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Quotes of Distinction
Most incisive quote ever? And one with transformative truth
We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time ——T. S. Eliot
We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our decent. ——Richard Weaver
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Arthur C. Clark
“Life is a circle. No matter where you start or which way you turn, you always end up home.” —CWA, Creator and Editor of Aerosphere.com
* * *
"The discovery that we are being visited by extraterrestrials would be one of the greatest in human history. Such a discovery would profoundly alter the perception of ourselves and our place in the universe."--Documentary Out of the Blue
"The question itself [of UFOs] I think is legitimate. It's interesting, it's fascinating. It's mythic in scale and one of the grand questions. It's like the God question or, you know, the meaning-of-life question. It's one of those, on that scale. So you'd have to be made of wood not to be interested and, you know, have they come here? Are they up there?"--Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic Magazine
"Think about how random things are…. For me, it required a Thursday night time slot for a medical show (ER). … There had only been two shows in 16 years —L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues— and it opened up. We had a show, and immediately everything changed. And you go, 'That has nothing to do with me.' That has to do with pure luck all the way around."—Actor George Clooney
* * *
"Of all the frictional resistance, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called "the greatest evil in the world." The friction which results from ignorance can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent." --Nikola Tesla
“When I went to the moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot, engineer, and scientist as any of my colleagues … But there was another aspect to my experience during Apollo 14, and it … began with the breathtaking experience of seeing planet earth floating in the vastness of space. The first thing that came to mind as I looked at earth was its incredible beauty … a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky…. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random process…. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction … an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose.”--Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things"-Niccollo Machavelli, circa 1500
* * *
“Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period” -- Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park
"The Cold War had become a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum.” – Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” -- German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” --Arthur C. Clarke, British science fiction writer
“It is paradoxical, yet true, to say, that the more we know, the more ignorant we become in the absolute sense, for it is only through enlightenment that we become conscious of our limitations. Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater prospects.” -- Nikola Tesla
* * *
“All scientific progress requires a climate of strong skepticism.” —Scientist J. A. Coyne
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”― George Orwell, 1984
“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”—Thomas Henry Huxley
“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”—Jim Morrison lead singer of The Doors
“For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity”—William Penn
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."-- J. Robert Oppenheimer
* * *
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, author
“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.” --D. Salinger, author
“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” -- Meister Eckhart, German Philosopher
“Without imagination we can go nowhere. And imagination is not restricted to the arts. Every scientist I have met who has been a success has had to imagine.’’ — Rita Dove, Poet
"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin, author
"If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you." --- Groucho Marx
* * *
“You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.” --- Brian Tracy
"Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I'm possible." -— Audrey Hepburn
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ---Oscar Wilde
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that." ---Martin Luther King Jr
* * *
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” -- George Orwell’s novel 1984
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." --- Ayn Rand
“The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.” ---Napoleon Bonaparte
"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."--- Aristotle
"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible"--- Arthur C. Clarke
"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."--- Babe Ruth
* * *
“The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. ”– Joseph Conrad
“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” --Baruch Spinoza
“I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.” --Elon Musk
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.” --Aristotle
* * *
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."- -Martin Luther King Jr.
