I periodically post my most recently collected quotes (over the past 3 months). I just love collecting quotes, because there’s a novel in every sentence–it’s high-impact reading. I collect these from many sources, though more than a few of the following were presented to me by The Quotations Page, which I use as my homepage. Enjoy!
“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
Booker T. Washington
“If you cut yourself in half and both sides lived, which side would be you?”
Anonymous on Reddit.com
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that”
George Carlin
“If a thing isn’t worth saying, you sing it. ”
Pierre Beaumarchais (1732 – 1799)
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Carl Jung (1875 – 1961)
“Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.”
Alan Dean Foster, “To the Vanishing Point”
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell
“I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison, on asked how it felt to fail 10,000 times before he figured out the light bulb.
“It is a curious thing… that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”
Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966)
Complexity is the problem. Moving it from hardware to software, or vice versa, doesn’t help. Simplicity is the only answer. There was a product many years ago called the Canon Cat. It was a simple, dedicated word processor; done very nicely in Forth. Didn’t succeed commercially. But then, most products don’t. I despair. Technology, and our very civilization, will get more and more complex until it collapses. There is no opposing pressure to limit this growth. No environmental group saying: Count the parts in a hybrid car to judge its efficiency or reliability or maintainability.
-Charles Moore, who is a pioneer software developer. The ‘Forth’ language he invented is still in use today, particularly by NASA
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair
“We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”
Thomas Friedman
“Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.”
Paul Eldridge
How's this one:
Albert Camus, from an “Neither Victims nor Executioners”, 1946
Brynn: Camus' quote was so very prescient; or is it that people don't learn very well from history?
Erich: I'm not sure of the full context of the quotation. It comes after the end of World War II, and I think Camus is reflecting on the technological advances during the 20th century that threaten the very existence of mankind. Later in the essay, he points out the absurdity of any ideology that posits the "end of history" (e.g. Marxism, Democratic Capitalism a la Fukuyama).
I don't know if you'd call it prescient, or what exactly, but as one of the great existentialist philosophers he certainly had a great deal to say on the subjects of war and peace as they relate to the individual human condition. It would appear that not much has changed in that realm during the past half a century or so.
Here's another one for your collection, oddly applicable to today's news as well:
"Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools, or health insurance for all?" — Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country