Quotes
"When one is commanded to love with the mind, then not to think
must surely be sin."
- Charles Templeton, ACT OF GOD
"Success in science depends not only on rational argument but on a
mixture of subterfuge, rhetoric and propaganda."
- P. K. Feyerabend
"In other cases, upon transfusion, recipients went into severe
shock and many died; in these cases, the donor and the recipient were
obviously incompatible."
- Snyder et. al. GENERAL GENETICS (p. 473)
"'... I am flattered to learn that you have heard most favorable
comment upon a paper of mine on the Chinese language. However, I regret
to say that I have not written any such paper.'"
E. Sapir (Quoted in LANGUAGE, Vol. 62,,
No. 1, p. 187)
THE FOUR STAGES OF PUBLIC OPINION
1. (Just after publication)
The Novelty is absurd and subversive of Religion & Morality.
The propounder is both fool a& knave.
2. (Twenty years later)
The Novelty is Absolute Truth and will yield a full and
satisfactory explanation of things in general - The propounder
man of sublime genius & perfect virtue.
3. (Forty years later)
The Novelty won't explain things in general after all and
therefore is a wretched failure. The propounder is a very
ordinary person advertised by a clique.
4. (A century later)
The Novelty is a mixture of truth & error. Explains as much as
could reasonably be expected. The propounder worthy of all
honour in spite of his share of human frailties, as one who has
added to the permanent possessions of science.
- Thomas Huxley, NOTES, 1873
(From IN THE BEGINNING, Brian M. Fagan)
"Admire experts for their knowledge and creativity; milk them of
what they can tell you; and pity them for their narrow-mindedness."
- Nigel Calder
"Well, yes; he could have done all that, but it is not proved: I
am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are
honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so
definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of
unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side.
Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigor of the order
I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling
of doing a work of pure imagination. And I am certain that the
characters in a novel would have a more genuine appearance or, in any
case, would be more agreeable."
- Jean-Paul Sartre, NAUSEA.
"Them funky dinosaurs just done give it up."
- James Brown
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
" ... great progress ... comes from a satisfactory philosophy
of ignorance ... "
"Nature only uses the largest threads to weave her pattern, so
each small piece of the fabric reveals the organization of the entire
tapestry."
- Richard P. Feynman
"Mere power and mere knowledge exalt human nature but do not bless
it. We must gather from the whole store of things such as make most for
the uses of life."
"It is not the pleasure of curiousity ... nor the raising of the
spirit, nor the victory of wit, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of
honor or fame, nor inablement for business, that are the true ends of
knowledge. [Rather it is] a restitution and reinvesting of man to the
sovereignty and power which he had in the first state of creation."
"There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some strangeness in
the Proportion."
- Francis Bacon
"I believe that in approaching our subject with the sensibilities
of statisticians and dissectionists, we distance ourselves increasingly
from the marvelous and spell-binding planet of imagination whose gravity
drew us to our studies in the first place.
That is not to say that we should cease to establish facts and to
verify our information, but merely to suggest that unless these facts
can be imbued with the flash of poetic insight then they remain dull
gems; semi-precious stones scarcely worth collecting".
- Daniel Dreiberg, BLOOD FROM THE
SHOULDER OF PALLAS (In Alan
Moore, WATCHMEN).
"If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!"
- Alan Moore, BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE
"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the
people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not."
- Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"
"Our ability to represent and simulate reality implies that we can
appropriate the order of existence and bring it to serve human purposes.
A good simulation, be it a religious myth or a scientific theory, gives
us a sense of mastery over our experience. To represent something
symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it,
thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the
realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in
creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our
grand illusion."
- Heinz Pagels, THE DREAMS OF REASON
"If thou wilt not fight thy battle of life because in selfishness
thou art afraid of the battle, thy resolution is in vain: nature will
compel thee.
Because thou art in the bondage of Karma, of the forces of thine
own past life; and that which thou, in thy delusion, with a good will
dost not want to do, unwillingly thou shalt have to do.
God dwells in the heart of all things, Arjuna: thy God dwells in
thy heart. And his power of wonder moves all things -- puppets in a play
of shadows -- whirling them onwards on the stream of time.
