Good Quotes by Famous and Mundane People

Good Quotes by Famous and Mundane People

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...."

 -Oscar Wilde, -The Picture of Dorian Gray

"You are a sceptic."

"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."

 -Oscar Wilde, -The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious

if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility."

 -Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake."

 - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)

"Don't be so humble - you are not that great."

 - Golda Meir (1898-1978) to a visiting diplomat

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write

faster than anybody who can write better."

 - A. J. Liebling (1904-1963)

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

 - Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve

other problems."

 - Rene Descartes, Discours de la Methode

"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."

 - Henry Ford (1863-1947)

"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'."

 - Yoda ('Return of the Jedi')

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."

 - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

 - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"Wit is educated insolence."

 - Aristotle (284-322 B.C.)

"Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me."

 - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are."

 - Gore Vidal

"Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them."

 - Samuel Palmer

"Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is

trying to be funny."

 - Guy Davenport

"I would have made a good Pope."

 - Richard M. Nixon

"The mistakes are all waiting to be made."

 - chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956) on the

 game's opening position

"It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims."

 - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that

one's work is terribly important."

 - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

"A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation."

 - H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

"Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to

do."

 - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his

clients to plant vines."

 - Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."

 - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to

me."

 - Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

"A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies."

 - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names."

 - John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"Logic is in the eye of the logician."

 - Gloria Steinem

"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."

 - William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live."

 - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"This book fills a much-needed gap."

 - Moses Hadas (1900-1966) in a review

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading

it."

 - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."

 - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."

 - Goethe (1749-1832)

"In the end, everything is a gag."

 - Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

"The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people."

 - Lucille S. Harper

"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known."

 - Walt Disney (1901-1966)

"He who hesitates is a damned fool."

 - Mae West (1892-1980)

"Good teaching is one-forth preparation and three-fourths theater."

 - Gail Godwin

"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

 - Henry Kissinger

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

 - Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

"You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty."

 - Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime."

 - Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

"If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."

 - Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be

living apart."

 - e e cummings (1894-1962)

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other

bastard die for his."

 - General George Patton (1885-1945)

"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."

 - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"I don't even butter my bread; I consider that cooking."

 - Katherine Cebrian

"I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it."

 - Steven Wright

"Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure."

 - Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

"I have read your book and much like it."

 - Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

"The covers of this book are too far apart."

 - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My

opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

 - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good

teacher."

 - Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

 - Paul Valery (1871-1945)

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

 - Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."

 - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to."

 - Elvis Presley (1935-1977)

"No sane man will dance."

 - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."

 - Robert Frost (1874-1963)

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

 - C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"Vote early and vote often."

 - Al Capone (1899-1947)

"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"

 - Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."

 - Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"Hell is other people."

 - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

 - Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

"Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate."

 - Thomas Jones

"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word

alone."

 - Al Capone (1899-1947)

"The gods too are fond of a joke."

 - Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."

 - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."

 - Gloria Leonard

"It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man."

 - Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

"Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people

in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."

 - Robert Orben

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

 - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from

any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."

 - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance."

 - Plato (427-347 B.C.)

"Plato was a bore."

 - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."

 - Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."

 - Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961)

"Hemingway was a jerk."

 - Harold Robbins

"Assassins!"

 - Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) to his orchestra

"How can I lose to such an idiot?"

 - A shout from chessmaster Aaron Nimzovich (1886-1935)

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

 - Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

"Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't

cure."

 - Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)

"Men have become the tools of their tools."

 - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"It is now possible for a flight attendant to get a pilot pregnant."

 - Richard J. Ferris, president of United Airlines

"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."

 - Gore Vidal

"Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other

alternatives."

 - Abba Eban

"Imitation is the sincerest form of television."

 - Fred Allen (1894-1956)

"In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."

 - Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965)

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."

 - Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

"Why don't you write books people can read?"

 - Nora Joyce to her husband James (1882-1941)

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

 - T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"Criticism is prejudice made plausible."

 - H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

"It is better to be quotable than to be honest."

 - Tom Stoppard

"Never mistake motion for action."

 - Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961)

"Hell is paved with good samaritans."

 - William M. Holden

"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and

that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have

only wasted my time."

 - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

"Silence is argument carried out by other means."

 - Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)

"The average person thinks he isn't."

 - Father Larry Lorenzoni

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."

 - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

"Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned

Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned"

 - William Shakespeare

"A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been

extracted."

 - Helen Rowland (1876-1950)

"Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century."

 - S. E. Perelman

"There is a country in Europe where multiple-choice tests are illegal."

 - Sigfried Hulzer

"Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done."

 - Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) to his maid when she informed him

 that his wife is dying

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the

opportunity in every difficulty."

 - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

 - Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

"I think it would be a good idea.

 - Mahatma Ghandi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!"

 - Will Rogers

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.'

 - Milton Friedman

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

| Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, |

| practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. |

| -Rev. Pat Robertson, 1992 GOP Convention |

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity"

 - Sigmund Freud

****************************************************************************

* National Health *

* The efficiency of the Post Office, the compassion of the IRS, *

* at Pentagon prices. *

****************************************************************************

We should be content with the mysterious,

the meaningless,

the contradictory,

the hostile,

and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving . . .

 --Philip K. Dick, from a speech in 1972

Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible; for after good health it is the best thing to have.

 --Wolfgang A. Mozart

Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.

If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.

 --John Cage

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.

 --D.H. Lawrence

A symbol may serve to transfer our intuitions and to suggest new ones only so long as its meaning is not defined.

 --P.D. Ouspensky

Make a mistake and do something wrong.

Make another mistake and do something right.

 --Sun Ra

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

 -- Euripides (The Bacchae, c. 407 BCE)

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

 --Aldous Huxley

The injustice of a government is proportional to the number of its laws.

 --Tacitus

A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a

sign of weakness and malady.

 - Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

There is greater argument in one fact than in all the creeds.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

It is easier to believe that a man is honest who says the Bible is the word of God than to believe that he is bright.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The cross everywhere is a dagger in the heart of liberty.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

A miracle is not an explanation of what we cannot comprehend.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

A dogma is the hand of the dead on the throat of the living.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The progress of the world depends upon freedom of thought and freedom of utterance.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

If man had no knowledge except what he has got out of the Bible he would not know enough to make a shoe.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The true man walks the earth as the stars walk the heavens, grandly obedient to those laws which are implanted in his nature.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

A great many people are afraid of knowledge, but we have seen hundreds of people that we thought would be improved if they knew more, but we have never seen one that we thought would be better if he knew less.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

Every fact is backed up by the whole universe.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

Christianity is a black spot on the page of civilization.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The church is a bank that is continually receiving deposits but never pays a dividend.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

When a minister says that God will help you, ask him to put up the collateral.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The church spends thousands of dollars to save a dogma, where it spends a cent to find a truth.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

To correct in ourselves what we condemn in others would remove most of the evils of life.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

Most men would kill the truth if truth would kill their religion.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The nation that proclaims the right of free speech, but will not protect that right, has abandoned its principles.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

Trying to find God is a good deal like looking for money one has lost in a dream.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

The reason that revelation is always made to the simple is that the wise could not be imposed upon.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

____________________________________________________________________

ATHEISM

What is called atheism is not a light, flippant assertion, but a calm, thoughtful conclusion. It is a conviction which human experience and human reflection have generated. Atheism is not the irresponsible opinion of moral debauchery; it is the outcome of an intelligent consideration of Nature and life. The atheist has been honest with himself and with the world. He has made a careful survey of the universe, as far as he is able, and has canvassed the facts of life which have come within the range of his observation, and he has candidly declared the result of his study and freely related the reasons for his conclusions.

Atheism is the universe as science finds it and as interpreted by human understanding. It is an attempt to state the simple truth, to give a fair likeness of things, to photograph facts. Atheism is denial of nothing true, of nothing good, of nothing that can be proved. We see no good reason for abusing the atheist. His opinions don't make him a bad citizen or a bad man. He is as moral as his Christian neighbor, and is as ready to help a fellow-being.

In countries where atheism is a crime, hypocrisy is more honored than integrity.

 --Lemuel K. Washburn

_____________________________________________________________________

To free a man of error is to give, not to take away.

Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth.

 --Schopenhauer

Certainly the Old Testament does not teach us that there is another life, and upon that question even the New is obscure and vague. The hunger of the heart finds only a few small and scattered crumbs. There is nothing definite, solid, and satisfying. United with the idea of immortality we find the absurdity of the resurrection. A prophecy that depends for its fulfillment upon an impossibility, cannot satisfy the brain or heart.

 --Robert Green Ingersoll (1833 - 1899)

Only those who live on the labor of the ignorant are the enemies of science. Real love and real religion are in no danger from science. The more we know the safer all good things are.

 --Robert Green Ingersoll (1833 - 1899)

"Spirituality" for the most part is a mask worn by idleness, arrogance and greed.

 --Robert Green Ingersoll (1833 - 1899)

"When I became convinced that the Universe is natural- that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave."

 --Robert Green Ingersoll (1833 - 1899)

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall,

one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

 - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"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 the appearance of solidity to pure wind."

 - George Orwell

"Music,

states of happiness,

mythology,

faces belabored by time,

certain twilights

and

certain places

try to tell us something,

or have said something

we should not have missed,

or

are about to say something;

"this imminence

of a revelation

which does not occur

is,

perhaps,

the aesthetic phenomenon."

 - Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Wall and the Books'

"Take chances- make mistakes- get messy!"

 - Miss Frizzle

"What you don't see can be very hard to find."

 - Miss Frizzle

"Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."

 - James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785.

"Theists think all gods but theirs are false. Atheists simply don't make the exception."

 - Mastuh Iggie

"We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

 - Aristotle (De Anima)

"We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."

 - Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey [SNL]

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

 - James Thurber

"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."

 - Bertrand Russell

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; ... who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

 - Theodore Roosevelt

"...those who think that faith is superior to reason, and try to reason me into thinking that way; why don't they "faith" me into it?"

 - Greg Erwin

"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."

 - Marquis de Sade

"Nothing defines humans better than the willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."

 - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

"There have to be community interests by which we all live, ways of behaving that do not harm others. But what that has to do with God and mysterious beings in some ether or underground beats the hell out of me."

 - James Burke

"The proof in the pudding will be in the technological spin-off of the back-action pilot-wave physics of sentience. We will make nanotech-engineered totally conscious quantum computer chips by imitating the microtubule architecture in the solid state. I am totally confident of this prediction. I have precognitively remote-viewed it! Nostradamus? You want Nostradamus? We got Nostradamus!"

 - Jack Sarfatti

"There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable."

 - John Cage

"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

"But how magnificent, she thought, that mere self-replicating specks of matter, trapped on a tiny planet for a few dozen orbits about an undistinguished star in one of billions of galaxies, have figured this all out."

 - Robert L. Park

"There is a new definition of atheism not found among the current orthodox: it is the non-experience of deity. It is not anti-theist, it is supportive of the natural quest for meaning in myth, symbol and practice, and challenges any construct that places itself in the position of worship or unquestioning obedience, whether it be called deity or law. Atheism is substantiated by the experience of no-god, or the lack of experience, not by belief or rational counter-arguments to theism. This definition comes, in part, from Pascal who conceives of a person so made that s/he cannot believe - a person who by nature is experientially limited to atheism."

 - (Introduction to Pensées, translated by W. F. Trotter, Chicago 1952)

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

 - Dorothy Parker

"People who cannot think in an orderly way are apt to suppose themselves more imaginative than others."

 - G.A. Wells, (Belief and Make-Believe, 1991)

Bumper sticker recently spotted:

 Fishing isn't a matter of life or death -

 It's more important than that.

'If you don't know how things actually work you starve in shit covered with sores while praying fervently, which is the least effective way to make things better.'

 - Michael Cortese

"Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis."

 - Jack Handey

"I too used to believe in magic. But the Doctor has taught me to believe in science. It is better to believe in science."

 - Leela, in Dr. Who, "The Horror of Fang Rock," 1977

 script: Terrance Dicks

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

 - Philip K. Dick

Albert Einstein:

 As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein:

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Richard Feynman:

 For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public

 relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Marvin The Paranoid Android:

 Oh dear, I think you'll find reality's on the blink again.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

 In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with

 reality at any point.

Joseph Chilton Pearce:

 We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world,

 but to the reality of other thinkers.

Siddartha, "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny:

 ...'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not

 matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and

 remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his

 fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the

 world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon

 reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles

 as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

 Once you discard the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable,

 must be the truth.

