I need to get some order into this page, but I don’t know how to organise it. Could someone PLEASE give me some suggestions?
What you call getting bogged down is what we call making progress.
- David Chalmers (philosopher), talking to scientists, 2011
There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.
- Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (from c_a_turbulence)
I just had one of those You’ve been living in the future too long moments where I thought to myself “I need to clean the bedroom, but I want to keep reading this Gene Wolfe novel, I wonder if there’s some text-to-speech hack I can install” and realized the book was made out of paper and the text-to-speech hack was to get someone to come over and read it to me while I clean.
- Kyle Cassidy, 22/2/2011, http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/695627.html
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m afraid of hard work. It’s just that I wish that I’d already done it.
- Alison, 2/11/2011
If there’s any hiding to be done, we’re not afraid to do it.
- the guinea pigs, according to Alison
cx 687 m hc ;.hj
- Fizgig, 5/9/2008
Once, I was born—and you’re pretty much screwed once that happens.
- yesihavecookies, http://community.livejournal.com/find_ljfriends/1216613.html#cutid1, 25/8/2008
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
- attrib. Mark Twain
Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, New York: Dell, 1911/1991
I imagine a scenario where primary school students (in a different universe…) have to make Big Bangs the same way primary schoolers in our universe make model volcanos
- Freya Howarth, http://xeny.net/Design, 2011
I kind of want to say, “Being nice is, like, you know nice. And therefore important. Obviously.” and leave it at that, in some ways, but then people leave out so much. Oh, you mean nice to animals?! And humans?! And the environment?! And oneself as well?! Right, I thought you meant nice to [whatever tiny group of whatever they like being nice to]
- Kathleen Bright, 23/9/2009
Jason’s games of ‘helicopter’ got increasingly violent and fiery as semester progressed
- tin_foil_hat, pretending to be one of my students, 26/5/2009
The history excuse is always laughable. “The past is awesome, at least this list of parts of which I approve.”
- new_perestroika, http://community.livejournal.com/veganpeople/3642118.html, 18/5/2009
Guinea pigs have so many faces.. well to guinea pig people they do, other people just see a furry lump while we oggle over how cute their little personality is showing through.
- craze_176, 20/11/2009
Alpacas always manage to look simultaneously out of place and exactly perfect for any situation they’re ever in
- penguin_bot, 5/11/2009
I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
- attrib. Mark Twain
Once you can no longer dress up a Dylan doll like Hillary while eating vegan cookies in your own home the terrorists have won.
- Frank or Jacqueline Merenda, http://simcha.livejournal.com/233012.html, 4/9/2008
They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
- Andy Warhol, "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol", p. 113
Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.
- attrib. Dr Seuss (Theodor Geisel)
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.
- John Cage, in Richard Kostelanetz "Conversing with Cage" (1988)
There was nothing I could do. They offered me money.
- Denis Bloodnok
Non-human animals … can be great indicators of whether or not someone is worth being around. But it’s not so much the way the animal responds to the human, but how the human responds to the animal.
- Jo Randall, 28/11/2010
I feel like … I’m in a little boat in a sea of drowning animals, and how can I do anything but pull on as many as many as will fit? But my boat isn’t very sturdy and leaks water, and the weight of them makes it much harder to paddle, and maybe if I could paddle a little faster and further I could find a much bigger boat, and help the people on it to achieve a lot more than I could by myself.
- _unsure, 14/6/2009
I did not marry the first girl I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict. She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.
- Woody Allen, N.Y.U.
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.
- Alan Kay
I’ve got two things that are horribly overdue. Well, in fact more than two things. What the two things are depends on who I’m talking to.
- Jeremy Shearmur, in an ethics class, 7/10/2008
I’m cranky because i’m dealing with assholes all day whose main purpose is to a) do better than me or b) stand in my way of doing better than the other assholes.
- etomlef, http://etomlef.livejournal.com/637190.html, 29/10/2008
I choose my words very carefully—they must sound right, must have the right rhythm, and their meaning must be slightly off center
- Paul Feyerabend, "Killing Time", p.163
I like the exact word, and clarity of statement, and here and there a touch of good grammar for picturesqueness
- Mark Twain
If I had no name … I’d think strangers were saying my name during pauses in conversation and I’d feel popular!
- Andrew McNicol, 27/10/2008
It rains so much in Wollongong, sometimes it rains twice at the same time.
Tax not the Aussie bloke with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned—
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of alpaca-herding Scholars only—this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!
- Paul Griffiths discussing our farm, 31/7/2008
It gets the audience laughing. They think linguistics is fun. They don’t realise they haven’t done any for an hour.