Go to him for thy salvation with all thy soul, victorious man. By
his grace thou shalt obtain the peace supreme, thy home of Eternity.
I have given thee words of vision and wisdom more secret than
hidden mysteries. Ponder them in the silence of thy soul, and then in
freedom do thy will."
- BHAGAVAD GITA 18:59-63
(Translated by Juan Mascaro)
On this level of sand,
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
O dear children, look in what dungeon we are lying, in what lodging
we are, for we have been captured by the spirit of the outward world; it
is our life, for it nourishes and brings us up, it rules in our marrow
and bones, in our flesh and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and
now death has us.
- Jacob Boehme
We take our first step in words each day, and instantly fall into a
hole in the sounds we make.
- Robert Bly,
"Falling into Holes in Our Sentences"
Through the way the prose poem absorbs detail, it helps to heal the
wound of abstraction.
- Robert Bly, "About the Author",
THIS BODY IS MADE OF CAMPHOR AND
GOPHERWOOD
The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.
- Old Irish tale
When men cannot observe, they don't have ideas; they have
obsessions.
The quality of a faith is not a constant; it depends on the quality
of the men who profess it.
- V. S. Naipaul
I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking
paths.
- Jorge Luis Borges,
"The Garden of Forking Paths"
"How does it sound to you?"
"Possible, but not interesting," Lo:nnot answered. "You'll reply
that reality hasn't the least obligation to be interesting. And I'll
answer you that reality may avoid this obligation but that hypotheses
may not."
- Jorge Luis Borges,
"Death and the Compass"
We ... have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm,
mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in
its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of
unreason which tell us it is false.
- Jorge Luis Borges,
"Avatars of the Tortise"
... the machinery of the world is much too complex for the
simplicity of men
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Paradiso, I, 32"
... cladistics is merely a method. This is both its strength and
ultimately a source of sterility ...
- Jon Coddington, CLADISTICS 6(4), 381
I have now conducted you to the doors of nature's house, where its
mysteries lie hidden. If you cannot enter, because the doors are too
narrow, then abstract and contract yourself mathematically into an
atom and you will easily enter, and when you gave come out again, tell
me what miraculous things you saw.
- Thomas Harriot, in a letter on optics
to Johannes Kepler (1606)
Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things, you get
used to them.
- John von Neumann
To the uninitiated, a molecule of Gallium Arsenide is probably
about as interesting as an empty box of Belgian chocolates.
- GEC-MARCONI Advertisement
We haven't the money, so we've got to think.
- Ernest Rutherford
The solution looks considerably less elegant than the simple
theoretical correlation which I had originally envisioned, but it has
the indisputable advantage of being correct ...
- George Gamov
In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place -- yet
I do ultimate things.
- Peter Shaffer, EQUUS
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school
of the genuis.
- Gibbon
Searching for extraterrestrials could be very damaging to your
career.
- Frank Drake
Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are
born to it.
- Thomas Harris,
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
If you have come to help me
You are wasting your time
But if you have come because your
liberation is tied up with mine,
Then let us work together.
-Lilla Watson
How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty with me,
and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If
you comply with my condition, I will leave them and you
in peace; but if you refuse I will glut the maw of death,
until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining
friends.
- Mary Shelley,
FRANKENSTEIN
"I have the advantage," Jock answered grandly, "of not knowing too
much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical
debate."
- Robert A. Heinlein,
FARMER IN THE SKY
"There may be something in what you say," he admitted. "It has
always seemed to be me to be decidedly inequitable that only the
intelligent minority should be allowed to benefit from a university
education."
- Tom Sharpe,
PORTERHOUSE BLUE
"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going,
because you might not get there."
- Yogi Berra
"Let's drive fast and eat cheese!"
- John Lithgow,
3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN
HEARTHSIDE
Half across the world from me
Lie the lands I'll never see --
I, whose longing lives and dies
Where a ship has sailed away;
I, that never close my eyes
But to look upon Cathay.
Things I may not know nor tell
Wait, where older waters swell;
Ways that flowered at Sappho's tread,
Winds that sighed in Homer's strings,
Vibrant with the singing dead,
Golden with the dust of wings.