Oscar Wilde:

 The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

George Carlin:

 Take Idaho's license plates - they say 'Famous Potatoes.' Then there's

 New Hampshire - their license plates say 'Live Free ... or DIE!!' I

 don't know, I think that somewhere between 'Famous Potatoes' and 'Live

 Free or Die' the truth lies. And I think it's closer to 'Famous

 Potatoes.'

Albert Einstein:

 The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not

 conceal any part of what one has recognized to be the truth.

Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988):

 "The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one

 small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes

 away from the beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is

 "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But

 do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my

 imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch

 one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part --

 perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is

 belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing

 all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all

 together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does

 not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more

 marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do

 the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can

 speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense

 spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 12, pg. 46:

 ...Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that

 as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most

 notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand

 years old. Well, I haven't ignored it; I considered the purported

 evidence and *then* rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a

 difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice

 is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is

 making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that

 you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not

 terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also.

 But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the

 evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.

Niels Bohr:

 The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the

 opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Mark Twain:

 If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

John Locke:

 Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding

 is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly

 learned, but may be little knowing.

Voltaire:

 Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to

 be read.

Frederick The Great:

 The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is

 to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.

Henry David Thoreau:

 All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald:

 The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two

 opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the

 ability to function.

P. B. Medawar:

 The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a

 strange protein; it rejects it.

Aristotle:

 It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought

 without accepting it.

Albert Camus:

 An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

John K. Stevens, "Reverse Engineering the Brain" Byte magazine, Page 287,

April 1985,:

 While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear

 that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged.

 Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even

 a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about

 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would

 take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping

 in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with

 each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of

 Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each

 second.

Eliot Handelman:

 ...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable,

 challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self.

 That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music

 is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea

 in "Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the

 girl's observation that the real art was the building of the machine

 itself, rather than its output.

RISKS-FORUM Digest 11.84:

 From Michael Davis' article "Thinking Like an Engineer: the Place of a

 Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession", Philosophy and Public

 Affairs, Spring 1991, Vol. 20 #2: Lund's [the engineer who expressed

 concern about the Challenger's O-rings] first response was to repeat

 his objections. But then Mason said something that made him think

 again. Mason asked him to THINK LIKE A MANAGER INSTEAD OF AN ENGINEER

 (the exact words seemed to have been "take off your engineering hat and

 put on your management hat.") Lund did and changed his mind. The next

 morning the shuttle exploded, killing all aboard. An O-ring had

 failed.

Albert Einstein.:

 If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty

 desk a sign?

Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address:

 In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a

 really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would

 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.

Voltaire:

 It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that

 virginity could be a virtue.

J. D. Watson, "The Double Helix":

 One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in

 contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers

 of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded

 and dull, but also just stupid.

Albert Einstein:

 My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable

 superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able

 to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

William E. Channing:

 It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior

 minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of

 all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most

 precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Robert M. Hutchins:

 Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them

 expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their

 horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if

 possible.

Bertrand Russell:

 It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope

 that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past

 rather than the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of

 those who control the teaching of the young.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

 Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable

 minds.

Carl Jung:

 The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not

 between right and wrong.

To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take, like a disease.

 - Nancy Mitford

Astrology- One of the finite number of theories

that are consistent with any infinite set of data.

 - Skepticus

"A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidence is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence."

 - John Allen Paulos, mathematics professor, in "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences"

"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."

 - Sigmund Freud

"And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

 - James Madison, letter to Edward Livingston, 1822

"Beliefs, including religious ones, are learned. Which makes atheism a normal state of affairs and religious beliefs a learned "abnormality". No psychological theory is necessary to explain the causes of a normal base state. Any psychological theory of learning, attitude change or socialization can explain the causes of religious belief."

 - Rosemary Lyndall, clinical neuro-psychologist

"... it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific.

Moral: science is the forbidden as such -- it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, seed of all sin, the original sin. This alone is morality. 'Thou shalt not know' -- the rest follows."

 - Nietzsche, "Antichrist"

"There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it."

 - Cicero (De Divinatione, 45-44 BCE)

"I contend that we are all atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

 - Stephen L. Roberts

"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day;

Teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for ever;

Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish."