- Alison Moore, 29/10/2008
Shepherd Book: Mind if I say grace?
Mal: Only if you say it out loud.
- Jos Whedon, Firefly, episode 1, "Serenity"
In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Letter Writer
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
- Misattributed to Voltaire. See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire.
Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what takes a real hero.
- attrib. Brian Andreas
Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: “Here are our monsters”, without immediately turning the monsters into pets.
- Jacques Derrida
Suppose it were true that the some sinister cabal in the US government pickled the Roswell aliens, shot JFK, faked the Moon landings and brought down the Towers. You know what? Compared with what the US and other governments do in plain sight, these would be as dust in the balance.
- Ken MacLeod on conspiracies, http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2007/09/down-rabbit-hole.html
we need not search painstakingly for evidence that Blair has lied to the public or to Parliament. Every time a minister uses the term “anti-terrorist powers”, he is lying. These are anti-dissent powers—the powers of tyranny.
- Richard Stallman, http://www.stallman.org/articles/animal_rights.html, 2005, viewed 1/10/2008
with … students, it’s absolutely important to challenge their internals — challenge their internal musculature, their internal ability to make images, their internal ability to think about things and to make representations of things.
- Alan Kay, Electronic Learning, April 1994, http://decenturl.com/iam.unibe/alankay
philosophy … is not an activity ‘after’ science, in a logical sense. In particular, it does not rely on inferences from what best current science says about reality. On the contrary, it is itself a kind of formal finishing school for scientific theory. Its own products are best current science.
- Huw Price, "Quining Naturalism"
[Latour’s] main point is “waah! science is hard to understand if you’re not a scientist”
- Simon Pride, 2008
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
- Richard Dawkins, Richard Dimbleby Lecture, 12/11/1996, transcribed at http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-12dimbleby.shtml (viewed 8/2/2008)
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
- attrib. Aristotle
One of the things about progressing through life is you can start crossing out the things you won’t be. You keep crossing them out until the only thing left is corpse.
- Richard Jackson, http://richardjackson.org/?p=198, 5/12/2007
The ethical incoherence of our customary treatment of nonhumans has been demonstrated time and again by Singer, Regan, Sapontzis, DeGrazia, Pluhar, and others. Almost every member of the American Philosophical Association would agree that all mammals are conscious, and that all conscious experience is of some moral significance. But somehow this has no connection with one’s choice of food. Like the undergraduate who listens to, and actually understands, the refutation of naive relativism, and still writes in the final exam that “no one can judge another person’s morality,” many philosophers suffer from a sort of inferential paralysis.
- Harlan B. Miller, Review of Peter Singer's "Ethics Into Action", Ethics 2000;110:443
If you find Dawkins irritating, just read a few pages of C.S. Lewis and you will see why Dawkins is necessary.
- Thomas Forster, http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/lewis.html, 21/5/2007
I offer you the lexical items “piss up” and “brewery”, and leave you to see what kind of cohesive product occurs to you.
- Alison Moore, 12/2/2007
Imagine how many physics students came to Caltech because of Richard Feynman. Undoubtedly they could have had some interesting interactions with him while they were here. But undergraduates would have found that he taught graduate seminars almost exclusively, while graduates would have found that he almost never took on any Ph.D. students. Too much worry and responsibility — he wouldn’t feel right giving a student a problem that he hadn’t already solved himself. While to me this seems like a scandalous abdication of duty (where would he have been if John Wheeler and others at Princeton had felt the same way?), the motivation is perfectly understandable.
- Sean Carroll, http://cosmicvariance.com/category/academia, 23/4/2007
I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it. I learned that one has to adapt abstractions to reality and not the other way around.
- Alexander Stephanov, Short History of STL* (attrib.)
All you’re doing is you’ve got a lot of guys running around in the armchair.
- Steve Downes on "experimental philosophy", 29/8/07
<yawn> I could sleep a horse.
- Alison Moore, 28/11/2006
The world is tired of metaphysical assertions.
- Kant
I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose. Take the statement: “Some people marry their deceased wives' sisters”. I can express this in language which only becomes intelligible after years of study, and this gives me freedom. I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language “understanded of the people”. In these days, when our very lives are at the mercy of the professors, I cannot but think that they would deserve our gratitude if they adopted my advice.
- Betrand Russell, "How I Write"
Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: ‘The human being is the only animal that…’. … it is with good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they might just die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.
- Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf), p.3
For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as if there was a rolling wall of fog following medical research at a five year remove. Some papers were cited before then – they were like distant mountains that one could see above the fog, the giants of the past.
