# Good quotes > Non-commercial TV should address itself to the ideal of excellence, not the idea of acceptability — which is what keeps commercial TV from climbing the staircase. I think TV should be providing the visual counterpart of the literary essay, should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and the woods and the hills. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential. * [[EB White]] > Imagine how difficult physics would be if particles could think * https://twitter.com/nathan_day/status/1562532895276666882?s=20&t=YvLsC4NP0rG8poB7cPtOtQ > Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. * [[John Maynard Keynes]] > At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. * [[Tyler Cowen]] > “For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple, and wrong.” * [[HL Mencken]] * via [[Peter van Hardenberg conversation 16 Aug 2021]] > What, after all, is an organization? It is # merely the formalization of a set of human relations among men with a common objective. The form of organization is important. # Far important are the men themselves, # and their insistence # on working together effectively for a common end. * [[Vannevar Bush]] * [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]] * `All models are wrong, but some are useful` * [[George Box]] * [[The Map is not the Territory]] * `Truth is the offspring of silence and unbroken meditation.` * [[Isaac Newton]] (from [[strevensKnowledgeMachineHow2020]]) * `When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.` * [[Isaac Asimov]] * `Verging on dumpster bin status` * [[Tyler Cowen]] * `‘What man, through his science and technology, has produced in this world, where he first appeared as a frail animal organism […] all this not only sounds like a fairy-tale, but actually fulfills all – no, most, fairy-tale wishes. […] Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience, which he embodied in his gods, attributing to them whatever seemed beyond the reach of his desires – or was forbidden him. We may say, then, that these gods were cultural ideals. Man has now come close to reaching these ideals and almost become a god himself. […] Man has become, so to speak, a god with artificial limbs.’` * [[Sigmund Freud]], [[Civilization and its Discontents]] * `“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water”` * [[Ernest Hemmingway]], [[Death in the Afternoon]] * [Iceberg theory - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_theory) * `Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in case of success` * Apocryfully Earnest Shackleton * `Reality is a cold bitch` * [[Kanjun Qiu]] * `He opens his mouth and within you see UNSPEAKABLE EVIL` * Rude Tales of Magic * `In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’` * [[GK Chesterton]]/[[Chesterton’s Fence]] * `The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.` * [[Walter Lippman]] * https://amzn.to/3aWS6Ds * `Ideas may come to us out of order in point of time. We may discover a detail of the façade before we know too much about the foundation. But in the end all knowledge has its place.` * [[Simon Flexner]] * `Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back` * [[Donald Kingsbury]] * `Trust is the coin of the realm` * [[George Schultz]] * `Long may you give confusion to your enemies and inspiration to your friends!` * [[EW Dijkstra]] in [[brabenScientificFreedomElixir2008]] * `A grain of sand in the mind’s eye` * `The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books` * [[CS Lewis]] * [C.S. Lewis On The Reading of Old Books | ReasonableTheology.org](https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books/) * `Good science often errs and pseudoscience sometimes finds the truth` * [[Science as Falsification]] `Every now and then I receive visits from earnest men and women armed with questionnaires and tape recorders who want to find out what made the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (where I work) so remarkably creative…… creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organized. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organization, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mounds of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners.` * First MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Director Max Perutz `The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a modest amount of funding, with a felicitous context and process can almost magically give rise to new technologies that not only amplify civilization, but also produce tremendous wealth for the society. Isn’t it time to do this again by Reason, even with no Cold War to use as an excuse?` * Alan Kay, Xerox PARC researcher and pioneer of personal computing `If the work you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success, then it won’t get funded` * Nobel Laureate Roger Kornberg (Lee, May 28th 2007, Washington Post) `Even God wouldn’t get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments (creating the universe), but they’ve never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what’s he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal (The Bible).` * Sydney Brenner, pioneer of molecular biology `… there is a serious problem with incumbents hoarding opportunity. Just make them compete with their grad students and postdocs. Make them get back into the lab. Make them do the analysis. That would sort things out pretty quickly` * Anonymous * Asked wether it was possible science might some day find a way to convert matter into energy for practical purposes, he smiled and said that he (Einstein) though the answer was “no”. `“I am not a prophet in anything.”` He said “`not in science either. But I feel absolutely sure — well nearly sure — that it will not be possible to convert matter into energy for practical purposes” `This, he explained, was because of the difficulty of the method which involves bombarding atoms with sub-atomic particles. While there are trillions of atoms they are so small that direct hits are very few and it is only these which release energy * Pittsburgh press 1934 `Systematic social institutions are absolutely necessary for large-scale civilizations, and can be improved via rational and empirical reason,` `AND` `are blind to factors their models overlook, depend on unmodeled human judgement to function, and are brittle to context changes` * [[David Chapman]] - https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1355208571928018946 `You did what they said could not be done, you created things that they could not see or imagine` * [[Robert Taylor]] * `**“Be careful of attempting to get publicity too soon or too much on a new investment. Remember the French proverb: ‘to live happily, live hidden’**` * `**The study of a company is not the study of a dead body… it is the study of things and relationships. They are very much alive and constantly changing… it is the study of people and people’s work, of their hopes and aspirations… a study of determination of successive goals and of victorious competitive drive towards them**` * `**A committee is an invitation to do nothing. Very few committees can perform better than the weakest man.**` * [[Georges Doriot]] * `‘If there is the tiniest difference between the behavior you want and the incentives you offer, people will find it.