Daily Quotes

[Tamrin]

Monday’s Quotes:

A person hears only what they understand


If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he
were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be


Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen


At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you


We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds;
our planet is the mental institution of the universe


None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free


There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity


Bro. Wolfgang Goethe
German writer and polymath
(Initiated this day 1780, in Amalia Lodge, Weimar)



Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away

[Tamrin]

Why should a worm turn?
It's probably just the same on the other side


As I understand it, sport is hard work for which you do not get paid


A good storyteller is a person with a good memory
and hopes other people haven't


Humor is merely tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn


If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers


I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial


An epitaph is a belated advertisement for
a line of goods that has been discontinued


Irvin S Cobb
American author, humourist and columnist (Old Judge Priest)
(Born this day 1876)



He is a self-made man and worships his creator

[Tamrin]

Damn you! I will not grant your cursed soul vicarious tears or a single glance
And I swear to you by the garden of the angels, I swear by the miracle-working
icon, and by the fire and smoke of our nights: I will never come back to you


You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms. The rim of the
sky will be the colour of hard crimson, and your heart, as it was then, will be on fire


A new epoch has begun. You and I will wait for it together


All has been looted, betrayed, sold; black death's wing flashed ahead


I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies.
Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise


No foreign sky protected me, no stranger's wing shielded my face


I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place


Anna Akhmatova
Russian anti-Soviet poet (Thinking of the Sun)
(Born this day 1889)



I am that shadow on the threshold defending my remnant peace

[Tamrin]

We are recorders and reporters of the facts — not judges of the behavior we describe


Certainly there are many sorts of truth in the universe, and many aspects of truth must
be taken into account if man is to live most effectively in the social organization to which
he belongs. But in regard to matter — the stuff of which both non-living materials and
living organisms are made — scientists believe that there is no better way of obtaining
information than that provided by human sense organs. No theory, no philosophy, no
body of theology, no political expediency, no wishful thinking, can provide a satisfactory
substitute for the observation of material objects and of the way in which they behave


With the right of the scientist to investigate most aspects of the material universe,
most persons will agree; but there are some who have questioned the applicability of
scientific methods to an investigation of human sexual behavior ... It is as though the
dietician and biochemist were denied the right to analyze foods and the processes of
nutrition, because the cooking and proper serving of food may be rated a fine art, and
because the eating of certain foods has been considered a matter for religious regulation


There is an honesty in science which leads to a certain acceptance of reality.
There are some who, finding the ocean an impediment to the pursuit of their
designs, try to ignore its existence. If they are unable to ignore it because of
its size, they try to legislate it out of existence, or try to dry it up with a sponge.
They insist that the latter operation would be possible if enough sponges were
available, and if enough persons would wield them. There is no ocean of
greater magnitude than the sexual function, and there are those who believe
that we would do better if we ignored its existence, that we should not try to
understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop
at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pro-
nouncements, and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality


It cannot be too frequently emphasized that the behavior of any animal must
depend upon on the nature of the stimulus which it meets, its anatomic and
physiologic capacities, and its background of previous experience. Unless it has
been conditioned by previous experience, an animal should respond identically
to identical stimuli, whether they emanate from some part of its own body, from
another individual of the same sex, or from an individual of the opposite sex


Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual.
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black
nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals
with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to
force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each
and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual
behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex


The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform


Alfred Kinsey
American entomologist, sexologist
(Born this day 1894)



The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and
face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent
shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion
of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulat-
ion, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a
duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity

[Tamrin]

1 of 2:

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise
of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity


We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes
topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the
mathematician as simply to determine the truth or falsity of propositions


We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge


Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition


I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used
to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past


If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
There are several theorems which say almost exactly that


A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and
subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine


Alan Turing, OBE, FRS
British mathematician and cryptographer (Turing Machine)
(Centenary of birth, 1912)



We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done

[Tamrin]

2 of 2:

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency


We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields


A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it
could deceive a human into believing that it was human


The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines
are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer


It is convenient to have a measure of the amount of work involved in a computing
process, even though it be a very crude one ... We might, for instance, count the
number of additions, subtractions, multiplications, divisions, recordings of numbers


I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general
educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to
speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted


Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not
rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then sub-
jected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain


Alan Turing, OBE, FRS
(Centenary of birth, 1912)



No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre
brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company

[Tamrin]

Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be
something. Here's a place to build a home. It isn't the land — there's always more land.
It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt


The faith itself was simple; he believed in the dignity of man. His ancestors were
Huguenots, refugees of a chained and bloody Europe. He had learned their stories
in the cradle. He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was
a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow


In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood
ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the
first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had
begun here and it would spread eventually over all the earth. But it had begun HERE


The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling,
but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility,
which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristo-
cracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But
he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himself


The great experiment. In democracy. The equality of rabble. In not much more
than a generation they have come back to CLASS. As the French have done. What
a tragic thing, that Revolution. Bloody George was a bloody fool. But no matter.
The experiment doesn't work. Give them fifty years, and all that equality rot is gone


We are never prepared for so many to die. So you understand? No one is.
We expect some chosen few. We expect an occasional empty chair, a toast to dear
departed comrades. Victory celebrations for most of us, a hallowed death for a few.
But the war goes on. And men die. The price gets ever higher. Some officers can
pay no longer. We are prepared to lose some of us, but never all of us. But that is
the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself
totally. And yet, if they all die, a man must ask himself, will it have been worth it?


So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor
joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to
black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question


Michael Shaara
American science and historical fiction writer (The Killer Angels)
(Born this day 1928)



There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield

[Tamrin]

We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is,
or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it


I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free,
if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure


If your happiness depends on what somebody else does,
I guess you do have a problem


If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it.
If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim


As long as we believe in sequential time, we see
becoming, instead of being. Beyond time, we're all one


We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find our-
selves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill


Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true


Richard Bach
American author (Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
(Born this day 1936)



Any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits.
Perfect speed, my son, is being there

[Tamrin]

I am interested in a phase that I think we are entering.
I call it "teleological evolution," evolution with a purpose


I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting
process, and we are constantly learning from experience


I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifest-
ation of the error-correcting process of evolution


That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the prob-
lems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve


Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience


It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be
of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning,
whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter


The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more


Jonas Salk, MD
US Medical researcher, author and inventor (Polio vaccine)
(Died this day 1995)



There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?

(about his vaccine)

[Tamrin]