Wise Words, Part 1
Mostly from people who are smarter than I am. Some of them may apocryphal or misattributed, but they contain wisdom nonetheless.
Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Gustav Mahler
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
C. S. Lewis
We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Leo Tolstoy
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Winston Churchill
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
Gandalf the Grey (J. R. R. Tolkien)
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.
Frodo: I wish that it need not have happened in my time.
Gandalf: So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary)
POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
PRESIDENT, n. The leading figure in a small group of men of whom—and of whom only—it is positively known that immense numbers of their countrymen did not want any of them for President.
Personal note: I like Bierce and Mencken for the same reason—they dismembered sacred cows with a scalpel, not a machete or a chainsaw.
H. L. Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
Voltaire
In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.