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.

All decisions are based on models . . . and all models are

--- John D Sterman (J. Spencer Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System
Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management), section title in his Jay Wright Forrester Prize Lecture, 2002; published in System dynamics review, 18, no. 4, (2002): 501

Stepping from the title to the first lines [of a poem] is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.

--- poet Billy Collins, quoted in a Poetry Foundation profile, itself quoting a 1999 New York Times article by Bruce Weber.

As quoted on the Poetry Foundation site:

"I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.

--- Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Ballantine Books, New York, 1984, p. 382

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial

--- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1820-72, Boston, 1909-14, IV, 160, cited by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, New York, 1984, p. 23

Tuchman comments: "This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings of power deceive us, endowing the possessor with a quality larger than life."

As elegant as modern econometrics has become, it is not up to the task of delivering policy prescriptions

--- banker and regulator Alan Greenspan, in his memoir The Age of Turbulence, quoted in a BusinessWeek book review, 1 October 2007

In context, in the BW review:

But equally important—and far less noticed—is Greenspan's disdain for academic economics. "As elegant as modern-day econometrics has become, it is not up to the task of delivering policy prescriptions," Greenspan writes. "The world economy has become too complex and interlinked." Indeed, academic economists are virtually nonexistent in the book. Greenspan's successor, Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke, is mentioned only once, in a photo caption.

Government is a reality of life. Denying it is just letting your biases influence your business judgment

--- MCI founder Bill McGowan, quoted by Stephen Keating in Cutthroat: High stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier (1999), p. 147, citing a Washington Post Magazine article by Greg Critser, 6/16/96

[Al Gore] never had great political instincts. He did have a keen sense for opportunities that might make headlines

--- Mike Kopp, Gore’s former press secretary, quoted by Stephen Keating in Cutthroat: High stakes and Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier (1999), p. 97

Quote in context:

“We never operated from a political strategy, we just chased opportunities,” said Mike Kopp, Gore’s former press secretary. “If you look at a list of his hearings, it was all over the map. It was like a buffet he was sampling. We tried to do that on a presidential level and it was a different game. He never had great political instincts. He did have a keen sense for opportunities that might make headlines.”

Wisdom and knowledge are not the same, and speech dominated by intellectual knowledge hardly ever contains wisdom

--- Ayya Khema, "Come and See for Yourself: The Buddhist Path to Happiness," Windhorse Publications 2002, p. 147

Quote in context:

"A certain satisfaction with our abilities can be skilful, but the pride that suggests to us we have more knowledge or ability than other people serves only to leave us even more separate from others than before. If we relate in this way, the language of the heart is suppressed because we are coming only from the logical intellect which is often devoid of the qualities of the heart. This is why spiritual pride impedes those who have acquired a lot of knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge are not the same, and speech dominated by intellectual knowledge hardly ever contains wisdom. Knowledge is helpful only if it can be put into action. Think a bit less and act a bit more! Teresa of Avila said, ‘Stop thinking so much; start loving more!’"

Ten years ago, companies would call up and say I need a digital strategy.' Now, it's I need a green strategy.'

--- Chris Hunter, a former energy manager at Johnson & Johnson, who works for the environmental consulting firm GreenOrder. Quoted in BusinessWeek story Little Green Lies, about the difficulty in making "being green" profitable.

The story features Austen Schendler and his experience trying to follow Amory Lovins' evangelism and help Aspen Skiing be a green company. According to BW, he sums up his experience thus: "I've succeeded in doing a lot of sexy projects yet utterly failed in what I set out to do. How do you really green your company? It's almost f------ impossible."

The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded

--- Paul Saffo, quoted in The Economist, "Social graph-iti: There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye," Oct 18th 2007

Quote in context, from the article:

This analogy to address books points to an important limitation for social networks, such as Facebook, compared with older sorts of network, such as the postal or telephone systems. These benefit from Metcalfe's Law, which says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. In other words, the more people have phones, the more useful they become. This “network effect” leads to rapid adoption and puts up barriers for new entrants.

But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. “The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,” says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. Despite their name, therefore, they do not benefit from the network effect. Already, social networks such as “aSmallWorld”, an exclusive site for the rich and famous, are proliferating. Such networks recognise that people want to hobnob with a chosen few, not to be spammed by random friend-requests.