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” George Orwell’s 1984
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." -Oscar Wilde
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover." -Mark Twain
* * *
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”—Albert Einstein
“Common sense is not so common in today’s world — and I bet I’m not the only one who has noticed.”—Dr. Ben Carson
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”—Steve Jobs
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” --- Margaret Mead
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” --Thomas Sowell
* * *
A society is only as great as the values that it enshrines as part of its ethos. A society is only as great as the extent to which it is willing to defend its identity." --Gad Saad
"Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness." -- David Hume
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors."--J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success." ---C. S. Lewis
"Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." ---Mark Twain
* * *
“Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” -- Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The greatest mistake you can make is to be continually fearing that you’ll make one.” —Elbert Hubbard
“There is only one certainty in life and that is that nothing is certain.” —G.K. Chesterton
“Living is the art of getting used to what we didn’t expect.” —Eleanor C. Wood
“Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
* * *
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” --- Dale Carnegie
“The present always contains within it the seeds of the past…Life may seem absurd, yet…there is a divinely imposed order, however dreary, repetitive and meaningless our existence may appear to us.” From a review by Jonathan Groner of The Sea Is Never Full, by Elie Wiesel
“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” --William Shakespear
“Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”—General George S. Patton
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”—Steve Jobs
* * *
"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." --Babe Ruth
“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” --Thomas A. Edison
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” --Thomas Jefferson
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover." --unknown, but attributed to: Mark Twain
"Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human; to forgive, divine."--Alexander Pope
* * *
‘“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” -- Robert Frost
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” --Walt Disney
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.” --Helen Keller
Whoever is happy will make others happy too.” --Anne Frank
"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else." --Margaret Mead
* * *
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”—Elon Musk
With accurate experiment and observation to work upon, imagination becomes the architect of physical theory. —John Tyndall, Irish physicist
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson
“Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.” -Babe Ruth
"You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated." -Maya Angelou
* * *
“The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science.”-- Walter E. Williams
“The only power that exists is inside ourselves.” –Anne Rice, writer
“We used to lighten it up with jolly mockery. ‘Laugh and know,’ was the Roman poet Martial’s formula. You only really understand the absurdities, vanities, and stupidities of the world when you can laugh at them. Then, they are entertaining rather than irritating.” Bill Bonner Agora Financial Founder
“People who think that they can control the climate… It’s just a pipe dream.” -- Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. René Descartes: Principles of Philosophy
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.--Gilbert K. Chesterton
“You cannot get behind consciousness” -- famous physicist Max Planck
* * *
“When I went to the moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot, engineer, and scientist as any of my colleagues … But there was another aspect to my experience during Apollo 14, and it … began with the breathtaking experience of seeing planet Earth floating in the vastness of space. The first thing that came to mind as I looked at Earth was its incredible beauty … a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky…. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random process…. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction … an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose.”-- Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell
“He who fears he will suffer, already suffers because he fears.” — Michel De Montaigne
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” — George Bernhard Shaw
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
* * *
“But look in the mirror, America. That black eye isn't from some creep who came in from the back and sucker-punched us. It's a self-inflicted wound. We got drunk and careless. We tripped on our own ignorant pride and fell right down the steps.”— Andy Snyder is the founder of Manward Press
“You are … host to a billion or so atoms that once belonged to Jesus Christ, or Julius Caesar, or the Buddha, or the tree that the Buddha once sat beneath.”-- British Astrophysicist and Cosmologist Paul Davies
“Today, probably more than in any other day, we are facing a revolution in our thinking about the physical universe–the stuff that you and I are made of. This revolution, brought to a head by the discoveries of the new physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, appears to reach well beyond our preconceived vision, based as it was on the concept of concrete solid reality.”--- Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, Author and Physicist
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things"-Niccollo Machavelli, circa 1500
* * *
"We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent" --Richard M. Weaver
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."--T. S. Eliot
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."-- Arthur C.Clarke
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”-- John Adams
* * *
"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently."—Henry Ford
"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. --Albert Einstein
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” -- Nikola Tesla
“The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system.” – Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.” --Michael Crichton, MD and American author and filmmaker
* * *
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” -- Socrates
"If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor."-- Eleanor Roosevelt
“Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people 'feel' have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick." – Thomas Sowell
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”—Milton Friedman
“Loyalty to country always! Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.” –Mark Twain
* * *
“If I was flying, Goose would still be alive” – Tom Cruise as “Maverick” in original Top Gun movie
“Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner vo ice.” – Steve Jobs, Apple Co-founder
“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”― Margaret Mead
“The universities act as training camps for the elite, prohibiting free speech and closing minds. More and more, what they teach is politically correct propaganda, not free inquiry.” –Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Financial