Under deeper skies than mine,
Quiet valleys dip and shine.
Where their tender grasses heal
Ancient scars of trench and tomb
I shall never walk; nor kneel
Where the bones of poets bloom.
If I seek a lovelier part,
Where I travel goes my heart;
Where I stray my thought must go;
With me wanders my desire.
Best to sit and watch the snow,
Turn the lock, and poke the fire.
- Dorothy Parker
(From ENOUGH ROPE)
"Built by engineers. Used by normal people."
- Hewlett-Packard slogan
MONOCHROME
Once the screen was really silver
Once the world was shades of gray
Come inside and touch the romance
Fred and Ginger dance the night away
Let the shutter frame your vision
Let the sprockets pull you down
Eighteen frames, the speed of silence
Twenty-four, the speed of sound
Monochrome
Bogie in a trench coat, standing alone
Monochrome
Mister Laurel, Mister Hardy
Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd
Can you hear the silent laughter
Echo in the whispering celluloid
Did you long to be with Garbo
Who was your romantic queen
Was it Colbert, Loy, or Harlow
Did you pine for Norma Jean?
Monochrome
Drift to sleep and dream in sepiatone
Monochrome
Dress in tails with Ronald Coleman
Grant and Niven, perfect gents
Say Klaatu Barada Nikto
Do you know what Rosebud really meant
Gone to dust and still they play on
Faded days stay crystal clear
All the stuff that dreams are made on
Long as you and I are here
Monochrome
Boris Karloff shambles from the unknown
Monochrome
Why do you say there's no color
Dietrich was the Blue Angel
Duke and Monty rode Red River
Leslie Howard's Scarlet Pimpernel
Fairbanks was a bold Black Pirate
Cagney's White Heat burned me cold
There's a panchromatic rainbow
To a silver-halide pot of gold
Monochrome
Though my valley's green no longer, it's home
Monochrome
Let me catch a bus with Gable
Grand Hotels for all my nights
Busby Berkeley tunes are playing
Through the window, Chaplin's City Lights
Wander down the aisles together
Take a lover, find a friend
Dance to Bernard Herrmann's music
Till the title card that reads The End
Monochrome
Carbon arcs in darkness lighting me home
In monochrome
Monochrome
With a cast of thousands, no one's alone
With monochrome
- John M. Ford
(from HOW MUCH FOR JUST THE PLANET?)
'But I have tenure!"
"Oh well, I suppose if you stick around a third-rate
institution long enough, they have to reward you for
your lack of initiative somehow."
- Jane Curtin and John Lithgow,
3rd ROCK FROM THE SUN
"Grad school is the snooze button on the alarm clock of life."
- John Rogers
"Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today."
- Ayn Rand
"All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary,
it is fact that requires explanation."
- Marilynne Robinson,
HOUSEKEEPING
"To oppose something is to maintain it."
"To learn which questions are unaswerable. and not to answer
them; this skill is most needful in times of stress and
darkness."
- Ursula K. Le Guin,
THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS
"I remember as a boy reading accounts of `scientific mysteries,'
in the sort of books that have successive chapters on the Loch Ness
monster, yetis, UFOs, and the Easter Island monuments. ... The emotional
appeal of the more exotic of these mystery accounts is clear: Not only
are such events alluringly weird, but they seem to offer effortless
access to profound and exclusive knowledge. Quickly the reader feels
as though he or she glimpses important truths that the stodgy scientific
world, or conspiratorial governments, have overlooked, misunderstood,
or denied. Accompanyting this feeling of exclusivity may be the
self-rightious satisfaction that comes with disdain for more
conventional explanations. If others do not share one's own privileged
viewpoint, then at least, their science must be poor, and at worst,
perhaps they are aliens themselves."
- Christopher F. Chyba,
"What Happened at Tungaska?",
THE NEO NEWS, 3(2), 1997, 1-2.
"Escaping the dangers of applied science is one thing. Doing the
simple and manifest good which applied science has put in our power is
another, more difficult, more demanding of human qualities, and in the
long run far more enriching to us all."
