art never improves, but ... the material of art is never quite the same

--- T S Eliot, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent, suggested by Bret Battey a propos the previous Basho quote

"[The artist] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country - a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind - is a mind which changes... That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the different between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show."

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

--- Matsuo Basho. Cited by Miller & Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (2007), p. 227. Quoted on the web passim, but I couldn't find a citation.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things

--- Henry David Thoreau

Cited by http://quotationsbook.com/quote/44734/ to be from Walden (1854), ch. 1, p. 67 .

"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

I found it via Miller & Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (2007), p. 215

Unlike Soviet propagandists, who told people what to think, Russian propagandists tell people what they want to hear

--- Georgy Satarov, formerly aide to President Boris Yeltsin, now runs the INDEM think-tank; quoted by The Economist in "Enigma variations", first article in a special report on Russia, Nov 27th 2008

Quote in context:

So far the state has not interfered in people’s personal lives. It gives them freedom to make money, consume, travel abroad, drive foreign cars and listen to any music they like. They are even free to criticise the Kremlin on radio, in print and on the internet, though not on television. And although Russia’s elections are stage-managed, the support for Mr Putin is genuine. During the war in Georgia it hit almost 90% in opinion polls. The biased television coverage plays its part, but unlike Soviet propagandists, who told people what to think, Russian propagandists tell people what they want to hear, says Georgy Satarov, who used to be an aide to a former president, Boris Yeltsin, and now runs INDEM, a think-tank. What people want to hear, especially as they are getting richer, is that their country is “rising from its knees”, sticking its flag in the Arctic Circle, winning football games and chasing the Americans out of Georgia.

Science: testable and partially tested fantasies about the real world

--- attributed to Kenneth Boulding by JohnH Miller & Scott E Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (2007) p. 8

Science advances funeral by funeral

--- Unknown; many attributions

Miller & Page in their Complex Adaptive Systems (2007) p. 6 cite Paul Samuelson using it to describe economics, citing Samuelson's foreword in Michael Salzberg, Passion and Craft: Economists at work, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (1999)

Paul H. Smith in Reading the Enemy's Mind (2005) mentions Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Max Born (without attribution).

There are two ways to make a man richer: give him more money or curb his desires

--- Ascribed to Jean Jacques Rousseau passim, but may be a paraphrase from Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (p. 43):

“There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires. Modern societies have done the former spectacularly well, but by continuously whetting appetites they have at the same time managed to negate a share of their success”

the same shit you get in any other book—a little bit mystical, but really about going to work every day and keeping your head down

--- Entrepreneur, financier Russell "Rush" Simmons, describing his bestselling book “Do You! 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success,” as reported in a profile in The Economist, 18 Oct 2008

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it

--- Author and journalist Upton Sinclair, quoted by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational, Harper 2008 (hardcover), p. 227. Cited passim on the web, but I didn't find a reference to the source.

cheating is a lot easier when it’s a step removed from money

--- Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, in Predictably Irrational, Harper 2008 (hardcover), p. 219

... the exuberant wreckage of August

--- Poet Reg Saner, lines ending "The Fifth Season" (1983), collected in Fifty Years of American Poetry, Harry N Abrams 1984, p. 235

From the poem

... ... ... ... - or common starling
dead in mid-flight,
flashing dark color off preen oil
in wings barely stirring, whispering
ever so lightly as its slow turn falls
perfectly aimed
through air's open doors
toward the exuberant wreckage of August.

Great voices rising like smoke from time’s wreckage

--- Poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, lines from "The Living Room" (1982), collected in Fifty Years of American Poetry, Harry N Abrams 1984, p. 210

The full text of the poem is posted in the article Art into poetry by Peter Steele, Eureka Street, Jul/Aug 2005. Here's a fragment

... ... ... ... ... She enjoys
Bach in Heaven, his sacred Fantasies
For her alone spin like fabulous toys.
Lines shift and break, she finds it rich and right,
Such music out of black dots on the page,
Symbols, the world a symbol from her height,
Great voices rising like smoke from time’s wreckage.
...