“My mother taught me an important lesson about life when I was young: Think with your mind, not your heart. I believe this lesson applies to us all today more than ever before.”—Dr. Ben Carson
* * *
“We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.” ― Gabor Maté
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” –Carl Jung
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” – Milton Friedman
“The human race has only one fully effective weapon and that is laughter.” –Mark Twain
“Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” — George Orwell’s novel, 1984
* * *
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”-- Aldous Huxley,English writer
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” ---French philosopher, Voltaire
As the National Commission on Excellence in Education reported many years ago, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."-- A Nation At Risk -- April 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education
"Great pilots are made, not born . . . . A man may possess good eyesight, sensitive hands, and perfect coordination, but the end result is only fashioned by steady coaching, much practice, and experience." — Air Vice-Marshal James Edgar "Johnnie" Johnson, RAF
“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
“Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.” — Oprah Winfrey
“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” -- author Robert Greene
“Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”— George Orwell’s novel, 1984
“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” — Lucille Ball
"I’ve always taken The Wizard of Oz very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I've spent my entire life trying to get over it.” --Judy Garland
* * *
“If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” --Isaac Newton
“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.” – Francis Bacon
“A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.” --William James Durant
"The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it." --Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“When you get into an airplane by yourself and take off, you find yourself in this lovely, three-dimensional world where you can go in any direction. There is no feeling any more exciting than that.” --- Gene Roddenbury
* * *
“The human race has only one fully effective weapon and that is laughter.” –Mark Twain
"The tendency of an event to occur varies inversely with one's preparation for it." — David Searles
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”--Arthur Schopenhauer
“The tendency for politicians to claim credit for favorable news is as natural as flatulence in cows.”--Economist Robert Samuelson
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”--George Bernard Shaw
* * *
“Honesty, the best of all the lost arts.” –Mark Twain
“If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”--Eleanor Roosevelt
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."-- Winston Churchill
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas A. Edison
“Climate is changing, but in a natural and historically consistent way with mankind’s influence tangential at best and insignificant regardless.”—Peter Murphy, Senior Fellow at CFACT
* * *
“Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.”-- Christopher Hitchens, author, journalist
“The fantasy that the government is a fairy godfather, able to grant all of your wishes, is the most dangerous idea in history.” -- Chris Campbell, Managing Editor Laissez Faire Today
"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." -- C.S. Lewis in his 1943 book The Abolition of Man
“Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time… It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” -- Leo Buscaglia, American author, motivational speaker
* * *
“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”-- Baruch Spinoza
“Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding.” —author James Bovard
"The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is "wind or breath." This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is the energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies." -- David Bohm, theoretical physicist
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” — Lao Tzu
* * *
“The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” – Author, Robert Greene
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”-- Oscar Wilde
“Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the Earth.”-– Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes
“We fly through the air at 500 mph, seated in a cushioned chair, inside a 100-ton metal tube, 30,000 feet above the ground - because of science. We communicate with practically anyone we've ever met, in an instant... because of science. We obtain immediate access to all the compiled knowledge of the world, at our fingertips - because of science. Neither you nor your mother died in childbirth - because of science. Most people used to die at 65 or 45 or younger, but we don't anymore - because of science."—Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
“When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”-- John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza
* * *
"We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green."–- English writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton
“Many shall be restored that are now fallen and many shall fall that are now in honor.”-- Roman poet Horace's Ars Poetica
“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”—John Steinbeck
“The best thing you can do for anyone is to inspire them.” -- Bob Dylan
* * *
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return“-- Leonardo Da Vinci
“In fact, I'll go further. I contend that social incentives are the root of all our biggest thinking errors.” Kevin Simler, co-author of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” -- H.L. Mencken
“I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” -- Baruch Spinoza
* * *
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.”—Ben Shapiro
"A good man’s life is never quite ended; something of it always remains to touch and illuminate other lives."-- Ed White, Apollo 1 Astronaut
“The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.”—Thomas Paine
“I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter is derivative from consciousness... Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness...The mind is the matrix of all matter.“- -Max Planck
“Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.”-- German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
* * *
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”-- Baruch Spinoza
“The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.” --George Jean Nathan
“Equality is neither a fact… nor a useful goal. After all, if we were all equal, we would be bored to death. No jokes, no lovers, no jackasses, no geniuses…. Not even identical twins are the same.”—Bill Bonner, Author and Founder of Agora Financial
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” — Maya Angelou
“We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.”—Last sentence in Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Righteous Mind
* * *
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” –George Orwell’s 1984
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.– Ernest Hemingway
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”—J. D. Salinger
“Space is not empty. It’s full. It is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves”– David Bohm
* * *
“The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.” –Scarlett Johansson, actress
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”— Sir Issac Newton
“I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening.”—Larry King, American television host
“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.”-- Abraham Lincoln