 - Stephen L. Roberts

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point

than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness

of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."

 - George Bernard Shaw

"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today."

 - Isaac Asimov

"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men."

 - Francis Bacon

"Without doubt you are not sane."

 - Tage Danielsson

"I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States."

 - Thomas Edison

"I can imagine no greater misfortune for a cultured people than to see in the hands of the rulers not only the civil, but also the religious power."

 - Caius Valerius Catullus, Roman poet 87-54 BC

"There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring

the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many

facts. Try to find a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next

fact; that's science. Three: Be aware that you live in a malevolent

Universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's

Factor; that's engineering."

 - Robert A. Heinlein

"So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

 - Bertrand Russell

"The scientist alters his perception to conform to the facts;

The religious man tries to change the facts to conform to his beliefs."

 - unattributed

"All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

 - Edgar Allan Poe

"It takes the shingles from the widow's cottage to put paint on the house of God."

 - Lemuel K. Washburn

"I call him free who is led solely by reason."

 - Spinoza

"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen."

 - Mort Sahl

"The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality."

 - George Santayana, "The Life of Reason"

"Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe."

 - W. Somerset Maugham

"I find every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, 'It is a matter of faith, and above reason.'"

 - John Locke

"The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to

himself and to his fellow-men."

 - Robert Ingersoll

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

 - Albert Einstein

"Pray you, make my excuses to the moderately intelligent, for I know not how to earn the grace and favor of the immoderately intelligent, though I have often sought to do so with great pains. Henceforth I neither desire nor regard their favor."

 - Martin Luther

"...it tickles me to know that I have taught my ungrateful students, even my enemies, to speak."

 - Martin Luther

"In this vain fleeting universe, a man

Of wisdom has two courses: first, he can

Direct his time to pray, to save his soul.

And wallow in religion's nectar-bowl;

But, if he cannot, it is surely best

To touch and hold a lovely woman's breast,

And to caress her warm round hips, and thighs,

And to possess that which between them lies."

 - Bhartrhari, 5th or 6th Century; translated by D. D. Kosambi.

"To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know

that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and

cannot exist--all this is but the beginning of wisdom."

 - Robert G. Ingersoll

"A skeptic is one who not only questions his own path, but the paths of

others. This can help, as whose footsteps are not washed by the rain?"

 - unattributed

"Where eminent men disagree violently, and both sides present their cases

as proven, we can be rather sure that certainty is not in fact available,

and that the matter is not technical but rather trans-scientific. It is a

dispute over probabilities, values, desirability, *not* over facts."

[Henry H. Bauer ("Beyond Velikovsky": U. Illinois, 1984) puts his own

peculiar spin on the controversy.]

"...He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any

world... He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him

as a proud man or be sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of

his age talks - that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the

grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

 - Raymond Chandler "The Simple Art of Murder"

"The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so."

 - Josh Billings, 1818-1885.

"By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold."

 - Terry Pratchett, (Moving Pictures)

"Now it seems to me that the really neat thing about science is that after you've sat there thinking about the things you've been looking at, what you think makes you want to go look at them all over again. And the really ugly thing about philosophy is that you've sat there and thought about all the things you've never looked at, and all you can do with this is sit there and think about them all some more."

 - WTS, Tuesday, June 15, 1999/2013

"Don't stop at the tears; go through to the truth."

 - Natalie Goldberg

"The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda -- a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."

 - H.L. Mencken

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

 - Henri Bergson

"When we are forty, let others--younger and more daring men--throw us into the wastepaper basket like useless manuscripts!"

 - F.T. Marinetti, "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" 1908

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary

safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

 - Benjamin Franklin

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It

passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced

and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious

right."

 - Mahatma Gandhi

"Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is

also big enough to take away everything you have."

 - Col. David Crockett

"Those with 'something to fall back on' invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it."

 - David Mamet, True or False

"Of the gods I know nothing, whether they exist or do not exist: nor what

they are like in form. Many things stand in the way of knowledge - the

obscurity of the subject, the brevity of human life."

"Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of

things that are not, that they are not."

 - Protagoras (ca. 481 - ca. 411 BC) in "Diogenes Laertius", *Vitae

Philosophicus* IX, 51

"...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious."