All models are wrong, but some are useful

--- Statistician George E P Box, in "Science and statistics", Journal of the
American Statistical Association 71:791-799, quoted in Holling, C S, Stephen R Carpenter, William A Brock, and Lance H Gunderson, “Discoveries for Sustainable Futures”, Ch. 15 in Gunderson, Lance H and C S Holling, Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems, Island Press (2002), p. 409

Wikiquote provides some alternative citations and variations:

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."

--- Box, George E. P.; Norman R. Draper (1987). Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, p. 424, Wiley. ISBN 0471810339.

"Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."

--- Box and Draper, Empirical Model-Building, p. 74

"All models are false but some models are useful."

You can control risk. You can't control return.

--- Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, in a BusinessWeek interview with Christopher Farrell, 27 October 2008

Context:

Christopher Farrell: On Wall Street the talk is about return, but both of you emphasize risk.

Bogle: You can control risk. You can't control return. That's up to the beneficence that stock and bond markets are generous enough to bestow on us. That's why we talk about diversification.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

--- philosopher John Searle, via the virtual philosopher blog

According to brainyquote, the fuller version is

"Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself. "

the direct use of force is so poor a solution . . .

... the direct use of force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources and diverse ends that it is rarely employed save by small children and great nations.

--- David M. Friedman, Law’s Order, Princeton University Press (2000), Epilogue, p. 309

Quote in context:

The world has limited space and resources and is occupied by people with differing beliefs and objectives. From those simple facts comes the potential for conflict. I want to hunt a deer across the field where you are trying to grow wheat. You want to go swimming in the stream where I am trying to catch fish.

The simple and obvious solution is the direct use of physical force. You plant a thorn hedge around your wheat field to persuade me to hunt deer somewhere else. I hit you over the head with a tree branch to convince you to swim somewhere else.

This is not a very satisfactory solution to the problem; it is expensive in time, effort, scratches and bruises, and frequently fails of its objective. Indeed, the direct use of force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources and diverse ends that it is rarely employed save by small children and great nations.

Our society has a very large industry in the business of transferring money from one future to another: the insurance industry

--- David M. Friedman, Law’s Order, Princeton University Press (2000), p. 99, Chapter 9: As Much as Your Life is Worth, discussing optimal deterrence vs optimal insurance

Quote in a little context:

Our society has a very large industry in the business of transferring money from one future to another: the insurance industry. When you buy fire insurance you are giving up money in a future in which your house does not burn down in order to collect money in a future in which it does, transferring wealth from one future to another.

This is a most wonderful book: a marvelous introduction to the field of law & economics.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, mathematician and risk analyst, quoted in "How to keep your head in scary situations", New Scientist, 27 August 2008.

Context from the article:

Some argue that the media's focus on shocking or traumatic news stimulates the intuitive, non-thinking side of our decision-making and is at the root of many misjudgements. "We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press," says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, co-director of the Decision Research Laboratory at the London Business School. For an illustration of this, look no further than the vastly different perceptions of the risks from terrorism and lightning strikes, each of which has killed roughly the same number of Americans since records began.

A good example of how graphic media coverage can distort our perceptions of real events is the finding by James Ost at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and colleagues that people who were highly exposed to news reports of the terrorist bombings in London on 7 July 2005 were more likely to recall things about the attacks that they could never have witnessed, such as whether or not the bus that was blown up in Tavistock Square was moving at the time (Memory, vol 16, p 76).

. . .

Taleb thinks teaching people the facts about risks will not help to change behaviour. He says it would be more productive to teach people to screen out the information that distorts our decision-making than to teach them to use general information better. "If it was possible to teach people to adjust their behaviour to risks, we wouldn't have smokers. But we do. Our intelligence doesn't translate into behaviour the way we think it should."

Taleb is also quoted as saying:

"Put wax in your ears. People are more afraid of flying than driving because the press does not report car accidents. I never watch the news. Only listen to news you get in a social setting, the things people talk about. Our brains cannot deal with the overload of information. Having a lot of data is not good for anyone trying to make a decision."

Most mathematicians would sell their mothers into slavery to find out whether NP is distinct from P

--- mathematician Ian Stewart in "Solving postal problem could win million-dollar prize", New Scientist, 23 June 2008

Quote in context:

All this classification has led to a rather fundamental question, and whoever cracks it will take the Clay prize: is NP really any different from P? To put it plainly, if it is easy to check the accuracy of any proposed solution to a problem, must there be an easy way to solve the problem in the first place?