* * *
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious"—Albert Einstein
“Voting is a right best exercised by people who have taken time to learn about the issues.” –Tony Snow, American journalist
“The human brain has plenty of constraints. We are misled by cognitive biases, optical illusions and inattentional blindness to things we don't expect to see.” --Adam Mann, LiveScience Contributor
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."-- Winston Churchill
* * *
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” ---Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” -- Winston Churchill
“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy.”—Plato
“I've always taken The Wizard of Oz very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I've spent my entire life trying to get over it.” --Judy Garland
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”--Mark Twain
* * *
“Not only can't we predict the future... we can't even agree on what happened in the past.”-- Nicholas Vardy, Quantitative Strategist, The Oxford Club
“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.” -- James Joyce
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”—Winston Churchill
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world"-- Anne Frank
* * *
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”—Mark Twain
“There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.” -- Alphonse de Lamartine
“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”—C.S. Lewis
“I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.” --David Attenborough
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” --Vladimir Lenin
* * *
"I could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people."-- Sir Isaac Newton
"The truth will set you free, but you have to endure the labor pains of birthing it.”--- Iyanla Vanzant
“A writer's job is to tell the truth.” -- Andy Rooney, American radio and television writer
“It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” --J. K. Rowling, author Harry Potter fantasy series
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” --Albert Einstein
* * *
“Much of today's totalitarianism, promotion of hate, and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses.” —Walter Williams
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” --C. S. Lewis
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Nietzsche
“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.” -- Andy Rooney
* * *
“Much of today's totalitarianism, promotion of hate, and not to mention outright stupidity, has its roots on college campuses.” —Walter Williams
“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.” --C. S. Lewis
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Nietzsche
“Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done.” -- Andy Rooney
* * *
“Though a society can resist epidemics of physical disease, it is defenseless against diseases of the mind. Against ‘psychic epidemics’ our laws and medicines and great factories and fortunes are virtually helpless.”-- Carl Jung
“You should be humble enough to understand that if you can’t order your own life, you shouldn’t be trying to order anything more complicated than that.” - Jordan B. Peterson
"Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them."-- George Orwell
“To a great extent, uncertainty will forever be your inseparable companion. So get used to it.”— Alexander Green, New York Times bestselling author
* * *
“‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
“When we tell little white lies, we become progressively color-blind. It is better to remain silent than to mislead.” --James E. Faust
“This world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaucrats.”-- Economist Milton Friedman
"Never make predictions, especially about the future."-- Yogi Berra
* * *
“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”-- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“The scientific method requires pain-staking investigation, rigid questioning, cordial dialogue, free exchange of ideas, and open minds. Data drives conclusions. Data is never altered, dismissed or politicized to protect a cherished theory.” --Craig Rucker,President, CFACT.ORG
“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” --Winston Churchill
“Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.”- -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
* * *
“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says 'I'm possible'!”—Audrey Hepburn, actress
"Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana, Philosopher
"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."-- Jimmy Dean, actor, singer, entrepreneur
“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
* * *
“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says 'I'm possible'!”—Audrey Hepburn, actress
"Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana, Philosopher
"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."-- Jimmy Dean, actor, singer, entrepreneur
“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
* * *
“Liberty means responsibility, which is why most men dread it.” -- George Bernard Shaw
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”-- John Kenneth Galbraith, famous economist
“I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” – Lars Løkke Rasmussen, former prime minister of Denmark
“Always forgive your enemies, as nothing annoys them so much.” -- Oscar Wilde
* * *
“The goal of socialism is communism.” -- Vladimir Lenin
“A perfect fictional depiction of groupthink in action is Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the emperor parades through the streets in what he has been talked into imagining is a dazzling new suit, all his deferential subjects acclaim it as handsome beyond compare. Only the little boy points out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes at all, and is stark naked. And, of course, those caught up in the ‘consensus’ all viciously turn on him for pointing out the truth.” --From GLOBAL WARMING: A case study in groupthink How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time --Christopher Booker
“Life is no brief candle for me. There is a sort of splendid torch which I've got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw
“Knowledge once gained casts a light beyond its own immediate boundaries.” -- John Tyndall 1820-1893 Physicist
* * *
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”-- Albert Einstein
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” --James Lovelock, scientist and environmentalist
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”--J. K. Rowling
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
* * *
“The truth is permanent… everything else will fall by the wayside.”-- Dave Chappelle
“The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proven to have their counterparts in the world of fact.”-- John Tyndall 1820-1893 Physicist
“Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.”-- George Henry Lewes 1817-1878 Philosopher
“It is profoundly instructive to learn that one has been wrong about something. It combats arrogance, and opens the mind to new ideas.”-- Steven Weinberg, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics
* * *
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."—Winston Churchill
“A closed mind is a dying mind.” --Edna Ferber, American novelist
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."—Cicero
“The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science.”-- Walter E. Williams
“You only really understand the absurdities, vanities, and stupidities of the world when you can laugh at them.”-- Bill Bonner, American author, founder of The Agora, co-founder of Bonner & Partners Publishing, as well as a fellow high school classmate.