` * [[Startup = Growth]] * *‘The [Bell] system constitutes the largest aggregation of capital that has ever been controlled by a single private company at any time in the history of business….. Its gross revenues… are surpassed by the incomes of few governments of the world….. [it owns] 98 percent of the long-distance telephone wires of the United States’*. (Danielian, in p45, Gertner). Even these antitrust regulators admitted its enormous impact: *‘[Bell Labs] have not only made things better, but have created new services and industries,*’ he wrote of the scientists and engineers. *‘They have also made significant contributions to pure science. For these, no one would wish to deny just praise.’* (Danielian, in p45, Gertner). Even relatively early in its history, Bell Labs contributions were seen as justification for its monopoly status, which made its contributions possible. * *‘[A] great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to “North” without having to see it… The pursuit of Art always sets off plans and goals, but plans and goals don’t always give rise to Art. If “visions not goals” opens the heavens, it is important to find artistic people to conceive the projects’* * [[Alan Kay]] * `*“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”* `*—*Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune * irector Max Perutz put it: *`“Impishly, whenever he was asked whether there are simple guidelines along which to organise research so that it will be highly creative, he would say: no politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people picked by a few men of good judgment. Certainly not the way research is usually run in our fuzzy democracy but, from a man of great gifts and of extremely good judgment, such a reply is not elitist. It is simply to be expected, for Max had practised it and shown that this recipe is right for those who, in science, want to beat the world by getting the best in the world to beat a path to their door.”*` * As the first Bell Labs president, Frank Jewett, said: an industrial lab is *“is merely an organization of intelligent men [sic], presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated…. It is likewise an instrument which can bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual.” (p32, Gertner)* * *When LMB researchers needed a new instrument, Perutz made sure technicians and engineers were there to build it, a model he learned at the Cavendish. “We were interested in topics that stretched the techniques,” says Walker, explaining how the lab developed technologies such as x-ray crys- tallography, DNA sequencing, and confocal microscopes. (pennisi 2003).* * Even senior scientists worked at the bench—a tradition that continues today [edit: people I know at LMB seriously dispute this] and goes far to explain the lab’s vitality, says [[Gerald Rubin]] of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, who did his graduate work at LMB. Perutz spent 90% of his working time at the bench until his death last year, focusing most recently on neurodegenerative disease. Klug still maintains a lab, although he’s officially retired* * . (Pennisi 2003)* * Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. * “The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.” * “First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.” * “Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.” * “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.” * * When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age. [[The End of the Future | National Review](https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/)] * Flying cars, maybe they’re good, maybe they’re bad but, but it’s remarkable how all the various things people envisioned. And we’ve gotten so few of them outside of the, outside of the computer area. * We find we either talk about a specific success and general success or specific failure and general failure. And so we would like to say Facebook is a specific success, it must mean some general success. And so Facebook is a great business, and therefore it will solve all the world’s problems. And I think the modality I prefer to think of is, that there are specific successes but they may be symptomatic of general failure. * [[Peter Thiel]] * Few people, I fancy, who know the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim, and Chanute, but will be inclined to believe that long before the year a.d. 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. —H. G. Wells, Anticipations (1902) * The flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years. —The New York Times (Oct. 9, 1903) * I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be―instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. ― Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road * In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction. —Richard P. Feynman (1959) * It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man. —Richard Feynman * He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance. —Thomas Jefferson, The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America * ... vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. —Winston Churchill * Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to “obey” laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810 pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or Dodd-Frank (2,300 pages). —Charles Murray * If you want to start an automobile company in this country you need a handful of engineers—and at least 1000 lawyers. * Arnold Kling * It was this attitude that had made his task so difficult. Decadence. A race on an ages-long decline from vast heights of philosophical and scientific learning. Their last external enemy had been defeated millennia in the past; and through easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had died. Adventure had become a meaningless word. — * John W Campbell, The Black Star Passes * I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all for fear of being carried off their feet. The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right. * Alexis de Tocqueville * No Utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possesions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. * Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End * ... in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. * Orson Welles, The Third Man * Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield. * George Orwell * ... the singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic lands often display amid their abundance, and the disgust with life that sometimes seizes them in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence. * Alexis de Toqueville * The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It’s rather like getting tenure. * Daniel Dennett * For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. * Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) * We have all known the loneliness, the emptiness, the plastic isolation of contemporary America. Our forebears came thousands of miles for the promise of a better life. Now there is a new promise. Shall we not seize it? Shall we not be pioneers once more, since luck and fortune have given us a vision of hope? * Charles Reich, The Greening of America (1970) * Dystopias featuring teen-age characters have been a staple of high-school life since “The Lord of the Flies” came