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph. Ning, a fast-growing company with offices directly across the street from Facebook in Palo Alto, is built around this idea. It lets users build their own social networks for each circle of friends.

So are Facebook and its graph really worth many billions?

A "trusted computer" is a computer they can trust not to do what I want

--- David Clark, comment at TPRC 2007, Sunday 30 Sep 2007, during the panel "Research Initiatives for a Future Internet"

Dignity is more important that wealth

--- Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, at TEDGlobal Africa, 5 June 2007, reported by Ethan Zuckerman

Vida sin amigos, muerte sin testigos

A Spanish proverb, roughly translated, "Life without a friend is death without a witness."

Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity

--- Bill Gates, prepared text for Harvard Commencement, June 7, 2007,

Quote in context:

But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.

Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good.

--- John Kay, Culture and Prosperity: Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor (2005), quoted by Andrew Taylor in his post Evolution vs. adaptation vs. ultimate good

In the blog Taylor gives a slightly longer quote: "Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good. This fundamental distinction is essential to understanding any evolving system."

Taylor comments:

"We can easily see in human history (and I see it in my own biases) a presumption that evolving systems slowly create better results. We've used the argument in reinforcing the supremacy of humans on the earth (animals and nature are in service to man, because man was the one to evolve the best). And we often use the bundled assumption in describing healthy organizations -- in the arts and elsewhere.

"But Kay's simple point cuts to the heart of these assumptions. Evolution -- and even adaptation -- are extraordinarily effective at advancing what can be replicated. But they have nothing to do with selecting and advancing the best responses for any larger challenge. In fact, established organizational cultures are highly effective at perpetuating themselves through these very systems."

The Delphic oracle’s guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle’s advice might be show thyself.

--- Christine Rosen, senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism", New Atlantis, Summer 2007, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/17/rosen.htm

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

--- Trappist monk Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, p. 122; cited by Bret Battey

Until proven otherwise, we should assume that consciousness doesn't play a role in human behaviour. This is the conservative position that makes the fewest assumptions.

--- Robert Provine, quoted in Mark Buchanan, Why we are all creatures of habit, New Scientist 7 Jul 07, p. 37

Other quotes along the same vein:

Alex Pentland: "The data support the view that a lot of human behaviour is largely automatic and determined by instincts alone."

Ap Dijksterhuis: "Almost everything we do is automatic. I'm more and more inclined to draw the conclusion that consciousness is a pretty unimportant thing."

Buchanan writes: "Provine goes even further. He suspects we only think we act consciously because our inner voice is so skilled at making up seemingly reasonable narratives and explanations of our unconsciously generated behaviour."

There's a resonance with Michael Brian Schiffer's theory of communication that focuses on receivers and artifacts rather than senders and words. From the article: "Researchers studying apes and other animals typically start from the idea that animals' actions follow mechanically and automatically from their instincts alone. In contrast, psychologists tend to view people as mostly self-aware individuals acting on conscious thoughts. Pentland's idea is that if we can explain and even predict much of what people do without ever referring to their words or conscious thoughts, then maybe those aren't as important as we usually believe. It is a radical thesis, but one for which his sensors provide strong support."

Buddhism takes realization of basic existential problems as a route to peace, when such realizations are more typically considered the basis for despair

--composer Bret Battey, email 8 Sep 07 (quoted with permission)

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.

--- Jane Hirshfield, from the poem Poem with Two Endings, in Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001(

You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity

--- UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt, interview with Dan P. Lovallo and Lenny T. Mendonca, McKinsey Quarterly 5 Sep 2007 (membership wall)

In context: "Strategic thinking helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity. If you want certainty and clarity, wait for others to take a position and see how they do. Then you’ll know what works, but it will be too late to profit from the knowledge."

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

--- Andre Gide. Quoted widely, but I have not found a source citation. Some versions have "new oceans" or "new continents" in place of "new lands". It's not in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, or Bartelby.com's collection of quotation references. It may be apocryphal.

Update 21 Oct 2007: Bret Battey, with a little help from books.google, found the reference: The Counterfeiters. In 1951 Knopf version in books.google.com, either Page 49 or 326 (can't tell for sure from the listing).

The good has to happen first in our own hearts. Only then can goodness and purity come out of it. We can't give away what we don't have.

