|
|
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
--Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
"Men in power are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth."
--Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
--Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn
"When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind."
--C. S. Lewis
"One thing I have learned in a long life is that our science, measured against reality, is primitive and child-like. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what Nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware."
--Albert Einstein.
"We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert."
--J Robert Oppenheimer.
"I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."
--Richard Feynman
"An old legal proverb states, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." Scientists chaining themselves to lamp posts and blocking roads in my opinion is pounding the table.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
--H.L. Menchken
"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of the old Soviet state
"Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists."
--Thomas Sowell
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
--Groucho Marx
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character."
--Martin Luther King, Jr. August 1963
"Fear is the foundation of most governments."
--James Madison
"We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements … profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster."
--Carl Sagen
"If you are criticizing decisions made in the fog of war, you don't understand the nature of the problem. Judge the quality of the corrections, not the errors, and we'll get to the other side of this."
- Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays, March 2020
"Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you."
- John Wooden, UCLA Basketball Coach and graduate of Purdue University
"It is usually futile to talk facts and analysis to
people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance."
- Thomas Sowell, @ThomasSowell, March 2020
"Engineering problems will first manifest themselves in a schedule slip someplace.
Generally, as I have learned since then, if you have a technical problem someplace or
some kind of a problem, it will manifest itself first as a schedule slip. Then, it will
eventually become a cost problem. If you wait to see the cost problem, something has already happened
over which you have long since lost control. I always believed in the old adage, ‘Time is money’;
but if you could control the schedule, you could, in fact, control the cost ultimately in what was
going on."
- LtGen Hans "Whitey" Driessnack, USAF
"As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability.
The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then
they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable
then it is not science. When I make predictions, I am not speaking as a scientist.
I am speaking as a story-teller, and my predictions are science-fiction rather than science.
The predictions of science-fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate. Their purpose is to imagine
what might happen rather than to describe what will happen."
- Freeman Dyson
"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
- Pablo Picasso
"The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war."
— General Norman Schwarzkopf
"I love deadlines; I especially like the SWOOSHING sound they make as
they fly past."
— Douglas Adams
"Predicting is difficult, especially the future."
— Niels Bohr
"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man
who points out where the strong man stumbled, or where a doer of deeds could
have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who
errs, and who comes up short again and again, who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause.
The man who at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst,
if he fails, fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be
with those cold timid souls who never knew victory or defeat."
— Teddy Roosevelt
"This might a a compelling view, but how does this theory make contact with
reality?"
— Brian Greene, speaking at the University of Colorado on String Theory,
when encountering someone with a great new idea based on theory.
"He who every morning plans the transaction of the
day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through
the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the
disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos
will soon reign."
— Victor Hugo
Organisations avoid dealing with low frequency
catastrophic events because of the gravity of the balance sheet."
— Professor Eben Moglen
"The more you’re told that you have to believe something,
the more you should question it."
- Henry Fountain
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes,
our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter
the state of facts and evidence."
- John Adams
© 2021 R.M. Schneider