“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” — Adam Smith
Quotations
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“I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise.” — Noël Coward
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“I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people’s accomplishments; the front page nothing but man’s failures.” — Earl Warren
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“Personalize your sympathies; depersonalize your antipathies.” — W.R. Inge
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“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” — On Richard Feynman’s Caltech blackboard at the time of his death in 1988
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“The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” — E.O. Wilson
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“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” — Marcus Aurelius
“When anger rises, think of the consequences.” — Confucius
“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” — Benjamin Franklin
Reflection
I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now.
— Graffito in a restroom of the Ninth Circle Restaurant, New York City, noted in Robert Reisner and Lorraine Wechsler’s Encyclopedia of Graffiti, 1974
Misc
- When written in all caps, the title of John Hiatt’s song “Have a Little Faith in Me” contains no curves.
- Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk.
- It isn’t known whether the sum of π and e is irrational.
- Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, and James Garfield died without wills.
- “Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
The medieval Latin riddle In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (“We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”) is a palindrome. The answer is “moths.”
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“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” — Euripides
“The truest characters of ignorance / Are vanity, and pride, and annoyance.” — Samuel Butler
“Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.” — Cato the Elder