Religion is regarded by the common people as true, the wise as false, and the rulers as useful.

Seneca

Indeed. The UK now resembles nothing so much as a retired soldier in imbecile dotage, boring all comers with increasingly-embellished tales of former glories, while handing power of attorney to conmen who want only to steal the paintings off the walls before the house falls down.

Comment in theguardian.com to Global Britain exposed as impotent and friendless by Afghanistan

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

to wit: a Great Truth is one whose negation is also a Great Truth.

Your retirement fund won't save your sanity, and LARP*ing Aurelian stoicism (a popular genre of Adulting) won't make life worth living.

Venkatesh Rao

*Live Action Role-play

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

Sun Tzu

People get paid the big bucks because they handle uncertainty well and bring vague, ill-defined problems to a good resolution.

"I'm pretty good with React" doesn't quite cut it.

Mike Julian

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut

People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A text without a context is pretext for a prooftext.

Anon.

Replace pure by applied mathematics, logic by computer programming, architecture by engineering, history by sociology. The result will be a new generation of well-informed philistines, whose charmlessness will undo every advantage which their learning might otherwise have conferred.

Roger Scruton

Brexit is a national tragedy built on a chimera. The UK is about to discover that it has traded the real power to shape its destiny for an illusion drenched in nostalgia.

Philip Stephens, The Financial Times

True innovation emerges from chaos. In that space, there's only one way to progress, and that is to create. Makers move forward, analysts get left behind.

Philosophie

Programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing. Architects need to understand both.

Rich Hickey

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which have happened.

Mark Twain

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

Arnold Glasow

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Life is an amazing journey to nowhere.

Jessica Wildfire

The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past.

Otto von Bismarck

"But a number of Republican lawmakers and Fox News personalities are lobbying the president to reopen the economy as quickly as possible." (NYT)

News Personalities is surely an Oxymoron and a clear indication that a nation has capitulated its critical thinking skills to the Telly

"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict ones prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from After Ten Years in Letters and Papers from Prison.

"Beyonce has mastered this celebrity age as creator of worlds, sayer of nothing"

Joel Golby, the Guardian

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Great minds discuss ideas; mediocre minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Premium mediocre minds discuss bitcoin

Venkatesh Rao