* * *
“The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.” -- H. L. Mencken
"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."-- Ayn Rand
“There's nothing like the eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before.”--Physicist Stephen Hawking
“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
* * *
"Anybody who thinks that flying fighters is not exhausting physically, demanding intellectually, and tough emotionally just has no clue about the complexity of air combat."---Retired Air Force Colonel Ed Atkins, who flew fighters for 20 years
"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life." – Plato
“Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”-- Judy Garland
“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.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
"All men naturally desire to know.”--Aristotle
“It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.”-- John Tyndall (1820-1893) Physicist
"Onward, and forever onward, mightier and forever mightier, rolls this wondrous tide of discovery."-- George Henry Lewes (1817-1878 Philosopher
"Nothing can be created from nothing."--Lucretius
* * *
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”-- Herman Melville
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”—George Orwell
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”-- Vladimir Lenin
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I, Scene III. A bit of Lord Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes:
“Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar…. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment…. This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”-- Oscar Wilde
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” -- Marcus Aurelius
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."-- Benjamin Franklin
* * *
“It is profoundly instructive to learn that one has been wrong about something. It combats arrogance,, and opens the mind to new ideas.-- Steven Weinberg
"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."-- Jimmy Dean
“Life is no brief candle for me. There is a sort of splendid torch which I've got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
“Fear is the great barrier to success. It gives small things big shadows. It is the inverse of faith, trapping us between regret for the past and anxiety about the future.” Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist, The Oxford Club
“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions. . . but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation.”--Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.” --Herman Melville
* * *
"If you like, you can say the laws (of physics) are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence," --Stephen Hawking
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir
An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment. -- David Attenborough
"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."-- Milton Friedman
* * *
“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” --Neils Bohr
“Plato was right when he said that politicians are essentially rhetoricians. Rhetoric succeeds or fails not because of its logic or intellectual substance, but on the question of its emotional appeal---Roger Kimball. Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion
“The silicon chip is Big Brother, not because electronic media won't let go of us but because we can't let go of it.”-- Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist, The Oxford Club
“Atoms are life’s building blocks. Most everything worthwhile—family, community, trade, inquiry, innovation, production, progress—starts with individuals and builds. Most everything deleterious—repression, state-sponsored rapacity, tyranny, war—is imposed from the top by sociopaths masquerading as leaders.” -- Robert Gore, American engineer and scientist
* * *
“I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”-- Morgan Freeman
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”—Arthur Schopenhauer
“One fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic”–Arthur C. Clarke
“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
“There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.” -- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Today, different news media present starkly different realities of everything from foreign conflict to domestic policy. And outcomes are consequential. What reporters and news corporations decide to show or omit of a given news story plays a tremendous role in shaping the beliefs and resulting values of entire populations and constituencies” -- Dr. Peter Diamandis
“Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.” -- Muhammad Ali
* * *
“Every general belief being no more than a fiction, it can only survive on the condition that it be not subjected to examination.” -- Gustave Le Bon, author The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
"This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds." -- Carl Jung
“Learning how to be still, to really be still and let life happen - that stillness becomes a radiance.”-- Morgan Freeman
"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." -- David Brinkley
* * *
“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” --Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, and more
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”-- Albert Einstein
“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again”-- Og Mandino, one of America’s bestselling authors
“The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death.”-- Historians Will and Ariel Durant
“You can’t control what happens to you, only how you respond to it. Better to love than to be bitter. Better to be grateful for the experience than feel unlucky. And better to take action than to not be prepared.”.-- By James Altucher, author and financial guru
* * *
“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” -- Isaac Newton
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view’”-- Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird
“Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed.” –Historians Will and Ariel Durant
* * *
"Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over"-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Free money, like free love and free booze, is thrilling – at first. The headaches come later.” --Bill Bonner
“It seems that neither of us knows anything great, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know. So it seems I am wiser than he in this one small thing, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”—Socrates
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”-- Alexis de Tocqueville
* * *
“Until humans learn to tolerate -- no, that’s not enough; to positively value each other -- until we can value the diversity here on Earth, then we don’t deserve to go into outer space and encounter the infinite diversity out there.” -- Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek
“The majority’s moral power makes individuals internally ashamed to contradict it, which in effect silences them, and this silencing culminates in a cessation of thinking.”—Alexis de Tocqueville
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”– Albert Einstein
“Consensus is the stuff of politics, not of science” --Paul Reiter, professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France.