- John Wilkins, http://decenturl.com/scienceblogs/fog, 13/5/2007
My talk in Kyoto University was on “philosophical techniques”, and the first one I discussed was the use of the definite article, “the”. My host Yasuo politely pointed out to me that Japanese doesn’t have a definite article. No matter—unfazed, I moved on to another technique, which involved the subjunctive conditional. “Professor Hájek: Japanese does not have that either.”
- Alan Hájek, 25/12/2006
When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that needs to be done, let him do it himself.
- Errett Bishop and Douglas, Constructive Analysis, Springer-Verlag 1980, p.5
We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.
- The Shoveller, in "Mystery Men" by Neil Cuthbert
you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system
- Robert K. Meyer, "Logicians Liberation League Manifesto", 1969, http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~rkm/manifesto.html
Metaphysics is about what there really is (as opposed to merely what there is, which is of course ontology)
- Jim Hankinson, Bluff your way in Philosophy, Oval Books, 1985, pp.30--31
When in Rome, do as the English do.
- attrib. Adrian Mathias
the communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language, as is commonly supposed
- Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710
Language is the noises we make with our faces in order to live.
- attrib. J.R. Firth
It’s very hard getting lodgers these days. If I took in aliens, spongers or those damnable statisticians I could fill the place twice over, but I have standards to maintain.
- Mrs Hubbard, in Jasper Fforde, The Big Easy, p.53
The Axiom of Choice is obviously true; the Well Ordering Principle is obviously false; and who can tell about Zorn’s Lemma?
- attrib. Jerry Bona, http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/ccc/choice.html, 1/11/2006
Time is an honorific we give to one of the dimensions of space for being so nice to us.
- Craig Callender, 26/7/2006
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
- attrib. Mark Twain
If you’re being chased by a police dog, try not to go through a tunnel, then on to a little seesaw, then jump through a hoop of fire — they’re trained for that.
- attrib. Milton Jones
Stigler’s Law … No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
- Stephen M. Stigler, Statistics on the Table, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1999, p.277
About the blind men and the elephant.
What if some of the blind men had blundered past the elephant and touched a giraffe? And if the whole group had then followed the traditional advice to pool their observations?
- Maynard S. Clark
In every history of philosophy for students, the first thing mentioned is that philosophy began with Thales, who said that everything is made of water. This is discouraging to the beginner, who is struggling — perhaps not very hard — to feel that respect for philosophy which the curriculum seems to expect.
- Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p.24
the device of art is that of ‘making things strange’ and of making form difficult, increasing the difficulty and time taken to perceive, since the process of perception in art is an aim in itself and must be prolonged
- Viktor Shklovskii, 1914, translated from Russian by (I think) Michael O'Toole and A. Shukman
There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.
- attrib. Steve Martin
Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde.
(If my grandmother had testicles she’d be my grandfather.)
- anonymous (courtesy of http://www.pass.to/glossary/Default.htm, 24/2/04)
On philosophers' possible worlds:
One is really inventing structures and then throwing away an infinite amount of them only to keep a very small finite remainder.
- Adrian Heathcote, 2005
Wat is groen maar niet gras? Het is stiekem toch gras.
- anonymous
The ethicists' marching chant:
– What do we want?
– The Good!
– When do we want it?
– Now!
- David Braddon-Mitchell (I think)
I prefer my own memory to paper. It works hands-free while driving, works without light late at night, and it’s waterproof in the shower. I especially like the way it improves everything I put into it. I have missed an occasional appointment. Perhaps that’s an improvement too.
- Ward Cunningham, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IsAnythingBetterThanPaper, recorded 1/9/2005
Ladies and Gentlemen, this ferry’s going out of service now. So when we get to Circular Quay, could everybody please get off, so this self-respecting crew can go to the pub. [Pause.] And remember, Sydney Ferries loves you.
- anonymous announcer, Sydney Ferries, 2005
I wanted him to die a natural death but someplace where I could watch.
- Garrison Keillor, Love Me
I fear the worst … OK, I fear the second-worst.
- Alison Moore
It’s terrible — all these people writing articles and only me to read them.
- attrib. Gary Bell, UCI
I got this book and I thought “that’s commendably thin” … but really it could have been commendably thinner.
- Ian Wills, July 2004
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
- attrib. Paul Valery
What was that story which the kid said “What did you bring that book about Down Under that I didn’t want to be read to out of up for” about about?
- adapted from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EndingWithaPreposition, November 2004
[on baseball players attributing their successes to god]
Apparently god cares a lot about baseball, but somehow missed the holocaust.