The smart money says NP problems need not be P: even if it is easy to check any proposed solution to a problem, you can't solve that problem efficiently by making repeated guesses and checking them in turn, because the sheer number of possibilities is too large. Think of opening a combination lock by trying every combination in turn. A single satisfying "click" greets the correct answer, but if you are dealing with a sophisticated lock you could spend a lifetime trying successive combinations. Guessing at a computer password is another example.

Even without the Clay prize as motivation, most mathematicians would sell their mothers into slavery to find out whether NP is distinct from P because it is such a baffling and fundamental problem. The truly tantalising thing about this conundrum is that it is an example of an "NP-complete" problem. NP-complete problems are a subset of NP problems and are special in that if an efficient solution to any of them can be found, then that same solution can be used to solve any NP problem efficiently. In other words, finding an efficient way to solve any NP-complete problem means we have shown that all NP problems are effectively P.

An adventure is just misfortune properly reconsidered

--- Michael Lindell, director of the Hazard Reducation and Recovery Center in College Station, Texas, quoted in "Gustav holdouts' tales give evacuees pause" by Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor, 4 September 2008

what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in

--- Terry Pratchett, through a character referring to journalist William de Worde, in The Truth (2001) p. 188

"The young man is also an idealist. He has yet to find out that what's in the public interest is not what the public is interested in."

Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools

--- Thomas Hobbes, (1651), Leviathan (1651) Pt. I, Ch. 4, quoted by Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought (2007), p. 151

A little more of the Hobbes quote:

Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

The context in Pinker leading up to this quote:

The theory of conceptual semantics, which proposes that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought, stands at the center of this circle, compatible with all of the complications. Word meanings can vary across languages because children assemble and fine-tune them from more elementary concepts. They can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest. And they can support our reasoning because they represent lawful aspects of reality – space, time, causality, objects, intentions, and logic – rather than the system of noises that developed in a community to allow them to communicate. Conceptual semantics fits, too, with our commonsense notion that words are not the same as thoughts, and indeed, that much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other.

It's supposed to be a cloud, not a wall

--- Pam Heath, responding to difficulties we were having sharing a file on Windows Live SkyDrive, personal email, 7 Sep 2008 (the same day I was failing to get tech support on a failure of Outlook to sync with Hotmail)

Words are fools / Who follow blindly, once they get a lead / But thoughts are kingfishers . . .

--- Siegfried Sassoon, in Limitations, quoted by Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought (2007), p. 151

Excerpt from the poem:

Limitations

If you could crowd them into forty lines!
Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;
All that you want is waiting in your head,
For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.

. . .

You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,
And all your life will waken with a cry:
Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing
And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?...

. . .

I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools
Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.
But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools
Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need
Is just that flash of joy above your dream.
So, when those forty platitudes are done,
You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream
That wandered through your childhood; and the sun
Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters....
And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.

Harvard Business School is a factory for unhappy people

--- "Cedric", a former HBS classmate, quoted by Philip Delves Broughton in Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, Penguin: 2008, p. 268

Quote in context:

I met Cedric for lunch in a noodle bar close to his office in Manhattan. He had gotten the job he wanted, at the investment bank . . . We began talking about everyone in our class and how they were getting along. Several had already left the jobs they had taken upon graduating, while others were seriously considering doing so. Why, I asked Cedric, had they taken these jobs in the first place? It's not as though we didn't know what they would involve.

"HBS," he said, hoisting a ball of noodles to his mouth, "is a factory for unhappy people. We have so many choices, and yet so few people seem happy about that. It just makes them anxious. And more anxious. And then they make terrible decisions about their lives. But," he added, "these are mostly very good people. People from good families with good values. I can't figure out what happens. I think they just get desperate."

Before the garden maker designs the garden he must thoroughly design the owner

"Before the garden maker designs the garden he must thoroughly design the owner. Unless the garden maker can keep the owner in check, the garden design will fail from the beginning. A garden maker who can't design an owner can't design a garden either."