 - Sir Julian Huxley

"Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said:

"And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible."

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it."

 - C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types

"It is a common saying that thought is free. A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks. The working of his mind is limited only by the bounds of his experience and the power of his imagination. But this natural liberty of private thinking is of little value. It is unsatisfactory and even painful to the thinker himself, if he is not permitted to communicate his thoughts to others, and it is obviously of no value to his neighbors. Moreover it is extremely difficult to hide thoughts that have any power over the mind. If a man's thinking leads him to call in question ideas and customs which regulate the behaviour of those about him, to reject the beliefs which they hold, to see better ways of life than those they follow, it is almost impossible for him, if he is convinced of the truth of his own reasoning, not to betray by silence, chance words, or general attitude that he is different from them and does not share their opinions. Some have preferred, like Socrates, some would prefer today, to face death rather than conceal their thoughts. Thus freedom of thought, in any valuable sense, includes freedom of speech."

 - J.B. Bury, "A History of Freedom of Thought", 1913

Puritanism -- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

 - H. L. Mencken

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once

in a while, or the light won't come in.

 - Alan Alda, actor and director (1936-)

“It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. This lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.”

 - Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince", Chapter 6, 1537

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.”

 - Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

"Ubi dubium ibi libertas." - Where there is doubt, there is freedom.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

 - Ambrose Bierce

"If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?"

 - anonymous

"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State.

My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on

their own, so both of them together is certain death."

 - George Carlin

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

 - Blaise Pascal

"I love to go shopping. I love to freak out salespeople. They ask me if

they can help me, and I say, "Have you got anything I'd like?" Then

they ask me what size I need, and I say, "Extra medium." "

 - Steven Wright

"Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box;

Religion is the smile on a dog.

I'm not aware of too many things,

I know what I know, if you know what I mean;

do ya?

"Choke me in the shallow waters

Before I get too deep."

 - Edie Brickell ["What I Am" from the album _Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars_]

"For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all."

 - Aristotle, The Metaphysics

"Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by misfortune, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

 - Karl Marx

"As I see it, feminism is rebellious -- it's about challenging orthodoxies and inequities not only of gender but of race, class, sexuality, and so forth. Coolness, on the other hand, implies a posture of carefully preserved distance from all things domesticated and sentimental -- the so-called feminine. This, I could definitely do without."

 - Susan Fraiman, "Cool Men and the Second Sex"

"And still he will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing good or bad, and may be expected therefore to imitate only that which appears to be good to the ignorant multitude?

"Just so.

"Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport...."

 - Plato, The Republic

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."

 - John Cage

Russell said: "As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is [or is] not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist... None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof. Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line."

 - Am I an Agnostic or an Atheist?, from Last Philosophical Testament 1943–1968, (1997) Routledge ISBN 0-415-09409-7.

"A theist is someone who cannot rely upon a universe without a god."

 - Wade T. Smith

"Hip hop isn't music. It's Tourette's Syndrome in-between court-ordered medication."

 - Ampar (avatar on MacDailyNews.com)

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against

absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the spot

of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes

the helm from the hand of reason and the mind becomes a wreck."

 - Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Smith, December 8, 1822

"Youth always dances with the specters of the forbidden, as does genius. Genius, we assume, learns a craft, while youth, if it moves at all, merely replaces itself.

"But that's its job.

"Getting old takes thought. Wars and the priesthood need youth. The state that sanctifies its conquests is the most corrupt. But there'll be others, and more."

 - Wade T. Smith 1999

"It's only because beauty is always a possibility that we don't allow evil to command without objection.

And it's not the fault of beauty that such objection is often weak."

 - Wade T. Smith 2010

“If you’re lucky, you learn to find a place for yourself. I’ve learned how not to feel like an outsider.”

 - Matthew Lopez

"Science is the process of eliminating supernatural explanations."

 - Robert L. Park

“It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.”

 ― Aleister Crowley

“It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel."

 - Anatole France

"Religion goes out of favor in 2033 when science discovers the gene that regulates fear."

 - Ruby, Happy Accidents

Pere Teilhard de Chardin on the meaning of life..."The elaboration of ever perfect eyes in a universe where there is always something more to be seen"