"[N]obody is going to earn any points for slogging their way through a book they aren't enjoying but think they ought to read"

Nancy Pearl, author of "Book Lust", and former librarian

Source: Christian Science Monitor interview with Nancy Pearl, Todd Crowell, 11 August 2005

Quote in context:

Pearl says she is a strong believer that no one should ever finish a book
they are not enjoying, no matter how popular or well reviewed it is. "Believe
me," she says, "nobody is going to earn any points for slogging their way
through a book they aren't enjoying but think they ought to read." She finishes
probably one book for every five she starts.

She expounds what she calls the "50 page" rule: If a book doesn't grab
you in the first 50 pages, put it down and try something else. Life is short,
and there are many books to read. (She often returns to finish books she set
aside. Reading enjoyment is as much a matter of the reader's mood as it is the
style and content of the book, she says.)

"When new technologies come along, they provoke a political question."

Source: Paul Starr, author of The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, On the Media Interview with Brooke Gladstone, 30 April 2004, rebroadcast 7 August 2005.

Context from the transcript:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, in your book, over and over again you demonstrate that, contrary to what I think is the popular opinion today, it wasn't the technology that pushed forward how we have our national conversation -- that the ground was already tilled for that kind of communication before the technology came along.

PAUL STARR: Well, what I suggest in this book is that when new technologies come along, they provoke a political question -- how is this new medium going to be handled? Is it going to be private? Is it going to be public? Is it going to be a military technology? What will be the basic purposes that it serves? And so Europe and America often dealt with the same technology in very different ways. When the electric telegraph first appeared, the Europeans treated it as a military technology. We treated it as a commercial technology. The telephone, same thing. There was a period in the 1890s, early 1900s when there were hundreds of little mutual telephone companies, independent telephone cooperatives that were established, and telephones spread much more widely, much faster in America than elsewhere.

Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are

Source: Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 2005, p61

Context: Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

--- Henry B. Adams

Source: The web, passim. No citation found.

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know until he takes up a pen to write."

William Makepeace Thackeray

"[D]ifferent social contracts are not Pareto—rankable: rich enough agents always prefer a more laissez-faire society, while those who are poor enough always want more of a welfare state."

Source: Roland Bénabou, "Inequality, Technology, and the Social Contract", October 2004, http://www.wws.princeton.edu/rbenabou/handbook4.pdf, as online 13 July 2005

He then examines how these two social models compare in terms of aggregate growth. Cutting out the Greek symbols, he writes:

"Compared to a more laissez-faire alternative, a more redistributive social contract is associated with lower inequality, and
1) has higher growth when tax distortions are small relative to those induced by credit constraints on the accumulation of human capital;
2) has lower growth when tax distortions are high and the credit—constraint effect is weak"

The ability to illustrate a spiritual event in the physical world is the central truth of icon painting. Here, that which belongs to the lower world -- the physical materials of wood and paint-- has been transformed and brought to new life by the higher, spiritual world of divine light and energy contacted through contemplative prayer. The colours play on our sensibilities like musical harmonies and enable us, through inner resonance, to open to a higher power. The icon's symmetry and balanced form corresponds to the meditative state of the mystic, where the exterior is passionless and without movement. This external stillness preconditions the inner state, and it is here that the higher life appears appears. At the centre of the painting is a strong, vertical axis around which flow the movements and energies expressed by colour and form.

Source: Richard Temple, Icons: Divine Beauty, Saqi Books 2004, p 87

"Behind these questions of style lie subtle metaphysical influences in which reside the essential difference between Eastern and Western Christian art in the 14th century. [...] It can be said that Western art strove essentially for realism, while Byzantine art strove essentially for transcendentalism. Western painting attempted to create the illusion of a third dimension while working on a two-dimensional plane. Icon painting, while using the same picture plane of two dimensions, extends not into the third dimension but rather into the fourth dimension or 'space-time', where space is infinity and time is eternity. This is the key to understanding the Byzantine icon in relation to Western painting. We see that the icon painter uses techniques of abstraction and conscious distortion, by which he tries to show us things we usually regard as invisible."

