“I hate Twitter. It’s like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers.” — Stewart Lee
Quotations
Twilight
We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.
— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925
Unquote
“It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘always do what you are afraid to do.”” — Emerson
“Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten someone will intercept it before it reaches you.” — Calvin Coolidge
Weather Report
“The most delightful advantage of being bald — one can hear snowflakes.” — English magistrate R.G. Daniels, quoted in the Observer, July 11, 1976
Unquote
“Reason misleads us more often than nature.” — Vauvenargues
Paperwork
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
— Emerson, “The American Scholar,” 1838
(Daniel Dennett: “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”)
Unquote
“I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.” — Montaigne
Unquote
“I always feel an optimist when I emerge from a tunnel.” — Robert Lynd
Conjunction
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one’. We forget that we have still to make a study of ‘and’.
— Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 1928
Unquote
“A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.” — Fred Allen