Notable Quotes

When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Alexander Graham Bell

Don't hate the media. Become the media.

Jello Biafra

I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.

William Blake, Jerusalem

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Edmund Burke

Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly,
We learn so little and forget so much.

Sir John Davies

In science one tries to tell people, in such
a way as to be understood by everyone,
something that no one ever knew before.
But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Paul Dirac

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I'm eighteen and it's December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which had looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair's clean tight jeans and her pale-blue T-shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge rather than "I'm pretty sure Muriel is anorexic" or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blair's car. All it comes down to is that I'm a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven't seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world.

Henry Fielding

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater

I think a good movie would be about a guy who's a brain scientist, but he gets hit on the head and it damages the part of the brain that makes you want to study the brain.

Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Sapere aude.

Horace

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity of school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain and abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

David Hume

The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously.

Hubert H. Humphrey

It is usual for new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Thomas Huxley

Civilization is protest against nature; progress requires us to take control of evolution.

Thomas Huxley

My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations.

Thomas Huxley

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Thomas Huxley

If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be ... if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.

Thomas Jefferson

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.

Thomas Jefferson

It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.

Thomas Jefferson

Security is mostly superstition.

Helen Keller

This is the acme of faith, to believe that He is merciful ... that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that, as Erasmus says, he seems to delight in the tortures of the wretched, and to be more deserving of hatred than love. If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God could be merciful and just who shows so much anger and iniquity, there would be no need for faith.

Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

James Madison

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

To begin, we must emphasize a statement which I am sure you have heard before, but which must be repeated again and again. It is that the sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work -- that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area. Furthermore, it must satisfy certain aesthetic criteria -- that is, in relation to how much it describes, it must be rather simple.

John von Neumann, Method In The Physical Sciences

Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

George Orwell, 1984

Time makes more converts than reason.

Thomas Paine

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.

Thomas Paine

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review , April, 1992

It is the private bewilderment, the personal hunch, the audacious extrapolation, the sudden intuition, the individual flare, that have been, and still are, the motivating forces for all fundamental science.

F. H. T. Rhodes, Cornell University 1985 Annual Report

Every advance in civilization has been denounced while it was still recent.

Bertrand Russell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

Bertrand Russell

Ellie paused in the doorway of the control room - they called it that with conscious irony, because it was the computers, in another room, that by and large did the controlling - to admire the small group of scientists who were talking with great animation, scrutinizing the data being displayed, and engaging in mild badinage on the nature of the signal. These were not stylish people, she thought. They were not conventionally good-looking. But there was something unmistakably attractive about them. They were excellent at what they did and, especially in the discovery process, were utterly absorbed in their work.

Carl Sagan, Contact

Architecture in general is frozen music.

Friedrich von Schelling

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Seneca

O judgment! thou are fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

William Shakespeare

They say best men are moulded out of faults,
And, for the most, become much more the better
For being a little bad

William Shakespeare

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

Josef Stalin

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Adlai Stevenson

When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl!

Brad Templeton

Faultily faultless, icily regular, spledidly null,
Dead perfection, no more.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Henry David Thoreau

Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.

Amos Tversky, quoted in The Mind's New Science

Networks are based on choice. When they get uncomfortable, it's easy to opt out of them. Communities teach tolerance, co-existence, and mutual respect ... I fear that calling a network a community leads people to complacency and delusion, to accepting an inadequate substitute because they've never experienced the real thing and they don't know what they're missing.

Eric Utne, Utne Reader , March/April 1995

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.

Happy he who has been able to learn the causes of things.

Virgil

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.

Voltaire

The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation.

John Watson

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

Orson Welles

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H. G. Wells

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

The Quotations Page

Thursday, 31 May 2001, 00:00:00 GMT
David Noelle / noelle@acm.org