The following are some quotations that we have particularly enjoyed:
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their
field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.
— Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
When arguing with a fool, make sure he is not doing the same.
— Anonymous
Those who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither freedom or safety.
— Benjamin Franklin
Never argue with a gun. A gun is 100-degree black belt.
— Mr. Pak, a Judo and Taikwando Instructor from Iowa State University
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.
- Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.
— Theodore Roosevelt
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to
Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind.
— Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell
God is always on the side of the big battalions.
— Voltaire
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is
the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you
devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one
thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the
mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of
regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn--pure science,
the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in
six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and
geography and history and economics--why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or
spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start
again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough."
— Merlin, The Once and Future King, by Theodore H. White
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to
examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings,
knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
— Nikola Tesla
Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore
misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and
things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors--they terrify me. Scientists are no problem;
against them I feel quite confident.
— Zambendorf, Code of the Lifemaker, by James P. Hogan
Science will climb the mountain and find religion has been there all along.
— Albert Einstein
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It
would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our
own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
— C.S. Lewis
|