"It seems to me that engaging in immediate debate on each
specific point closes one's mind for good and all. Debating
gives most of us much more psychological satisfaction than
` thinking does; but it deprives us of whatever chance there
is of getting closer to the truth. It seems preferable to
me to sit back and let what has been said sink in -- I don't
pretend this is altogether easy -- and then, after a longish
interval, with the advantage of what I've heard and of new
knowledge, see what modifications I should make ..."
- C.P. Snow,
"The Two Cultures: A Second Look"
"The academic mind is addicted to problems and averse to
solutions, since a problem is a nice little earner but a solution
requires the unfortunate solver to find a new justification for the
continuation of funding."
- David Gaffan,
"Book Review: THE MIND-BRAIN
CONTINUIM (ed. Llinas/Churchland)",
TRENDS IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE,
1(5), 194, 1997.
"Computers are irrelevant."
- Tom West
(quoted in Tracy Kidder,
THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE)
"The ignorant worship and fear.
Scientists worship and investigate."
- Randy Allen Harris,
THE LINGUISTICS WARS
"We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that
we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgements we
can usually make for ourselves."
"If art isin't entertainment, what is it? Punishment?"
- Pauline Kael
(Quoted in Will Brantley (ed.).
CONVERSATIONS WITH PAULINE KAEL)
Atkinson's First Law of Computing: All computers and all
computing are simply a combination of a very, very large
number of very, very trivial things.
- Tom Atkinson
To be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and
happiest of marriages.
- Susan B. Anthony
PIAZZA PIECE
I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying
To make you hear. Your ears are soft and small
And listen to an old man not at all,
They want the young men's whispering and sighing.
But see the roses on your trellis dying
And hear the spectral singing of the moon;
For I must have my lovely lady soon,
I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.
I am a lady young in beauty waiting
Until my true love comes, and then we kiss.
But what grey man among the vines is this
Whose words are dry and faint as in a dream?
Back from my trellis, Sir, before I scream!
I am a lady young in beauty waiting.
- John Crowe Ransom
"For all my years, the only piece of wisdom I've acquired
is that time doesn't have to move forward. The noblest
achievement of the imagination is to make it run some other
way, and terminate in beauty and forgiveness."
- David Gelernter,
1939: THE LOST WORLD OF THE FAIR
I call heaven and earth to witness before you this day that
I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the
curse. Therefore, choose life.
- Deuteronomy
Ten years of successful work tends to make a man touchy, dogmatic,
intolerant of correction, and abominably self-centered.
- William Osler
(Michael Bliss, WILLIAM OSLER:
A LIFE IN MEDICINE, p. 248)
"Arrr, the laws of Nature be a harsh mistress."
- Bender, FUTURAMA
Anyone who works for posterity is working for an ungrateful client.
- Paul Schrader
What is the thing we crave most in life? The sense that someone
somewhere remembers and loves us. Even better if we love them in
return. Anything can be endured if that idea holds fast.
- Martin Cruz Smith, RED SQUARE
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by
spectacular error.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
* Abstinence from liquor is requested, but if you must drink share the
bottle. To do otherwise makes you appear selfish and un-neighbourly.
* If a lady is present, gentlemen are urged to forgo smoking cigars and
pipes as the odor of same may be repugnant to the gentler sex.
Chewing tobacco is permitted but spit with the wind not against it.
* Buffalo robes are provided for your comfort during the cold weather.
Hogging robes will not be tolerated and offenders will be made to
ride with the driver.
* Don't snore loudly or use your fellow passenger's shoulder for a
pillow. He (or she) may not understand and friction may result.
* Fire arms may be kept on your person for emergencies. Do not fire for
pleasure or shoot at wild animals as the sound riles the horses.
* In the event of runaway horses remain calm. Leaping from the coach
will leave you injured, at the mercy of the elements, hostile
Indians & hungry coyotes.
* Forbidden topics of discussion are stage coach robbers and Indian
uprisings.
* Gentlemen guilty of unchivalrous behavior towards lady passengers
will be put off the stage. It is a long walk back.