out, in 1954. But the genre only really took off in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and adult authority flourished ... All of [these books] are characterized by a withering contempt for adults and by an unshakable suspicion of authority. * Jill Lepore * The role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone, however. On the contrary, many environmentalist leaders were quite upset. As Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome, put it in 1990, “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” * Robert Zubrin * If you think your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument rather than by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based upon faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting or distorting the minds of the young in what is called “education.” * Bertrand Russell * The actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect. * Harpers Weekly (1902) * Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of the arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness. * Woodrow Wilson (1906) * The prisoners, without memory of the past, had nothing upon which to base a speculation of the future. * Robert Sheckley, The Status Civilization * Note: You can buy a used airplane for about the same price as a new sports car. Riddle: What’s the main difference between the sports car and the airplane? Answer: If you speed up the sports car to about 75 miles per hour and pull back on the steering wheel, nothing very interesting happens. —John Denker, See How It Flies * The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by-products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. —Isaac Asimov (1964) * At some point in the last few centuries, human civilization had taken the wrong path—a path that led only to oblivion. —Randall Garrett, The Highest Treason * “Decentralized cities, labor-saving machinery for everyone, luxuries—it’s all possible, but I’ve got a feeling that we’re staring right into a mess of trouble. Did you ever hear of ’Breakages, Ltd’?” “What is it, a salvage concern?” “Not by a hell of a sight. It’s from the preface of Back to Methuselah, and is a sardonic way of describing the combined power of corporate industry to resist any change that might threaten their dividends. What do you think happened to atomic power?” —Robert A. Heinlein, Let There be Light * Understanding the low-energy fission process has proved so difficult that, even 60 years after the Bohr-Wheeler liquid-drop statistical model, which provided a qualitative understanding of fission, there does not seem to exist a well-defined and universally accepted theory. —A. J. Cole, Statistical Models for Nuclear Decay (2000) * Today, education concerning nuclear physics is in an appalling state. On the one hand, discussion of the politics of nuclear issues is to be heard almost daily on the evening news. On the other hand, a visit to any typical bookstore in the US will reveal a total lack of interest in the academic field of nuclear physics. Of course, popular renditions of the “quantum revolution” circa 1920 continue to be written, but even university bookstores rarely have any texts on the nucleus itself. And if you find a book on nuclear physics, check the copyright date! Books written in the 1950s or 1960s and reprinted in unaltered form are on offer to students in the twenty-first century. —Norman Cook, Models of the Atomic Nucleus (2010) * Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. —Paul Ehrlich * It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it. —Amory Lovins * Even considering the improvements possible ... the gas turbine could hardly be considered a feasible application to airplanes mainly because of the difficulty with the stringent weight requirements. —the Gas Turbine Committee of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences (1940) * Mark my word: A combination airplane and motor car is coming. You may smile. But it will come. —Henry Ford (1940) * Leaping lightly across some centuries of intensive development and discovery, let us consider how the replicator would operate. —Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future * The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. —Motto of the SeaBees * There are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until, in a visible future, the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied. ... within ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion... will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem ... will write music that will be accepted by critics as possessing considerable aesthetic value. —Newell and Simon (1958) * In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. —Marvin Minsky (1970) * The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he ... seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. —Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) * The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. —(Economics Nobel Laureate) Friedrich A. Hayek * For ages man lived in a world where he was a slave to the elements. His own achievements were by comparison crude and immature; his every living moment was subject to the blind caprices of fate. Not unnaturally, he dreamt of greater things. At first his achievements were limited to dreams, and to dreams only. ... It was not until man found himself capable of transforming dreams into prophesy that he wrote science fiction. ... The only difference between the science fiction fan of today and the Homer of yesteryear is that the fan of today knows that there is a sufficiently large kernel of truth in his dreams to make them possible of realization—that the fantastic fiction of today may well become the fact of tomorrow. —Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm * As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. —Jane Jacobs * Cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender; we were able to retreat. —P. J. O’Rourke * Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies. —Kepler, letter to Galileo (1610) * In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York! —Jules Verne * Do I dare Disturb the universe? —T. S. Eliot * A dark age is not when you’ve forgotten how do something. It’s when you’ve forgotten that you could. —David Altrogge * You boys like to call this the pushbutton age. It isn’t, not yet. Not until we can team up atomic energy with electronics. Then we’ll have the horses as well as the cart. —“Dr. Cal Meacham” in This Island Earth * A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Heinlein * The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —Isaac Asimov * Clearly then you must also be ignorant of the fact that the Clouds are also patrons of a varied group of gentlemen, comprising: chiropractors, prophets, longhairs, quacks, fops, charlatans, fairies, dithyrambic poets, scientists, dandies, astrologers, and other men of leisure. And because all alike, without exception, walk with their heads among the clouds and base their inspiration on the murky Muse, the Clouds support them and feed them. —Aristophanes, The Clouds (423 BC) * Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. —Ovid * Still, I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis. —Edgar Pangborn * “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” * [[Thomas Sowell]]