February 21 2021

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

Kurt Vonnegut


February 20 2021

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson


January 15 2021
Tags: prooftext

A text without a context is pretext for a prooftext.

Anon.


December 23 2020

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


December 20 2020
Tags: brexit

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


December 11 2020

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


December 10 2020

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

Rich Hickey


August 29 2020
Tags: stoicism

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

Mark Twain


August 29 2020
Tags:

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

Arnold Glasow


April 22 2020

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


April 17 2020
Tags:

Life is an amazing journey to nowhere.

Jessica Wildfire


April 10 2020

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


April 10 2020
Tags: politics

"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


February 13 2020
Tags:

"...Why am I frugal? You can't buy health and you can't buy love. I'm a member of every golf club that I want to be a member of. I'm the highest handicap member of Augusta National. I'd rather play golf here with people I like than at the fanciest golf course in the world...

Warren Buffett


January 07 2020

"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."


December 12 2019
Tags: vacuous

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

Joel Golby, the Guardian


March 16 2019

"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


February 12 2019

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

Premium mediocre minds discuss bitcoin

Venkatesh Rao


February 12 2019
Tags: stupid

A stupid person in Cipollas sense is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.


September 29 2018

A zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they've forgotten their aim.

Andy Hunt (agile manifesto)


June 11 2018

There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen


May 30 2018
Tags: science

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck


April 24 2018
Tags: wisdom

An old joke about a horse-trainer serving a mad Russian tsar.

One day the tsar insists that the trainer must make his favourite horse talk within the year or face execution. The trainer instantly agrees to make the horse talk. When his friends warn him that he has taken on an impossible task, he replies: A lot can happen in a year the tsar might die, I might die, the horse might die. Or the horse might talk.


February 07 2018

Be the hero of your life, not the victim; no longer choose a life that looks good over a life that feels good. Give up on some goals so you can care about others. Be honest even if that means you aren't universally liked.

Paraphrased from an article on Thought Catalog by Brianna Wiest, November 16th 2017


February 05 2018

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE, Edward O. Wilson, 2014