Rationality Quotes December 2011

On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:

I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden—I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as intrinsically amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.

Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).

Miss Tick sniffed. "You could say this advice is priceless," she said, "Are you listening?"
"Yes," said Tiffany.
"Good. Now...if you trust in yourself..."
"Yes?"
"...and believe in your dreams..."
"Yes?"
"...and follow your star..." Miss Tick went on.
"Yes?"
"...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye."

-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“Should we trust models or observations?” In reply we note that if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, but unfortunately observations of the future are not available at this time.

Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.

Most people don't know the basic scientific facts about happiness—about what brings it and what sustains it—and so they don't know how to use their money to acquire it. It is not surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about wine end up with cellars that aren't that much better stocked than their neighbors', and it should not be surprising when wealthy people who know nothing about happiness end up with lives that aren't that much happier than anyone else's. Money is an opportunity for happiness, but it is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don't.

From "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. (http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf)

(Tuco is in a bubble bath. The One Armed Man enters the room)

One Armed Man: I've been looking for you for 8 months. Whenever I should have had a gun in my right hand, I thought of you. Now I find you in exactly the position that suits me. I had lots of time to learn to shoot with my left.

(Tuco kills him with the gun he has hidden in the foam)

Tuco: When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk.

--The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought, distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do not bear examination.

-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)

There's 2 varieties of subjectivism:

• Hayekian subjectivism of limited knowledge, and limited reason, and error, resulting in Bayesian probabilities in the .8 range and below, with required updating, and impact on making +EV decisions...

• Hippie subjectivism of you believe what you want to believe, and I believe what I want to believe.

Aretae

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.

• The Joker

If you hit this sign, you will hit that bridge.

-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good to have some distance between map and area.

What is more important in determining an (individual) organism's phenotype, its genes or its environment? Any developmental biologist knows that this is a meaningless question. Every aspect of an organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes.

-Tooby and Cosmides, emphasis theirs. It occurred to someone on the Less Wrong IRC channel how good this is an isomorphism of, "You have asked a wrong question."

Economists essentially have a sophisticated lack of understanding of economics, especially macroeconomics. I know it sounds ridiculous. But the reason why I tell people they should study economics is not so they’ll know something at the end—because I don’t think we know much—but because we’re good at thinking. Economics teaches you to think things through. What you see a lot of times in economics is disdain for other's lack of thinking. You have to think about the ramifications of policies in the short run, the medium run, and the long run. Economists think they’re good at doing that, but they’re good at doing that in the sense that they can write down a model that will help them think about it—not in terms of empirically knowing what the answers are. And we have gotten so enamored of thinking things through that the fact that we don’t know anything needs to bother us more. So, yes, it’s true that the average guy on the street doesn’t understand economics, and it’s also true that we don’t understand economics. We just have a more sophisticated lack of understanding than the guy on the street.

---"Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler"

Fujiwara no Yoshitake (954-974), a handsome nobleman, tragically died of smallpox at age 21. He left a love poem full of pathos:

Kige ga tame
oshikarazarishi
Inochi sae
Nagaku mo gana to
Omoikeru kana

For your precious sake, once I thought
I could die.
Now, I wish to live with you
a long, long time.

--Hokusai and Hiroshige

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

In the autumn of 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein and his young Cambridge student and friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the Germans had accused the British government of instigating a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious. Some five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends."

--Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder; apparently of the many attempts, the one referred to did not actually have British backing, although some did eg. the Oster Conspiracy or Operation Foxley.

(This is the full and original quote; the emphasis is on the section which is usually paraphrased as, "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic...if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?")

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

-Probably not Henry Ford

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html

If you're tempted to respond, "But I love school, and so do all my friends. Ah, the life of the mind, what could be better?" let me gently remind you that readers of economics blogs are not a random sample of the population. Most people would hate reading this blog; you read it just for fun!

-- Bryan Caplan

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?'

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?'

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

"I did not think; I investigated."

Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, expanded edition, p. 146.

In the early 1970's it cost $7 to buy a share in [Warren Buffett's] company, and that same share is worth $4,900 today... That makes Buffett a wonderful investor. What makes him the greatest investor of all time is that during a certain period when he thought stocks were grossly overpriced, he sold everything and returned all the money to his partners at a sizable profit to them. The voluntary returning of money that others would gladly pay you to continue to manage is, in my experience, unique in the history of finance.

• Peter Lynch, "One Up on Wall Street"

God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.

-- Dutch proverb

I had a dream that I met a girl in a dying world. [...] I knew we didn't have long together. She grabbed me and spoke a stream of numbers into my ear. Then it all went away.

I woke up. The memory of the apocalypse faded to mere fancy, but the numbers burned bright in my mind. I wrote them down immediately. They were coordinates. A place and a time, neither one too far away.

What else could I do? When the day came, I went to the spot and waited.

And?

It turns out wanting something doesn't make it real.

~ Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl

One of the toughest things in any science... is to weed out the ideas that are really pleasing but unencumbered by truth.

Thomas Carew

Unlike programs, computers must obey the laws of physics.

