Quotes

1. “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

A comment on this quote also worth quoting:

“Thanks to Historians, the past is also not what it used to be.”

Paul Valery and ‘RR’. Link.

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2. “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” (Carl Sagan)

Though the line is sometimes blurry, in general a scientist should never tell you what to think, rather he should tell you how to do it. People who are used to being told what to think often don’t think all that much. Thinking takes a lot of work and practise.

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3. “economists can predict things very well unless something changes.” (John Emerson/maybe Galbraith said something similar – I’ve not been able to find this quote elsewhere online though).

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4. “Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist — how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!” (Bill Watterson)

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5. “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” (Bertrand Russell)

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6. “Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.” (Agatha Christie)

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7. “If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.” (Linus Pauling)

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8. “The best way to remember your wife’s birthday is to forget it once.” (Joseph Cossman)

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9. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” (Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit – found here)