--- Ayya Khema, from the discourse "Talking to One Another," p. 50, Be an Island, 1999

If we're looking for outer conditions to bring us contentment, we're looking in vain. We have to find inner conditions conducive to contentment. One of them is independence - not financial independence, which may bring other hazards, but emotional independence from the approval of others. This entails knowling that we are trying to do the best we can, and if someone disapproves, that's just the way things are. . . .

To be independent also includes no looking for support from others. Sometimes the best we can do may be very good, sometimes it is mediocre. That too has to be accepted. . . . If we sometimes cannot do as well as we thought we could, that is also all right and no reason for discontentment.

Emotional independence requires having a loving heart. If we are looking for love, we are emotionally dependent and often discontented because we don't get what we want, or don't get enough of it. Even if we do get enough, we still cannot count on it to fill our needs. To look for love is a totally unsatisfactory and unfulfilling endeavor. What does work, however, is loving others, which brings emotional independence and contentment. Loving others is possible whether the other person reciprocates or not. Love has nothing to do with the other, but is a quality of our own hearts.

--- Ayya Khema, in the discourse "Harmonious Living," p. 41-41, in Be an Island, 1999

He lives well who lives lightly,
hoards nothing,
lets go the air he breathes-
to draw in more

Peter Abbs, in The Flowering of Flint: Selected Poems, quoted in a review in the Economist, 11 Aug 2007

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

--- Donald Knuth, Email (let's drop the hyphen)

In context:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail and send a letter to the following address. . .

Our evolutionary history determined that we become [sic] a cultural creature, but did not determine what kind of culture we would have. Hence our problem today is not whether to have a culture; it is what kind of culture to have.

--- Ervin Laszlo, The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time, Hampton Press 1996, Ch. 4, "The Systems View of Ourselves," p. 75

The music industry is growing. The record industry is not growing.

--- Edgar Bronfman, chairman of Warner Music, at a New York investor conference, June 2007, as quoted in "A change of tune," The Economist, July 5th 2007

According to Aristotle's commendable formula . . . the beautiful is defined as that which the eye can easily embrace in its entirety and which can be surveyed as a whole.

--- Friedrich Kittler, "The World of the Symbolic--A World of the Machine", cited by http://noraproject.org/. Text via Google Books

This is evocative because it connects cognitive capacity to aesthetics, not least the aesthetics of programmers who use elegance as a criterion for good code.

The Hopi way cherishes the intangible: the riches realized from interaction and interrelationships with all beings above all else. Great abundances of material things, even food, the Hopi elders believe, tend to lure human attention away from what is most valuable and important. The views of the Hopi elders are not much different from those elders in all the Pueblos.

---Leslie Marmon Silko, Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination, The Migration Story: and Interior Journey, in Antaeus, no. 57, Autumn 1986, reprinted in The Norton Books of Nature Writing, eds. Robert Finch and John Elder, 1990

Being an Oxford graduate is like having a permanent source of emotional central heating. Whatever happens to you later in life, the fact that you were once at Oxford marks you out as someone who was destined for greatness before accountancy beckoned.

--- Guy Browning, Oxford Today, Trinity Issue 2007, p. 64

A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn't let them get her down.

--- Beverly Sills. More great quotes at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/beverly_sills.html

For example: "Attachment to spiritual things is... just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else. "

[T]he American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

Matt Taibi, in Adbusters column The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

More:

"It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little. "

Quoting David Sirota: "Perhaps what the real issue is that the left is not really a grassroots movement. . . . You have this donor/elite class, and then you have the public . . . You have these zillionaires who are supposedly funding the progressive movement. At some point that gets to be a problem."

"Citibank gives money to Tom Daschle, Tom Daschle crafts the hideous Bankruptcy Bill, and suddenly the Midwestern union member who was laid off in the wake of Democrat-passed NAFTA can’t even declare bankruptcy to get out from the credit card debt he incurred in his unemployment. He will now probably suck eggs for the rest of his life, paying off credit card debt year after year at a snail’s pace while working as a non-union butcher in a Wal-Mart in Butte. Royally screwed twice by the Democratic Party he voted for, he will almost certainly decide to vote Republican the first time he opens up the door to find four pimply college students wearing I READ BANNED BOOKS t-shirts taking up a collection to agitate for dolphin-safe tuna. "