Futility Closet

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”

– Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925

“I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.” — Elbert Hubbard

“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” — Alfred North Whitehead

“Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is it reasonable?’” — Richard Feynman’s father

“Life is a horizontal fall.” — Jean Cocteau

“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” — Anatole France

Curiously, when France died in 1924, doctors found that his brain was two-thirds normal size. But, said surgeon Louis Guillaume, “It was the most beautiful brain one could dream of seeing. Its convolutions were marvelous.”

“It is difficult not to write satire.” — Juvenal

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” — George Bernard Shaw

“It will only encourage the lower classes to move about.” — The Duke of Wellington, opposing railways

“After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.” — Cato the Elder