Source: Richard Temple, Icons: Divine Beauty, Saqi Books 2004, p 71

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."

G. K. Chesterton, for more see http://www.yuni.com/quotes/chesterton.html

"Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers."

Andy Grove. Source: Michael Kanellos http://news.com.com/2061-10791_3-5712202.html, reporting on the 18 May 2005 Intel shareholders meeting where Grove retired, reportedly making these comments: "For years and years I have wanted to have a law named after me. Call it a case of Moore envy. And this is it. Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers. "

"[The] author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself"

Source: Sir Peter Medawar review of Teilhard de Chradin's The Phenomenon of Man. Fuller quote: "It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year --- one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. "

"The best surprise is no surprise"

Holiday Inn ad campaign, started in 1975 according to http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/motel/holiday/

Talk does not cook rice

Source: Chinese proverb

"I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publishers' desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way."

Gail Godwin, novelist
Cited in Writer's Almanac, 18 June 2005

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 15 June 2005
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”

Sir Joshua Reynolds

“Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Samuel Johnson, http://www.samueljohnson.com/dogwalk.html

"You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array your experience - both vicarious and direct - on this latticework of models."

Cited by Robert Hagstrom in Investing: The Last Liberal Art, Chapter 1, as having been said in April 2004 at the Marshall School of Business of the University of Southern California.

Courtesy Tren Griffin, November 2004. Tren's full comment: "As Charlie Munger has stated - "You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array your experience - both vicarious and direct - on this latticework of models." As Benjamin Franklin said it is forming "habits of mind" that seek to link together different disciplines. Intelligence is really a factor of how many connections or links one has learned. As Munger also stated: "You can reach out and grasp the model that better solves the overall problem. All you have to do is know it and develop the right mental habits. Worldly wisdom is mostly very, very simple. There are a relatively small number of disciplines and a relatively small number of truly big ideas. And it's a lot of fun to figure it out. Even better, the fun never stops. Furthermore, there's a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience. What I'm urging on you is not that hard to do. And the rewards are awesome…..It'll help you in business. It'll help you in law. It'll help you in life. And it'll help you in love…..It makes you better able to serve others, it makes you better able to serve yourself, and it makes life more fun.""

"Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way; Americans think a hundred years is a long time."

Cited by Mark Jeffrey in his email signature, Nov 2004

"The first law of standards: Standards are only important to companies that do not have market share."

John Latta, email Nov 2004

"Serendipity: looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer's daughter."

Widely quoted, sometimes attributed to Roger Needham

Courtesy Pierre-Yves Saintoyant, Oct 2004

“Never worry about someone stealing your great idea. If it is truly good, you will have to jam it down their throat.”

Howard Aiken, the developer of the Mark 1 computer
According to http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Howard_Aiken: "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

Courtesy Gary Starkweather, Sep 04

“The Law of the Jungle in technology: Profits follow architectural control.”

John Thompson, CEO Symantec, said at the PFF Aspen Summit, 23 Aug 04

"But the aspect of nanotechnology that promises to revolutionize the economics of manufacturing is bottoms-up self-assembly, which means that molecules and atoms can be rationally controlled and programmed or directed like software code to organize in a desired fashion to yield a desired function. Physical matter will become as programmable to chemists as code is to software engineers. This is an interesting proposition, when you consider that the raw material required to make one computer and a 17-inch monitor today weighs about the same as a car, requiring about 529 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals, and more than 3,000 pounds of water." (Italics mine)

Josh Wolfe, Co-founder of Lux Capital and author of the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, in an SNS special letter, July 21st, 2004

"Experts often possess more data than judgment."

Colin Powell, cited in http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1042

"To be a novelist or a short story writer, you first have to pretend to be a novelist or a short story writer."

Charles Baxter, novelist, quoted in The Writer's Almanac, 13 May ’04

"A search engine is an invention. The Google innovation is a business model (which they borrowed and did not create) that ties the invention to new transaction based revenue streams and new sources of customer value."

Tren Griffin, 5 May 2004

A great list of misquotations: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations

"Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can buy things that make you happy."

Susan Tonkin, personal communication, 15 Apr 2004

"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."