-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

-- You can look at the stars and say "they sure are pretty" without having to calculate how many light-years away each one is.
-- Not if you want to get to them someday.

-- Questionable Content #2072

"The older we become, the more important it is to use what we know rather than learn more."

--I.J. Good (as quoted in "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" by Persi Diaconis)

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of my delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

-John Nash, A Beautiful Mind

In other words, recognizing that politics is the mind-killer helped Nash manage his paranoid-scizophrenia.

Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman

"I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author."

-Randall Munroe, xkcd

Rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

I am sure that I really know many, many, things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.

Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, August 15, 1820.

"If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things, just accommodating them. Scientists use words like “curve fitting” and “fudge factors” to describe that sort of activity. On the other hand, if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it has real power. You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted. " Frank Wilczek

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

-Pierre de Beaumarchais (and usually incorrectly attributed to Voltaire)

“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde.

English translation: It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.

Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)

"Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another."

--Arthur Schopenhauer

Remember — there is a correlation between correlation and causation.

• ChaosRobie on Reddit

When you choose

How much postage to use,

When you know

What's the chance it will snow,

When you bet

And you end up in debt,

Oh try as you may,

You just can't get away

From mathematics!

Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"

(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)

A system for generating ungrounded but mostly true beliefs would be an oracle, as impossible as a perpetual motion machine.

(McKay & Dennett 2009)

Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

~ Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

Every Sauron considers himself a Boromir.

~ Mencius Moldbug

The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea

-- Paul Graham, "The Age of the Essay" (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)

Every properly trained wizard has heard of Abraham, the idiot apprentice who recklessly enchanted a massive diamond instead of selling it to pay someone more skilled to fix his cursed noble friend. Haven't you destroyed the bloody thing by now?

• Raven, from Dan Shive's webcomic El Goonish Shive.

The story of computers and artificial intelligence (known as AI) resembles that of flight in air and space. Until recently people dismissed both ideas as impossible - commonly meaning that they couldn't see how to do them, or would be upset if they could.

-Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation

The man, who in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

-Voltaire, Cato

Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.

~Epictetus

"Numbers---you know? The kind with decimals in them?"

--Max Tegmark, asking for some quantitative information in a vague lecture.

"Well, if it were true, how would the world look different from what we see around us?"

--Gregory Cochran

If wanting to be right is wrong, I don't want to be right.

-- Steven Kaas

“If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.”

--Jalaluddin Rumi

I have a lot of beliefs, and I live by none of them. That's just the way I am. They're just my beliefs, I just like believing them. I like that part.

They're my little "believees," they make me feel good about who I am. But if they get in the way of a thing I want or I want to jack off or something, I fuckin' do that.

Louis C.K., Live at the Beacon Theater

"'...You are now nearly at childhood's end; you are ready for the truth's weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcomes resolve all-- all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.' He made a gesture I can't describe: 'Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality-- there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth-- actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.'"

"'Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsquence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui-- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.'"

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 232

"One should forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged."

--Heinrich Heine; an early, little-known German contribution to the Evil Overlord List.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically -- she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living -- not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth -- if women ever do hope this -- but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one -- knowledge of the world.

The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy -- this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a stage of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.

And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.

But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.

Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.

All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense. "Thank God for the aged", sings the poet:

Thank God for the aged And for age itself, and illness and the grave. When we are old and ill, and particularly in the coffin, It is no trouble to behave.

-T.H. White, in The Once And Future King (book III, Le Chevalier Mal Fet)

Winning is getting what we want, which often includes assisting others in getting what they want. Winning may forward a just cause. It may help strangers. It may discover the truth. Winning may help a loved one to succeed, a child to bloom, an enemy to see us in a new light.

Gerry Spence (emphasis his)

The Doctor: The security protocols are still online and there's no way to override them. It's impossible.

River: How impossible?

The Doctor: A few minutes.

-Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 5

(I can't give the exact quote, as it's hearsay, and I'm translating it back into English from Russian)

During WW2, British aircraft engineers had to reach a compromise between an airplane's structural durability and other uses of weight such as armor, defensive armament, etc. The odds of losing a bomber due to its structure falling apart were much less than those of it simply being shot down; 1:10000 and 1:20 respectively. Yet when the designers proposed sacrificing some structural integrity to improve the bomber's armor plating or machineguns, the pilots were adamant. They hated the thought of their plane breaking up on its own so much that they passed up the opportunity to reduce a MUCH more likely risk.

(I suspect that the bias here had to do with risks somewhat dependent on the subject seeming much more controllable and less abhorrent).

• Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, by J. E. Gordon

Once man is in a rut he seems to have the urge to dig even deeper

Fritz Zwicky, Morphological Astronomy

“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen saying

A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.

Man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

Euripides, Helen

I should not choose long, hard words just to make other persons think that I know a lot. I should try to make my thoughts clear; if they are clear and right, then other persons can judge my work as it ought to be judged.

-- Guy Steele, Growing a Language (pdf)

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” - Sir Francis Bacon

With ten-thousand-time-told truths, you've still got to ask for proof. Ask for proof, because if you're dying to be led they'll lead you up the hill in chains to their popular refrains until your slaughter's been arranged, my little lamb, and it's much too late to talk the knife out of their hands.

