In praise of quotes

A novel in every sentence! 

I’ve been collecting quotes for years.  Here are some of my favorites.  No particular topic.  BTW, “The Quotations Page is a good place to get a quote of the day. 

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (referring to the benefits of openness and transparency).

If we had been born in Constantinople, then most of us would have said: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we would have been worshipers of Siva, longing for the heaven of Nirvana. As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother is good enough for them.

Robert G. Ingersoll, American politician and lecturer

Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t.

George Bernard Shaw

“Success is going from failure to failure without a loss in enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill

“The best time to plant a tree… was twenty years ago. The second best time is today.”

Chinese Proverb

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

The besetting sin of political and media types is that about 98 percent of their public conversation is utterly dishonest. The language is inflated, …

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Link to us!

Every couple of weeks a reader asks me (through email) whether it is OK to link to one of our posts.  Absolutely!   Linking makes us more available to more readers.   Further, linking to our posts makes our site more visible on Google and other search engines.   Therefore, if you see a Dangerous Intersection…

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Dangerous Intersection: Comments Policy, Email Policy and other Notices

I'm still relatively new at administering a blog, but it has now become clear that we need to give our readers notice as to what will and won't fly regarding comments.   The starting point is that we love comments.  Without them, our posts lack life.  Therefore, if you are tempted to…

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A Reprise on Fungible time

Last evening, I wasted about 1½ hours working in the basement on some uninteresting but useful titanium accessories that I call Fat Wires on MrTitanium.com. I had a dyslexic moment, and made them slightly wrong. Just wrong enough that I can’t in good conscience sell them. I found this very frustrating. A big waste of time.

This morning I started over. This sort of fine craft allows my mind to wander as I cut, hammer, punch, drill, grind, band-aid, polish, bend, re-polish, and assemble. I reflected on Erich’s post on Fungible time: The principle that time, like money, is commutative in an accounting sense. In brief, time is spent whatever you do, so you should make the best of it.

So I wondered (in between thinking about the imminent Buy Nothing Day and listening to FM blather) why I was so upset at having wasted 1½ hours on honing my craft but getting no product, yet a comparable time wasted playing Doom2 or watching YouTube doesn’t bother me. I quit TV several weeks ago.

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A haphazard list of some of Dangerous Intersection’s more memorable posts

We recently received this comment from Scholar:

Erich or Grumpy,

May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.

Thanks,
Scholar

I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts.  I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts! 

Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list:  1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again.  Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete.  2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable.  Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog

To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me.  Here’s another way of looking at it:  if you want …

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