--- Mirei Shigemori, master of the modern Japanese dry landscape garden, "Shinsakuteiki" in Shigemori Mirei Sakuhinshū: Niwa-Kamigami e no Apurōchi, cited in Christian Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori: Modernizing the Japanese Garden, Stone Bridge Press: 2005, p. 116, footnote 63.

Politely persistent people persuade politicians

Tip #8 from "10 Strategies for Using Congressional Town Hall Meetings to Advance Your Legislative Agenda"

Second Life mania parallels the virtual world enthusiasm of the mid to late Nineties: All dressed up, somewhere to go, not enough to say or do

--- Jonathan Grudin, researcher, 3 June 2005, personal communication

When you first come, you realize immediately why they left

--- Water Laumb, a herdsman from Minnesota, describing a visit to his Mexican employees' home village. The punchline to an excellent story in the Christian Science Monitor, "U.S. farmers see how their employees live back in Mexico," 19 Aug 2008:

"When you first come, you realize immediately why they left," says Mr. Laumb. "And then 10 minutes later you realize why they all want to come home."

Fiction is a simulation that runs on the software of our minds

Keith Oatley, professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, in a New Scientist article "The science of fiction", issue 2662, 25 June 2008, page 42-43

Oakley reports on various studies done with his collaborators. From the article:

We found that fiction readers had substantially greater empathy as measured by the mind-in-the-eyes test, and also performed somewhat better on the interpersonal perception test than people who read predominantly non-fiction.

It's not just reading preferences of different personality types; they controlled for this. The effect is pretty immediate:

We found that people who read the Chekhov story underwent larger changes in personality than those who read the control text - although the types of changes varied from person to person. Results from the emotions questionnaire indicated that the personality changes were mediated by the emotions experienced while reading: a person's emotional state is known to influence their scores on personality tests.

...

This is why I liken fiction to a simulation that runs on the software of our minds. And it is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.

You can only really understand something when you know what it is not

--- Steven Pinker, The stuff of thought, Viking 2007 (hardcover), p. 91

the keen pleasure that comes from taking up a text and leaving it tighter, clearer, and more accurate

--- John McIntyre, Copy Editor of the Baltimore Sun, in a profile of him by Richard O'Mara, The Christian Science Monitor July 14, 2008

Quote in context:

“Those who do not edit do not understand the keen pleasure that comes from taking up a text and leaving it tighter, clearer, and more accurate. Working against deadline provides a structure and a stimulus. And it is far from widely understood how smart and funny copy editors are as a group.”

There are no side effects—only effects

--- John D. Sterman(2002) “All models are wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist: The Jay Wright Forrester Prize Lecture.” System Dynamics Review Vol. 18, No. 4, (Winter 2002): 501–531

Full quote: There are no side effects—only effects. Those we thought of in advance, the ones we like, we call the main, or intended, effects, and take credit for them. The ones we didn’t anticipate, the ones that came around and bit us in the rear—those are the ‘‘side effects’’.

Advertising is the price companies pay for being un-original

--- Quoted by designer Yves Behar in his TED Talk on February 29, 2008

There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but...

--- Lord Chesterfield, implicitly criticizing multi-tasking, in a letter to his son in the 1740s, quoted by Christine Rosen in "The Myth of Multitasking," The New Atlantis, Number 20, Spring 2008, pp. 105-110.

In full: "There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time"

a gaffe occurs not when someone lies, but when they say what they really think

Ascribed to journalist Michael Kinsley, eg by Michael Cooper, In Balancing Act on National Security, a Stumble, New York Times 25 June 2008

See also The Columbia World of Quotations (1996) #32773, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth," Guardian (London, Jan. 14, 1992)

The challenge for the government [is] managing the creative destruction so that capitalism does not ... destroy itself for ... political reasons

--- Brad DeLong paraphrasing Schumpeter, in Creative Destruction's Reconstruction: Joseph Schumpeter Revisited, The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007

Fuller quote:

“Schumpeter, like his contemporary Karl Polanyi, feared for the long-term survival of capitalism. Bureaucrats and ideologues threatened by creative destruction would resist it. The challenge for the government in managing the market thus becomes not just the Adam Smithian task of securing property rights, enforcing contracts, and providing civil order, but also the tremendously difficult job of managing the creative destruction so that capitalism does not undermine and destroy itself for essentially political reasons. Schumpeter did not think the beast could be managed, because democracy is hostile to great inequalities, and socialism even more so.”

Four thousand pieces of a Porsche are more difficult to value than a Porsche itself and the sum of the parts does not equal the whole

--- Bill Michael of KPMG, an accountancy firm, quoted in a story about the role of fair value accounting in the sub-prime debacle, Black Mark, The Economist, May 15th 2008

Quote in context:

"The fact that deciding on a fair value has been so tough reflects the complexity of the products as much as the state of the markets. Setting a price for derivatives that have been repeatedly repackaged, overcollateralised and subordinated is difficult in any conditions. “Four thousand pieces of a Porsche are more difficult to value than a Porsche itself and the sum of the parts does not equal the whole,” says Bill Michael of KPMG, an accountancy firm (choosing an appropriate car)."

A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong

--- Shang Yang (c. 390 - 338 BCE), chief adviser to the prince of Qin, author of the reforms that led Qin to conquer the rest of China.

Shanqiunshu 20, quoted in Mark Elvin, “Was There a Transcendental Breakthrough in China?,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany 1980), p. 352, quoted in K. Armstrong, The Great Transformation (New York 2006), p. 335

As given in Armstrong: "A state that uses good people to govern the wicked will be plagued by disorder and destroyed. A state that uses the wicked to govern the good always enjoys order and becomes strong."

Why would we expect elected officials to immediately change policy based on randomised trial research if we can't get doctors to wash their hands?

--- Lawrence Sherman, a criminologist at the University of Cambridge and the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, quoted in Science rules OK: Running societies the rational way, New Scientist, 21 May 2008

Extended quote:

There is another barrier to evidence-based policy - just because the evidence is there does not compel anyone to use it. School driving lessons, Scared Straight programmes and many other policies continue despite solid evidence that they do not work. "What's not there is the automatic transfer of knowledge to practice," says Sherman. He points out that we have known since the 1850s that doctors can save lives by washing their hands more, yet in intensive care units the failure of doctors to wash their hands is still a major cause of death.

"Why would we expect elected officials to immediately change policy based on randomised trial research if we can't get doctors to wash their hands?" Sherman believes that policy documents, and journalists, should be clearer about the quality of evidence for new policies to help the good ones make their mark.

Greatness can be doled out only with an equal measure of weakness

Janna Levin, on Kurt Godel and Alan Turing, the subjects of her book "A madman dreams of Turing Machines" 2006, p. 3

Quote in context:

"Their genius is a testament to our own worth, and antidote to insignificance; and their bounteous flaws are luckless but seemingly natural complements, as though greatness can be doled out only with an equal measure of weakness."

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be

--- Vint Cerf, in What I've Learned: Vint Cerf by Cal Fussman, Esquire April 24, 2008

You must set out to enjoy it

--- H.M. Queen Elizabeth II, on how she maintains her enthusiasm for the endless round of tedious public engagements.

Reported by Jeremy Paxman in On Royalty, Penguin 2006, p. 228, citing Rev. Charlie Wilson “a Church of Scotland minister who considers the queen a good friend, [who] says he one asked her how she maintained her enthusiasm.” This is what she told him.

Avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less

--- Former poet laureate Robert Hass paraphrasing Basho, cited by Howard Norman in "On the Trail of a Ghost", National Geographic Magazine Feb 2008, p. 143

PowerPoint presentations damage your brain. If you look at too many, you become immoral.

--- Yossi Vardi, Israeli entrepreneur, quoted in Nick Paumgarten, "Smart, Useless", The New Yorker, 16 Oct 2006 - an article about Gadgetoff, an annual convocation of gear-heads. Found via a Vardi profile in The Economist, 5 Jan 2008.

Quote in context:

"The person who perhaps best embodied the smart-and-useless parameter was Yossi Vardi, the tech investor and distinguished prankster, who had come to New York from Israel with his older brother Didi. Vardi, who is sixty-four, helped found ICQ, the Instant Messaging program. When asked what he planned to do with his three and a half minutes, he said, “I’m going to demonstrate how you can transfer data faster with snails than with broadband.” He said that he had sixty PowerPoint slides, but, he warned, “PowerPoint presentations damage your brain. If you look at too many, you become immoral.”

"In the church, he presented meticulously researched, technically correct, but completely ridiculous charts and graphs. He compared various data-transfer systems: ISDN, ADSL, Wi-Fly (that is, pigeons). Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water. (There are flaws, however. As Vardi noted, “In some regions, most notably France, culinary habits may pose a denial-of-service problem.”) Dubno rang a bell and shooed Vardi from the stage."

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful

--- Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway 2004 Chairman's Letter (PDF)

Quote in context:

"Over the 35 years, American business has delivered terrific results. It should therefore have been easy for investors to earn juicy returns: All they had to do was piggyback Corporate America in a diversified, low-expense way. An index fund that they never touched would have done the job. Instead many investors have had experiences ranging from mediocre to disastrous.

"There have been three primary causes: first, high costs, usually because investors traded excessively or spent far too much on investment management; second, portfolio decisions based on tips and fads rather than on thoughtful, quantified evaluation of businesses; and third, a start-and-stop approach to the market marked by untimely entries (after an advance has been long underway) and exits (after periods of stagnation or decline). Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful."

Themistocles was no angel...

Brian Strauss, The Battle of Salamis (Simon & Schuster, 2004) p. 13

Full quote:

Themistocles was brilliant, farsighted, creative, tireless, magnanimous, courageous, and eloquent. Yet it as also true that during the course of his career he lied, cheated, blustered, and threatened; grabbed credit for others' ideas; manipulated religion; took bribes and extorted protection money; served up insults and pursued vendetta; and ended his days in exile, a traitor. In short, Themistocles was no angel, but seraphim could not have saved the Greeks.

Nothing is true in tactics

--- Commander Randy "Duke" Cunningham, U.S. Navy, Vietnam, as cited in Robert L. Shaw, Fighter Combat, Tactics and Maneuvering (Naval Institute Press, 1985), x, as cited in Brian Strauss, The Battle of Salamis (Simon & Schuster, 2004), footnote on p. 176

This has been interpreted to mean that each and every fight has it's own special set of circumstances (here), or that everything is relative to the particular situation.

The US Constitution assumes that the chief executive will work to be king . . .

"The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches."

David Mamet, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal': An election-season essay", Village Voice, March 11th, 2008

If we seek truth, we shall find beauty

Architect Moshe Safdie, at TED 2007 quoting a poem he wrote years ago (video - this is at the end)

Full text courtesy of stereopsis

He who seeks truth shall find beauty.
He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.
He who seeks order shall find gratification.
He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed.
He who considers himself the servant of his fellow beings shall find the joy of self expression.
He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance.
Arrogance is incompatible with nature.
Through nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of man, we shall seek truth.
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.

Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking

--- Singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen

Source: Jon Pareles, "At lunch with Leonard Cohen: Philosophical Songwriter on a Wire", The New York Times, October 11, 1995, available at: http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/news3.html

In context:

I've always found theology a certain kind of delightful titillation. Theology or religious speculation bears the same relationship to real experience as pornography does to lovemaking. They're not entirely unconnected. I mean, you can get turned on. One of the reasons that they're both powerful is that they ignore a lot of other material and they focus in on something very specific. In these days of overload, it's very restful to know, at last, what you're talking about.

Any policy decision is a bet

Edmund Thomas, personal communication, 1 October 2007

Let us cultivate our garden

--- Voltaire, closing words of Candide (1759). In the marvellous George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003), Robert Darnton argues that the novel poses the question, "How can happiness be found?" Voltaire's answer, he suggests, is "Happiness lies in the cultivation of the garden."

Quote in context, in the translation by Philip Littell; available from Gutenberg.org:

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to
their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful
crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent
pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after
the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service
or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide:

"There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds:
for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of
Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had
not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had
not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would
not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our
garden."

If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say

--- Philosopher Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, Oxford University Press 1989, Introduction, p. 9 (Google Books)

In context: The right attitude in philosophy is to accept aims that we can achieve only fractionally and imperfectly, and cannot be sure of achieving even to that extent. It means in particular not abandoing the pursuit of truth, even though if you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.