"Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country."

Ambrose Bierce
Courtesy Tren Griffin, 23 Nov 2004

"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you can find a rock."

Will Rogers
Courtesy Tren Griffin, 23 Nov 2004

"I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me."

Camillo DiCavour
Courtesy Tom Marshall via the seattlewireless DL

"There are two ways of explaining something. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. Just like programming."

Tren Griffin, personal communication, 22 Oct 2003

"We simultaneously overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact."

Rule coined by Roy Amara (but often misattributed to Paul Saffo) of the Institute for the Future. That rule is now called the "First Law of Technology": "A consistent pattern in our response to new technologies is we simultaneously overestimate the short-term impact and underestimate the long-term impact."

"The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics."

Gregory Benford
Elibron Quotations, http://www.elibronquotations.com/cat.phtml?sctnid=212&subsctnid=889
Courtesy Tren Griffin, Aug 2003

More:

"There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities -- potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry -- that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics."

"Everything that can be invented - has already been invented"

AttributedCharles Duell, Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, 1899. Cf.Henry Ellsworth, a patent commissioner in 1843 who said something similar in a report to Congress: "The advancement of the arts, from yearto year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of thatperiod when human improvement must end."

"If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much."

Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense
Widely quoted, no citation found

"The future is already here -- it's just unevenly distributed."

William Gibson, widely quoted but I haven't found a citation

"The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers. "

Edgar R. Fiedler in The Three Rs of Economic Forecasting-Irrational, Irrelevant and Irreverent , June 1977
Courtesy Tren Griffin, May 2003

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"

Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In full, according to brainyquote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. "

"Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely"

Mark Anderson, SNS, 23 April 2003

"Often wrong, never in doubt"

Used everywhere, often in reference to CEOs and other opinonated big-ego leaders; also used in reference to columnists, scientists, surgeons. A couple of sites attributed this to Lev Landau: "Cosmologists are often wrong, but never in doubt."