- an anonymous guest on Real Time with Bill Maher
- Bertrand Russell said something similar a long time ago, but for once he didn't manage to make it snappy.
Truth often represents the only way to keep a complex story straight.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
- Jamie Zawinski, http://www.jwz.org/hacks, viewed 17 September 2004
- also attrib. Greg Kuperberg
I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou.
- anonymous, alt.sysadmin.recovery
It is amazing what one can accomplish if one does not care who gets the credit.
- attrib. John Dove Isaacs
There are probably intelligent creatures on other planets. Otherwise, we should have had them here by now.
- anonymous, quoted by Sture Allén, "Of Thoughts and Words", Imperial College Press, 1994, p.3
I don’t know anything about the law, but I know what I like.
- Catie Flick
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise … surprise and fear … fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise… and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency… and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Our four… no… Amongst our weapons… Amongst our weaponry… are such elements as fear, surprise… I’ll come in again.
- Monty Python (<<http://www.jumpstation.ca/recroom/comedy/python/spanish.html,>> 22/4/04)
The Bush vision … is, among other things, a vision of perpetual war. … “World peace” used to be such an uncontroversially good thing that Miss America contestants, even at the height of the Cold War, could safely say that they were in favour of it. Now they’ll have to say, “As Miss America, I hope to help little children and work on behalf of United States world domination.”
- Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, October 14 & 21, 2002, p. 66
The Philosophers' Motto:
Ours not to do or die
Ours but to reason why
- Grossman
A jazz musician is someone who never plays the same thing once.
- anon.
Father, I cannot tell the truth.
- Epimenides/Washington
Quine was a wickedly gifted stylist. At any hole in the argument there would always be a perfectly turned metaphor to throw the reader off the scent. I think they were there to throw the author off the scent too, for Quine was not intellectually dishonest.
- Thomas Forster
Ist mir wurst.
- Einstein (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-epr)
Space is what stops everything from happening in the same place.
- attrib. Arthur C. Clarke
Space is what stops everything from happening in Cambridge.
- Jeremy Butterfield
I’m gonna tell Mom you slayed in front of me.
- Dawn Summers
The 80’s was a really hard thing to put up with.
- Steve Howe
Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you’re in.
- anon.
If [a statement that we should have confidence in a significance test] is true, then it is also true that tossing a coin twice for one head and one tail proves with 100% certainty that the coin is fair! For that matter, you could prove it by tossing the coin 0 times, or sticking it up your nostril.
- John Price
Careful. We don’t want to learn from this.
- Calvin and Hobbes
“Do you know how I got this beard?” asked the Biscuit.
“Grew it, I suppose."
"Not at all. Far from it. Very much otherwise. It’s a long story and reflects a good deal of discredit on some of the parties concerned. When I was a baby, you must know, I was a beautiful little girl. But one day my nurse took me out in my perambulator and stopped to talk to a soldier, as nurses will, and when her back was turned a wicked gypsy sneaked out of the bushes, carrying in her arms an ugly little boy with a beard. And do you know what she did? She stole me out of my perambulator and put that ugly little boy with a beard in my place. And ever since then I’ve been an ugly little boy with a beard.”
- P.G. Wodehouse
It takes about seven years of intensive work with me before I allow students to say I was their teacher
- Rosalyn Tureck
All grammars leak.
- Edward Sapir, Language, p. 38
In Liverpool you can’t exist as a poet just by having long hair and saying you’re a poet. You have to be able to talk football as well.
- Roger McGough
If you read enough Wittgenstein you begin to address your wife in Wittgensteinian aphorisms, which can be very exasperating for her.
- John Searle
Whereof I cannot think of the answer right now, thereof you must remain silent.
- Wittgenstein/Grossman
Alternative translation:
What I cannot speak about, you must pass over in silence.
If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.
- Wittgenstein/Frayn, http://stevepetersen.net/personal/wittgenstein-fog.html
“Je suis,” it seems to say, “ergo sum.”
- Tom Stoppard
Boyle was a great partisan of the mechanical philosophy; a theory which, by discovering some of the secrets of nature and allowing us to imagine the rest, is so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men.
- David Hume, "The history of England: from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the revolution in 1688", volume 2, p.653 of the American edition of 1836 (Philidelphia: M'Carty and Davis)
Kicking the trunk of the tree of knowledge until the possum of truth falls out.
- motto of the University of Queensland Psychonomic Seminar Series, 2006
(later changed to: Wobbling the flabby midriff of systematic observation until the belly button piercing of theoretical cohesion is dislodged.)