires a bullet that hits your bullet and knocks your bullet out of the air. That kind of good fortune.
Since about the seventeenth century or so, we have had this institution we have called “college” that is supposed to — let’s be honest, okay? — put on this good show about trying to educate the masses so everyone can be moar-better-equal, while in reality, laboring tirelessly to preserve and perpetuate a caste system..."
House of Eratosthenes
Tuesday, December 24. 2013
...a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.
Carl Sagan on God, via this post
Monday, December 2. 2013
“God’s purpose is not to perfect me but to get me where he can use me.”
A friend of mine
Wednesday, November 6. 2013
“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
William F. Buckley Jr, via Teacher Calls Parent ‘Neo-Nazi’ for Criticizing Eighth-Grade Project
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