Saturday, April 21, 2012

Quotes of the Day

Betimes, TOF copies and squirrels away what seems for one reason or another a pithy quote or aphorism.  Then he forgets he has done so.  But today, he has seined the folder for recent additions and now inflicts them on you.

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“Life is hard. It’s harder if you’re stupid.”
-- John Wayne
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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
-- Ray Bradbury
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Civil society consists not just of autonomous individuals.
It also consists of communities, which have rights of their own.
-- Abp. Charles Chaput
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Raccoons eat the corn, squash and tomatoes. Sleet, snow, frost or freezing rain take care of everything else. One season of agriculture in New England explains Manifest Destiny.
-- P.J.O'Rourke
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Yes, one would have to be crazy to even consider the possibility that a highly-scalable,
massively-parallel system architecture based on a 4-bit digital code with super-dense,
multi-layered, multi-directional, 3-dimensional storage, utilizing retrieval and translation
mechanisms incorporating file allocation tables and bit parity algorithms,
all operating under top-down software protocol heirarchies
could possibly be the result of planning and forethought.

No, it is obvious to all enlightened folks that such a system could only have come about
through a long series of accidental particle collisions.
-- Eric Anderson, comm box comment
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We have forgotten what we used to accomplish with the public schools,
and now strive to achieve goals that would have been considered
failure by most teachers over most of the period of the public schools.
-- Jerry Pournelle
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As a female lecturer (not yet a professor) who’s also worked in the government
and private sectors, it’s sometimes apparent to me that masculinity in the
workplace is glorified, especially by older female supervisors.
-- Jenny, comm box comment
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We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available
 to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
-- Phil Jones, Hadley Climate Research Unit
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There's no such thing as consumer protection
when the "producer" has the power of the state.
-- James Taranto, WSJ
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Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers;
so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning.
-- Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Part I Q73 A1 reply3
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The problem isn't distinguishing between right and wrong. ...
The problem is finding a way to justify doing the wrong thing.
And once you think you have found it,
the people still arguing for doing the right thing
may be dismissed as "simplistic."
-- David Warren
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The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will,
but he does believe in changing the environment.
He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more,"
because the sinner cannot help it.
But he can put him in boiling oil;
for boiling oil is an environment.
G.K.Chesteron, Orthodoxy.
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2 comments:

  1. *sigh* So many quotes, so few siglines...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love the 'accidental particle collisions' one. :)

    ReplyDelete

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