* * *
"If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things." William James “The Principles of Psychology” (1890)
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.”-- Albert Einstein
“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”--Thomas Henry Huxley
* * *
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” ―Richard Feynman
“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.” -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Great pilots are made, not born . . . . A man may possess good eyesight, sensitive hands, and perfect coordination, but the end result is only fashioned by steady coaching, much practice, and experience." — Air Vice-Marshal James Edgar "Johnnie" Johnson, RAF
"But there are two higher qualities which [the pilot] also must have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake." — Mark Twain
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
"Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal." - Nicolás Gómez Dávila
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”-- James Thurber
"Sit down before fact like a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly to wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads or you shall learn nothing." -- Thomas Huxley
* * *
“The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”-- Albert Einstein (note: this is the very definition of a Singularity.)
Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire. — Excerpt from “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost
“Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don't know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it.” --Stephen Hawking
* * *
“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”-- Albert Einstein
“The best way to guarantee a loss is to quit.”-- Morgan Freeman
“For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.”—Judy Garland
“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.” ― Richard Feynman
* * *
"You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them."-- Michael Jordan
“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.” ― Physicist Richard Feynman
"Some of the most selfish people I've met are artists - I'm one of them - and some of the most selfless people I've met are in business, like Warren Buffett. So, I've never had that clichéd view of commerce and culture being different." --U2 singer Bono
"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."-- George Bernard Shaw
* * *
“The urge to save the world is almost always only a false front for the urge to rule it.” -- H.L. Mencken
“One of the great things that science fiction does as a way of changing people’s worldview is to show what the world might be like. It’s remarkable that people dreamed up things long before there was any possibility that they could do it. This is true not just of flying to the moon, but of flying in general.” – Aaron Parrett, professor of English at University of Great Falls in Montana.
“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree”--Albert Einstein
“I’m not concerned with you liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”—Jackie Robinson, famous baseball player
“The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.”--Marcus Aurelius
* * *
“It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.”-- Judy Collins American singer
“Without education, he lives within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance.... Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be made free.”-- Frederick Douglass, In “The Blessings of Liberty and Education” (1894)
“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”-- Albert Einstein
* * *
"I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse."-- Florence Nightingale
“What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact… Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee.”-- Astronomer, Clifford Stoll, discribing the Internet
“Although the different religious traditions have somewhat different conceptions of God, the common thread is that God represents unlimited—infinite—levels of intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love. As systems evolve—through biology and technology—we find that they become more complex, more intelligent and more knowledgeable. They become more intricate and more beautiful, more capable of higher emotions such as love. So they grow exponentially in intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love, all of the qualities people ascribe to God without limit. Although evolution does not reach a literally infinite level of these attributes, it does accelerate towards ever greater levels, so we can view evolution as a spiritual process, moving ever closer to this ideal. The Singularity will represent an explosion of these higher values of complexity.”—Ray Kurtsweil, AI as a Singularity proponent
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover."-- Mark Twain
* * *
"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."—Aristotle
"Truth lies all about us like sparkling gems, but we roam the world in dark glasses. And when we do notice a faint glint of it, we pick it up and, as often as not, discard it, unable to accept what it is because what it implies about us is too unpleasant." – Youssef Sharabi, character in Second Eden
“That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”-- Albert Einstein
"I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends."-- Abraham Lincoln
* * *
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.-- George Orwell, 1984
"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity."-- Amelia Earhart
"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."-- George Bernard Shaw
* * *
"Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, 'I'm possible!'"-- Audrey Hepburn
"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."-- Babe Ruth
“The only real possession you’ll ever have is your character.“ --Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full
* * *
“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”-- Stephen Hawking
"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible"-- Arthur C. Clarke
"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."-- Michael Jordan
“The universe, as known to us, is a joint phenomenon of the observer and the observed.”--Physicist, R.D. Carmichael (1879–1967)
* * *
"You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."- Christopher Columbus
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”-– Thomas Sowell
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."--Plato (Some say it is not Plato's quote, though no one has offered a convincing proof otherwise)
* * *
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.--C.S. Lewis
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any."--- Alice Walker, author of the novel The Color Purple
“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.”--Ralph Waldo Emerson
* * *
“Math. It's just there.... You're either right or you're wrong. That's what I like about it.”-- Katherine G. Johnson
“In science, researchers adjust their conclusions to fit the data. They must never adjust the data to fit a preferred conclusion”-- David Rothbard, President & Co-Founder CFACT.ORG
"The difference between genius and stupidity is . . .genius has its limits."--Son of Alexandre Dumas, author of, among others, The Count of Monte Cristo
"Chance favors the prepared mind."-- Louis Pasteur
* * *
“Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” --H. G. Wells wrote in The World Set Free. Written and published pre-World War One
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.”-- Soren Kierkegaard
* * *
"Be stubborn on vision and flexible on journey." -- Noramay Cadena
“I... a universe of atoms, an atom in the universe.”― Richard Feynman
“Creation leads you to the best things in life, consumption just kind of fills the gaps in between.”--Jason Zook
* * *
“One of the great things that science fiction does as a way of changing people’s worldview is show what the world might be like,” -- Aaron Parrett, professor of English at University of Great Falls in Montana.
