Quotes

There is a useful quotes page at talk.polywell. I'm going to list some of my faves here (you may have seen some of them before - if I find something good I like to replicate it):

"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." --George S. Patton

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so." - Artemus Ward

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

“Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and ‘fascist,’ while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.” Jean-François Revel

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. Source: The Book of Lies

Change is hard. The universe is full of inertia. And people who are either stupid or not interested. Sometimes both. Unrelenting effort is required. -- Simon

“Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.” -- Hendrik Tennekes

"You cannot be sure you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do." -- Milton Friedman

Some people get all their pleasures from negative emotions. -- Ouspensky

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. -- Sir Winston Churchill

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." -- Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. -- Thomas Jefferson

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness. -- Marcus Aurelius

[L]ook at the characters of your own associates. Even the most agreeable of them are difficult to put up with; and for that matter, it is difficult enough to put up with one's own self. -- Marcus Aurelius

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius