Quotes

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

Help us [think] they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence

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 --- Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc.," 1964, quoted by Etymonline The future offers very little hope for those who expect tha...
Sunday, March 22, 2026

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it

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 --- Robert Frost, quoted by Anneliese Burgess in  Skuld, skaamte en die krag van 'n geheime innerlike lewe , March 2026
Friday, March 20, 2026

No war is over until the enemy says it’s over

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 --- Jim Mattis, quoted by Ned Temko in  What constitutes victory in an ‘asymmetric’ war with Iran? , CS Monitor, March 2026 In context Mr. ...
Wednesday, March 11, 2026

quantum mechanics [is] a theory that predicts very well and explains very badly

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 --- Nick Ormrod , quoted in  A new understanding of causality could fix quantum theory’s fatal flaw by  Ciarán Gilligan-Lee in New Scienti...
Friday, February 27, 2026

We never left religion. Instead, we found new gods.

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 --- Joel Halldorf,  Professor of Church History at University College Stockholm,  Not So Secular Sweden , Comment magazine, January 2026, ...
Thursday, February 26, 2026

change the question from, "Is it good?" to "Is this good for me?"

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 --- Samuel Mead,  https://www.instagram.com/samuelmeadarts/ , Instagram post , 13 February 2026 Voice over transcript (punctuation added) W...
Friday, February 20, 2026

Science discovers, art digests

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 --- Brian Eno,  What art does, an unfinished theory (2025: 111) Excerpt Politics all too often makes the individual feel left outside with...
Monday, February 16, 2026

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have . . . . art is what you can get away with

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 --- Andy Warhol From Goodreads , no citation An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for ...
Friday, February 13, 2026

You are always at the mercy of your stupidest competitors

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 --- Craig McCaw, quoted by Tren Griffin, in The 1990s Telecom Bubble. What Can We Learn? , November 2017 In context The $14 billion dollar ...
Saturday, January 03, 2026

our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out ever more terribly against a modern background

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 Guy Davenport, from The Geography of the Imagination: 40 Essays (2024:98), in the essay “Prehistoric Eyes” Excerpt Man, it would seem, doe...
Friday, January 02, 2026

there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it

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 --- Paul Kingsnorth, in AI Demonic: A Spiritual Exploration of AI , From the Nov/Dec, 2023 issue of Touchstone Excerpt For the last two yea...
Sunday, December 28, 2025

the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive

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 Ecclesiastes 4:1 to 4:3 . Links to BibleHub parallel translations. New International Version: Again I looked and saw all the oppression th...
Wednesday, December 17, 2025

no major, forward-looking future visions have taken root in our collective imagination since smartphones

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 --- Sarah Housley, in an opinion piece for New Scientist,  We have run out of new visions of the future. This needs to change , Sep 2025 In...
Saturday, December 06, 2025

A nightmare is a failed dream, a dream that, by not “handling” anxiety, has failed in its role as the guardian of sleep

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 --- Irving Yalom , quoted by Anneliese Burgess in  Oor die lewe se dwarswinde , Binne+Land , 9 November 2025 Burgess writes Ek vind Irvin Y...
Thursday, December 04, 2025

the purpose of planning is to develop the planner, not to develop the plan

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 --- Angus Fletcher, in conversation with Russ Roberts about his book, Primal Intelligence , EconTalk, Nov 3, 2025 ,  11:25 Russ Roberts : B...
Tuesday, October 14, 2025

in the midst of this world | we stroll along the roof of hell | gawking at flowers

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 --- Kobayashi Issa, trans. Sam Hamill, quoted in Joel Pulliam, 45. Tokyo Cemetaries In full 世の中は地獄の上の花見哉 ( Google Translate ) in the midst ...
Friday, October 03, 2025

Goodhart’s law: the notion that, once you start using a given measure as a target, it stops being a useful measure

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 --- via Feedback, New Scientist , April 2025 : Feedback is irresistibly reminded of Goodhart’s law: the notion that, once you start using a...

In the sublime war of man against Reality man has but one weapon, the imagination

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 --- Benjamin de Casseres , according to QuoteInvestigator . Often misattributed to various people, including Lewis Carroll and Jules de Gau...
Monday, September 29, 2025

When the politicians become historians, that becomes propaganda and not history

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 --- Amir Khosru Mahmud Chowduhury, a former lawmaker from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, quoted in  Students toppled a dictat...
Saturday, September 27, 2025

Speak to one person like it's the last time

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 --- @thestoicmanual , post  on X, quoted by Anneliese Burgess, " 'n Week van wolke, ... ," Binne+Land, 28 Jun 2025 A beautifu...
Thursday, September 18, 2025

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

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 --- Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) American politician and author, Godkin Lecture, Harvard (1985) ( Source via Wist )
Sunday, September 07, 2025

Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.

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 --- English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), quoted by Joseph Epstein in  The Unbearable Ubiquity of Trump , WSJ, 5 Sep 2025 From E...
Tuesday, August 26, 2025

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete

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 --- attrib. to the Buddha by Jack Kornfield, cited to p. 28 in Kornfield's Buddha’s Little Instruction Book by Fake Buddha Quotes , vi...
Wednesday, August 20, 2025

each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being

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 --- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, part 3, prop. 6, quoted in Wikipedia/conatus Excerpt from the  R. H. M. Elwes translation on Gutenberg.org VI. ...
Saturday, August 09, 2025

Your greatest obstacle is not being copied; it’s being ignored

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 --- Will Parker Anderson, in  How much content should you give away? , Writers Circle on  Substack , 9 august 2025 Excerpt Your greatest ob...
Friday, August 08, 2025

like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls

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--- (ascr. to) Anthropologist Matt Cartmill, e.g. by Quodid Full quote As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certaint...
Thursday, August 07, 2025

autumnal recrudescence of the amatory urge

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 --- Via Mark Crawford, 7 Aug 2025: when juvenile birds start singing again in the fall. Mating is tied to day length, and so it feels like ...
Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

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 --- poet Mary Oliver, from " Sometimes " quoted Geraldine Brooks in Memorial Days, mentioned in Karen Campbell's review, A no...
Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Systemic reforms without credible individual sanctions breed cynicism, while charging officers without structural reform guarantees a revolving door of future cases

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--- Thaddeus Johnson, a former police officer and now a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, quoted in Henry Gass & Patrik ...
Monday, July 21, 2025

The way we talk about politics shapes the kind of politics we end up with

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--- cultural historian Tom Wright talking to David Runciman, The History of Bad Ideas: Charisma , 26 June 2025, at time code 2:40 Excerpt T...
Thursday, July 10, 2025

Sotheby’s had “no monopoly on amorality, but as in so many other areas, they practised it better than anyone else”

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 --- James Stourton, in Rogues & Scholars: A History of the London Art World: 1945-2000, reviewed by Terry Hartle , CS Monitor, March 10...
Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Where the book doesn’t reach, the extremist arrives first

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 --- Judge Omar Weslati, quoted in  This judge grew up with nothing. Now he makes sure that children have books , Meriem Belhiba, CS Monitor...
Tuesday, June 10, 2025

especially as a PPE student, my time wasn't about figuring out what others thought but figuring out what I thought and being prepared to defend it

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 --- Sarah Stewart Johnson , "Bon Voyage 2024 Speech, Oxford as Chrysalis," The American Oxonian , Winter 2025 A wonderful summary...
Monday, June 09, 2025

Ons irrasionele instinkte het 'n verlangse verwantskap met intuïsie, is 'n huisvriend van samesweringsteorieë en het 'n nasaat in subjektiewe moraliteit

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 --- Piet Croucamp, in Die ontwrigting + Johannesburg kan mistroostig wees , Binne+Land 3 Jun 2025 Quote in context Die mens se vermoë om i...
Monday, June 02, 2025

live deliberately. unfollow the noise. read poetry daily. watch shadows shift.

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 --- @fossilisedflowers Instagram post , May 18, 2025, via Annelies Burgess,  Klein treë na 'n doelbewuste lewe , May 25, 2025 Post in ...
Monday, May 12, 2025

Se non è vero, è molto ben Trovato

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--- Giordano Bruno, quoted by Willem Kempen in  'n Ode aan onkunde, onvermoë en onwilligheid , Binne+Land, 9 May 2025 Extract Die Renais...
Friday, April 25, 2025

[myths are things that] never happened but always are

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 --- Sallust, from On the Gods and the Cosmos , per Wikiquote/Sallustius , via Meghan Cox Gurdon's WSJ review of Natalie Lawrence's...
Monday, March 24, 2025

When policymakers buy the hype, the public pays for it

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 ---  Eryk Salvaggio , in  Most Researchers Do Not Believe AGI Is Imminent. Why Do Policymakers Act Otherwise? , Tech Policy Press , 19 Mar ...
Monday, March 10, 2025

ne vous faites pas si petit, vous n’etes pas si grand” (Don't make yourself so small, you’re not that big)

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---C Scot Hicks and David V Hicks, translators of Plutarch, The Lawgivers: The parallel lives of Numa Pompilius and Lycurgus of Sparta , Cir...
Thursday, February 06, 2025

Conspiracy culture gets the facts wrong, but the feeling is right

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 --- Naomi Klein, in a July 2024  New Scientist interview  about her latest book, Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world . In context I...
Thursday, January 30, 2025

Science is always good for books. And adventure is good.

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 --- Ruth Krauss, "How to write a book," How to make an earthquake , 1954, pp. 27-28 Text: You can write books about anything. For...
Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are

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--- attrib. to José Ortega y Gasset ( Man and Crisis , 1964), in Cindy Engel,  Another Self: How Your Body Helps You Understand Others (202...
Monday, January 13, 2025

Myths represent another way of understanding history, beyond the simply rational

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 Anselm Kiefer, 1991(?), from an excerpt in the Wim Wender documentary Anselm: Das Rauschen der Zeit  (2023). In audio over what seems to be...
Tuesday, January 07, 2025

for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun

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 --- R Buckminster Fuller, in "No More Secondhand God," collected in No More Secondhand God and Other Writings By R. Buckminster F...
Monday, December 02, 2024

‘kind and ordered’ is a better goal [than justice]

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The robot valet Uncharles, on the last page of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model (2024), “Epilogue,” p. 373. Excerpt “Justice is a human-m...

I have no duties and in their absence the world creeps in

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The robot valet Uncharles, in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model (2024), “Interconnection IV,” p. 251. Uncharles has been told that he’s be...

I live every day like it's my last: with a lot of yelling, screaming, and gnashing of teeth

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 --- Weird Al Yankovic, interviewed in the documentary  Weird Al: Never Off Beat (2023), around time code 31:12
Sunday, November 24, 2024

It’s done in seconds and 34 years

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 --- Designer Paula Scher quoted by Rei Inamoto in  To Rebrand or Not To Rebrand? , Nov 2024 From Inamoto's post: According to legend, i...
Friday, November 15, 2024

Technology . . . the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it (and Christine Rosen's gloss on Frisch)

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 --- Max Frisch, Homo Faber (1957), epigraph to the Introduction of Christine Rosen's  The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Di...
Friday, November 08, 2024

Painting is more important than art

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--- Wayne Thibaud, quoted by Adam Gopnik in “An American Painter,” in Wayne Thiebaud: A Paintings Retrospective , Steven A. Nash, Thames ...
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JP (Pierre) de Vries
WA, United States
When I was small, my family says, I used to ask my mother at bedtime, "Tell me a story that you don't know."
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