Passenger Rules, Barstow and Helena Stagecoach Company (1876)
(from Jaffe, M. (2000) THE GILDED DINOSAUR: THE FOSSIL WAR
BETWEEN E.D. COPE AND O.C. MARSH AND THE RISE OF AMERICAN
SCIENCE, pp. 168-169)
How do I go about writing a script? I sit down on a chair.
I pull out a typewriter -- or computer now -- and just try to
hit the keys. The whole problem is to hit them in the right
order. That's the only problem really.
- Krzystof Kieslowski
The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work,
what is in it that shouldn't be, what is not in it that could be.
He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the
work than they could see for themselves; he is a great critic,
if by his understanding and feeling for the work, by his passion,
he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the
art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily
a bad critic if he makes errors in judgment (Infallible taste is
inconceivable; what could it be measured against?) He is a bad
critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests
and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to
transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others.
... theory distorts experience ... and helps us to see more
sharply for having done so ...
- Pauline Kael,"Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris"
To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted,
than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to
his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness
which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife;
but where other powers of entertainment are wanting,
the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as
are given.
"For what do we live, but to make sport for our
neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"
- Jane Austen, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
"Why waste time learning when ignorance is instantaneous?"
- Calvin and Hobbes
Q: The menu in our cafeteria shows that enchiladas are available
"Tue.-Fri." When I ordered one on a Wednesday, I was told that
enchiladas are available on Tuesday and Friday, not Tuesday
through Friday. When I informed the cafeteria manager that this
sign was incorrect, she seemed shocked and refused to change
the sign. Please help determine who is correct.
A: Although the sign was incorrect, I'm not sure you should annoy
the person who provides the enchiladas.
- Website of THE CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE
"When I was small, my mother said to me, 'Elwood, in this world,
you must be either oh so smart or very pleasant.' For many years,
I was smart. I recommend pleasant."
- Mary Chase, HARVEY
"I suppose it can said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true
that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but
on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never
gotten credit for it."
- Glenn Gould (quoted in Kevin Brazzana (2003) WONDROUS STRANGE:
THE LIFE AND ART OF GLENN GOULD, p. 329)
"Being famous and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee."
- Chuck Yeager
"... this diversion, although pleasant, is not true. Things never
happened thus."
"Oh, but it is true. Things need not have happened to be true. Tales
and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are
dust and ashes, and forgot."
- Neil Gaiman, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", THE SANDMAN
"That's screaming! A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming."
- BARBARELLA (1968)
"All you need for an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of people."
- MY MAN GODFREY (1936)
"For I believe that he who learns only how to obey orders
can never be a great explorer."
- Captain James Cook
(Quoted in Vanessa Collingridge, CAPTAIN COOK: A LEGACY UNDER FIRE,
p. 255)
"Teaching is a very good way to learn."
- Julia Child
"You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and
you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend
pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and
feel empties. All a you. Every you ...
Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a
challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you.
Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live
and be great."
...
"I believe," he thought. "I have faith."
"Faith in what?" he asked himself, adrift in limbo.
"Faith in faith," he answered himself. "It isin't necessary to have
something to believe in. It's only necessary to believe that
somewhere there's something worthy of belief."
- Alfred Bester, THE STARS MY DESTINATION
It is the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoke, done. The idea is
like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, likes
being stepped on.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, THE DISPOSSESSED
"Perhaps we're intruding, this seems to be a private beach."
- Overhead during D-Day landing on Gold Beach
(Quoted in Cornelius Ryan (1959) THE LONGEST DAY, p. 195)
As he hurried along, eagerly anticipating the moment when he would be at home
again among the things he knew and liked, the Mole saw clearly that he was an
animal of tilled field and hedgerow, linked to the ploughed furrow, the
frequented pasture, the lane of evening lingerings, the cultivated garden
plot. For others the asperities, the stubborn endurance, or the clash of actual
conflict, that went with Nature in the rough; he must be wise, must keep to the
pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough,
in their way, to last for a lifetime.
...
"And you, you will come too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return,
and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere
the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a
blithersome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!
Then someday, someday long hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has
been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with
a store of goodly memories for company. You can easily overtake me on the road,
for you are young and I am ageing and go softly. I will linger and look back; and
at last I will surely see you coming, eager and lighthearted, with all the South
in your face."
