Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[weateallthepies]

"According to the fortune-cookie logic most people live by, the best things in life are free. That’s crap. I have a gold-plated robot that scratches the exact part of my back where my hands can’t reach, and it certainly wasn’t free"

-I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President (Josh Lieb)

[WT Sharpe]

.....Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
..........— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish dramatist and author. Man and Superman (1903).

[WT Sharpe]

.....It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
..........— Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), American novelist and social reformer. I, Candidate for Governor (1935).

[WT Sharpe]

.....If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
..........— George Orwell (né Eric Blair) (1903-1950), Indian-born British writer. Animal Farm (1945), from the introduction, which was suppressed but published by the N.Y. Times (1972). Quoted in The Great Thoughts (1996) by George Seldes.

[kennyc]

Great one Tom!

[WT Sharpe]

.....My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above 60 years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and professional life, if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age.
..........— Sir William Oscar (1849-1919), Canadian-born British physician. Address, Johns Hopkins University (February 22, 1905). George Seldes notes that an international sensation was caused by this address. Quoted in The Great Thoughts (1996) by George Seldes.

[WT Sharpe]

.....Had it not been a law of nature, that any impression, however ridiculous and absurd, and however contrary to fact, may be given in infancy, so as to be tenaciously retained through life, men could not have passed the previous ages of the world without discovering the gross errors in which they have been trained.
..........— Robert Owen (1771-1858), English socialist, philanthropist, and social reformer. "An Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark" (1816), quoted on page 170 of Socialist Thought: a Documentary History edited by Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (Morningside edition, 1993). A brief biography of Robert Owen begins on page 151, and the entire speech begins on page 154.

[BenG]

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.
T. K. Whipple, "The Myth of the Old West" from Study Out the Land: Essays

[WT Sharpe]

.....Man is a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.
..........— Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French mathematician, philosopher. Pensées (1670), #200.

[adityadubey]

I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but it's one of my favourite lines from On the Road by Jack Kerouac:

"A pain stabbed my heart as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world."

[kennyc]

Thanks for that adityadubey.

Nice one.

[WT Sharpe]

.....The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
..........— B. F. Skinner (1904-1990), American behavioral psychologist. Contingencies of Reinforcement (1969).

[WT Sharpe]

.....Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.
..........— Martin Luther (1483-1546), Father of the Reformation. Table Talk (1569), CCCLIII (tr. Hazlitt).

[BenG]

I've been reading In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard (An excellent book BTW) and searched for the poem that inspired the book's title and epigraph. The author, Charles Hamilton Sorley, was killed in World War I. This poem was found among his belongings after his death.

“When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead”

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the overcrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all this for evermore.

[kennyc]

Thanks for that Ben.