* * *
“The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system”--Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell on the nature of the universe
* * *
“By all appearances, we’re in a golden age of innovation. Every month sees new advances in artificial intelligence, gene therapy, robotics and software apps.” --Greg Ip of The Wall Street Journal.
* * *
“Captain Kirk and I melded. It may have been only out of the technical necessity; the thrust of doing a television show every week is such that you can’t hide behind too many disguises. You’re so tired that you can’t stop to try other interpretations of a line, you can only hope that this take is good, because you’ve got five more pages to shoot. You have to rely on the hope that what you’re doing as yourself will be acceptable. Captain Kirk is me. I don’t know about the other way around.”-- William Shatner
* * *
"Surely you can't be serious."
"I am serious. And don't call me Shirley." -- Dr. Rumack to Ted Striker, characters in the film Airplane
* * *
“In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.” ― Richard Feynman
* * *
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”--Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”--William Shakespeare, As You Like It
* * *
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."---Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.” -- Richard Feynman
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain
* * *
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” --H.L. Mencken
"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." -- Winston Churchill
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -- T. S. Eliot
* * *
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”-- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Two things fill me with constantly increasing admiration and awe, the longer and more earnestly I reflect on them: the starry heavens without and the Moral Law within.” --Immanuel Kant, philosopher
“Death makes me very angry. Premature death makes me angrier still.”--LARRY ELLISON, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison” by Mike Wilson
“Acceptance of the point at which intelligence and its inventions can no longer battle the ultimate natural master, death, is a true affirmation of what it means to be human.”---SUSAN JACOBY, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age
* * *
“Science is about an arc of knowledge, and it can take a long time to play out. Sometimes we won’t know answers for generations.”-- Bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, Northwestern University
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”-- George Orwell, author of 1984
“I have sometimes wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence. For invention and improvement are prolific, and beget more of their kind…” Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to a friend, 1788
* * *
“Economists are probably the one group who make astrologers look like professionals when it comes to telling the future.”-- James Montier of GMO, a global money management firm
"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone." -- Blaise Pascal
“But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” —Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* * *
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”― Søren Kierkegaard
“In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”-- George Orwell
“The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”-- Wayne Dyer
* * *
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.”-- J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”-- Joseph Campbell
* * *
“The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”—Thomas Henry Huxley
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”― Mark Twain
“All great drama is derived from the passions of men (and women) and how they interact with one another. Fear, greed, mob mentality and insanity are just a few of the very interesting human emotions.”-- Addison Wiggin, three-time New York Times bestselling author and the cofounder of the Daily Reckoning
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“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” –J. B. S. Haldane, British geneticist and evolutionary biologist
“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”—Jim Morrison lead singer of The Doors
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“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.”--Nils Bohr
“I don’t think we’re building a god by any means. I think it’s going to be something very sophisticated with vast amounts of information, but I still think of it very much as a tool.”--Oren Etzioni, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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“We take pride in the marketplace of ideas — a dividend of free speech — to sort the worthy from the unworthy. If government assumes that function, you no longer have free speech.”—Robert J. Samuelson, columnist
“For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity”—William Penn
A “supercalculator” configured from a conglomeration of all the computers on 96 billion planets is asked: “Is there a God?” Its answer: “Yes, now there is a God”—From the 1954 short story “Answer” by Fredric Brown
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“I've had a hell of a lot of fun and I've enjoyed every minute of it.”—Errol Flynn (1909–1959) last words
“Vision needs no special gift or effort, but only the use of a faculty which all possess but few employ.”--Plotinus
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"Hey sky, take off your hat, I'm on my way!" -- Valentina Tereshkova, first woman in space
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful… and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”-- 1984 author George Orwell
“Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow...”—Apple Founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011), his last words as reported by his sister, novelist Mona Simpson
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“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”--Albert Einstein
“I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015. There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’ ”--Don McLean, on his lyrics to the famous song.
