"The French poet Paul Valéry once spoke of “producing future”. I like to think that’s what brains are for: they are for producing future. You extract information from the past and use it to produce future, and the more future you can produce the more freedom you have."

Daniel Dennett, New Scientist interview, 24 May 2003, p 39/40, “Free will, but not as we know it”

"This world is a bridge. Pass over it; but do not build your dwelling there."

Attrib. to Jesus Christ.

Courtesy Sheelagh de Vries.
From Jesus and Christian Origens Outside the New Testament, p. 130: "The most famous instance of their ascription to Jesus in Muslim tradition is on the main gateway of the mosque erected in 1601 at Fathpur-Sikri, south of Delhi, by the Moghul Akbar the Great; it bears the inscription: 'Jesus, on whom be peace, said: "This world is a bridge. Pass over it; but do not build your dwelling there."'"
See also http://www.gospelthomas.com/gospelthomas42.html

"If the basic idea is too complicated to fit on a T-shirt, it's probably wrong."

Leon Lederman
Physics aphorisms: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~panagiot/aphorisms_physics.htm

"Physics is not a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money."

Leon Lederman
Physics aphorisms: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~panagiot/aphorisms_physics.htm

"The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes."

Warren Buffett, Nov. 2002 talking with students at Gaston Hall
Courtesy of Tren Griffin, 10 Feb 2004, who also cited this by Buffett: "Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime it's too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. ... we have adopted a strategy that required our being smart - and not too smart at that - only a very few times..."

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"

Romain Rolland, popularised by Gramsci

"His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words actually capture a thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and over work."

William McAdoo, losing Democratic contender, on President William Harding's stump speeches
Courtesy Ian Ferrell, Jan 2004

"A few weeks ago, I was in a big supermarket here in the United States. In one aisle, they were selling a calculator. It was the size of a credit card. And the price was only 99 cents.... A few aisles over, they were selling a bottle of Evian water for $2 and 49 cents. Is that ironic? Electronics cheaper than water!"

Fumio Ohtsubo, President, Panasonic AVC Networks, CES keynote, January 2004

"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."

“Sometimes it's good to remind ourselves that these are not, after all, super men and women. They are human beings of remarkable skills and strength but frailer than most emotionally - because of their huge commitment of ego and ambition, and because the competition at their level of performance is so relentless.”

Comment: Also applicable to people in the uppermost reaches of corporate management

Source: Jim Klobuchar, 'Swiss Air': The ski jumper who astonished himself, Christian Science Monitor, 15 Feb 2002, http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0215/p01s02-ussc.html