...
Indeed, much of what he related belonged more properly to the category of what-might-
have-happened-had-I-only-thought-of-it-in-time-instead-of-ten-minutes-afterwards.
Those are always the best and raciest adventures; and why should they not be truly
ours, as much as the somewhat inadequate things that really come off?
- Kenneth Grahame, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS
Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then,
when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the
promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.
- Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS, Book 12, Part 22
(translated by George Long)
"Yeah, well, what do you know? You and your Ivory Tower, hurling down your
Wisdom McNuggets dipped in the Special Sauce of the Establishment!"
- Kristen Johnson, 3RD ROCK FROM THE SUN
Given the right premises, any desired conclusion can be reached, automatic as
addition. This is plain to most of mankind after a few years of experiment.
Jumping to conclusions is an easy process, akin to cooking, which in fact it
rivals in age. Pick your premises, follow the rules, and apple pie.
Once men realized the danger in false conclusions, of course they instantly
reformed themselves, and as everyone knows have ever since been far more
sparing in the making of them. We should all be congratulated, but the job
is not yet done. Far more serious than jumping to conclusions is its
antecedent -- jumping to premises. The ideal man is not only sparing of
conclusions, but also the premises to which he commits himself.
- Alexei Panshin, MASQUE WORLD
My job is not to find out what the public wants and give it to them;
my job is to make the public want what I want.
- Robert Bresson
Make the popular good and the good popular.
- Huw Wheldon
The Five Stages of Movie Production:
1) Wild Enthusiasm
2) Total Confusion
3) Utter Despair
4) Hunt for the Guilty
5) Punishment of the Innocent
- Nicholas Meyer, THE VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE (p. 235)
Science has achieved some wonderful things of course, but I'd far rather
be happy than right any day.
Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the
pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I'm afraid
where you begin to suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the
entire multi-dimemsional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly
being run by a bunch of maniacs.
- Douglas Adams, THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom
one is not on friendly terms.
- KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS (1949)
You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man
reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of
tyrants are invariably thin?
- SPARTACUS (1960)
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
- Hunter S. Thompson
Listen, Little Boy, in this business there's only one law you gotta follow
to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it.
- SCARFACE (1932)
Creativity is the product of wasted time.
- Albert Einstein
Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.
- Gustav Mahler
In much wisdom there is much grief, and he who increases knowledge
increases sorrow.
- ANDREI RUBLEV (1966)
The whole problem of the world is that fools and fanatics are always
so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
- Bertrand Russell
Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?
- THE DECAMERON (1971)
If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
- Billy Wilder
There is perhaps no beguilement more insidious and dangerous
than an elaborate and elegant mathematical process built upon
unfortified premises.
- Thomas Chamberlin
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome
return of conjecture out of such a trifiling investment of fact.
- Mark Twain
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake
in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day
are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and
make it possible.
- T.E. Lawrence, THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM
Keep your eye on the ball and hit 'em where they ain't.
- William H. "Wee Willie" Keeler
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
- Origin unknown, often attributed to Albert Einstein
The past, unavoidably, is commemorated to the extent that it serves
the needs of the present.
- Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope,
ENIAC IN ACTION (p. 270)
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses
nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
- Thomas H. Huxley
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it
deeply enough.
- Richard Feynman
The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your
critics, to get their approval.
- Thomas Harris, HANNIBAL
Even a man who is pure at heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms
and the autumn moon is bright
The way you walked was thorny though no fault of your own, but
as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears
run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace for eternity.
- THE WOLF MAN (1941)
If you have not helped another human being you have not prayed
to God yet.
- Bindeshwar Pathak
Better to hate than to grieve. I sing in praise of hate, and
all its attendant energy ... I sing a hymn to the death of love
and the end of pain.
- Fay Weldon, THE LIFE AND LOVES OF A SHE-DEVIL
"And what are you dressed up as?"
"I'm a homicidal maniac -- they look just like everyone else."
- THE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991)
Created: June 21, 1995
Last Modified: October 31, 2023