“All scientific progress requires a climate of strong skepticism.” —Scientist J. A. Coyne
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“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”-- Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk
“One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.”-- Stephen Hawking, on Artificial Intelligence
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”-- Galileo Galilei
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"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."-- J. Robert Oppenheimer
“We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.” —Richard Weaver
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." --Benjamin Franklin, 1787
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“I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”--John Maynard Keynes
“I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”--Albert Einstein
“The moon does not simply disappear when we are not looking at it.”--Albert Einstein
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"Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens."--Carl Jung
“Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism... and even anger.” (T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37-43, 2001)
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“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” – Niels Bohr
“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”-- Mark Twain
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."--George Bernard Shaw
“Give me a lever long enough, and I’ll move the world.”—Archimedes
"I know where I'm going, and I know where I've been." --Leaonard Nimoy
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“We have a complete inventory of the universe, and it makes no sense.” -- California Institute of Technology cosmologist Sean Carroll
“A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.”--William James Durant
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“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.”—From a Chinese fortune cookie.
“The dogma that man is ruining the planet rather than improving it is a religion, a source of prestige and a career for too many people.”-- Alex Epstein’s book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels
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''Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt.''-- Russian physicist Lev Landau
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." –Carl Sagan
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Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive--Poet Walter Scott
There's nothing like the eureka moment of discovering something that no one knew before.--Physicist Stephen Hawking
People, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or... acknowledged. The information is... somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. --Stanley Cohen in his book States of Denial
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"Of all the frictional resistance, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called "the greatest evil in the world." The friction which results from ignorance can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent." --Nikola Tesla
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"This new concept [Multiverse Theory] is, potentially, as drastic an enlargement of our cosmic perspective as the shift from pre-Copernican ideas to the realization that the Earth is orbiting a typical star on the edge of the Milky Way." -- Sir Martin Rees, 1998, current Astronomer Royal of Britain
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“What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”-- 2010 Stephen Hawking, co-author of The Grand Design
“We don’t say we’ve proved that God doesn’t exist. We don’t even say we’ve proved that God hasn’t created the universe. If you think that God is the embodiment of quantum theory, that’s fine.” --2010 Leonard Mlodinow, co-author of The Grand Design
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"This is the true joy in life - that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one - that being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”---George Bernard Shaw
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“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.”--Albert Einstein
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"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."--Albert A. Michelson, German- Born American Physicist 1894
To get a better sense of the importance of this quote, read this May’s commentary
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“You are … host to a billion or so atoms that once belonged to Jesus Christ, or Julius Caesar, or the Buddha, or the tree that the Buddha once sat beneath”.-- British Astrophysicist and Cosmologist Paul Davies
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“Today, probably more than in any other day, we are facing a revolution in our thinking about the physical universe–the stuff that you and I are made of. This revolution, brought to a head by the discoveries of the new physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, appears to reach well beyond our preconceived vision, based as it was on the concept of concrete solid reality.”--- Dr Fred Alan Wolf, Author and Physicist
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“When I went to the moon, I was as pragmatic a test pilot, engineer, and scientist as any of my colleagues … But there was another aspect to my experience during Apollo 14, and it … began with the breathtaking experience of seeing planet earth floating in the vastness of space. The first thing that came to mind as I looked at earth was its incredible beauty … a splendid blue and white jewel suspended against a velvet black sky…. In a peak experience, the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random process…. Clearly, the universe had meaning and direction … an unseen dimension behind the visible creation that gives it an intelligent design and that gives life purpose.”--Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell
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“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things"-Niccollo Machavelli, circa 1500
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