"The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tziQcj4XIYw

Phenotype is the genotype transformed and refracted through the lens of developmment and the environment; all genes are pleiotropic, all traits are polygenic.

--PZ Myers

At some point, our society decided with great certainty that the Earth is a sphere and, consequently, that further consideration is unnecessary and anyone holding an opposing viewpoint is unworthy of debate.

-- Daniel Shelton, re-founder of the Flat Earth Society

(We're looking for good illustrations of motivated uncertainty, insistence that no conclusion can be drawn from overwhelming data. Shelton may not be a good example because he is probably a deliberate troll who does not really believe the Earth is flat. Also, religious examples are excluded, but examples from e.g. astrology and homeopathy would not be. Daily-life examples are best.)

The crucial point to be considered in a study of language behavior is the relationship of language and reality, between words and not-words. Except as we understand this relationship, we run the grave risk of straining the delicate connection between words and facts, of permitting our words to go wild, and so of creating for ourselves fabrications of fantasy and delusion.

-- Wendell Johnson, as quoted in Language Thought and Action

“The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."

--Christopher Hitchens (Dec. 15 December 2011) The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer

Let's go for two-in-one this time:

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

• Bertrand Russell

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

• Benjamin Franklin

• Make Hyper Bubble
• Cause Black Hole
• Become Insane
• PB Takes Off My Glasses
• Save The Day
• Win Heart Of The Princess

-- Finn's Note, from "The Real You"

An example of working precommitment (to a plan that may involve forgetting the plan).

"Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education." - Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

After describing an odd subjective experience:

If the rationalist reader has had the quite super-Stylite patience to read to this point, he will surely now at last throw down the book with an ethically justifiable curse.

Yet I beg him to believe that there is a shade of difference between me and a paradox-monger. I am not playing with words -- Lord knows how I wish I could! I find that they play with me! -- I am honestly and soberly trying to set down that which I know, that which I know better than I know anything else in the world, that which so transcends and excels all other experience that I am all on fire to proclaim it.

Yet I fail utterly. I have given my life to the study of the English language; I am supposed by my flatterers to have some little facility of expression, especially, one may agree, in conveying the extremes of thought of all kinds. Yet here I want to burn down the Universe for lack of a language.

-- Aleister Crowley here

Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory.

--Asher Peres

"Is there NOTHING political parties can work on together? Can't each side shift at least some of their focus towards goals they have more or less in COMMON with the other side rather than zeroing in on what they think their opponents are wrong about?"

"But they're wrong about EVERYTHING!"

"Well, fixate on whatever it is they're least wrong about, then."

• Out There, R.C. Monroe

Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises. Within the bounds of what a person in that part of the system can see and know, the behavior is reasonable. Taking out one individual from a position of bounded rationality and putting in another person is not likely to make much difference. Blaming the individual rarely helps create a more desirable outcome. – Donella H Meadows

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

-John Lennon on leaving a line of retreat

Of course there’s sophisticated theology – it’s the one which uses Bayes theorem to estimate how many angels can dance on a pinhead.

-- Kiwi Dave

Whenever I am confronted with a major decision like this, I think "what would the protagonist in a sci-book do?"

-- Salman Khan

(Edit: Pretty sure he means "sci-fi book".)

In our acquisition of knowledge of the Universe (whether mathematical or otherwise) that which renovates the quest is nothing more nor less than complete innocence. It is in this state of complete innocence that we receive everything from the moment of our birth. Although so often the object of our contempt and of our private fears, it is always in us. It alone can unite humility with boldness so as to allow us to penetrate to the heart of things, or allow things to enter us and taken possession of us.

This unique power is in no way a privilege given to “exceptional talents” – persons of incredible brain power (for example), who are better able to manipulate, with dexterity and ease, an enormous mass of data, ideas and specialized skills. Such gifts are undeniably valuable, and certainly worthy of envy from those who (like myself) were not so “endowed at birth, far beyond the ordinary”.

Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the “invisible yet formidable boundaries” that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn’t even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child’s play.

— Alexander Grothendieck (attributed; couldn't find a reliable source)

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

African proverb

Education helps close the gap between what man believes to be the truth and truth itself.

Richard Scholz

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you stock it with such furnature as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

-Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems.

-- Scott Adams

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

-- Warhammer 40,000

[...] Let the voice of reason chime,
Let the friars vanish for all time,
God's face is hidden,
all unseen,
You can't ask him,
What it all means,
He was never on your side,
God was never on your side,
Let right or wrong alone decide,
God was never on your side.
See ten thousand ministries,
See the holy,
righteous dogs,
They claim to heal,
But all they do is steal,
Abuse your faith,
Cheat and rob,
If god is wise,
Why is he still,
When these false prophets,
Call him friend,
Why is he silent, Is he blind?!
Are we abandoned in the end?
Let the sword of reason shine,
Let us be free of prayer and shrine,
God's face is hidden,
turned way,
He never has a word to say,
He was never on your side,
God was never on your side,
Let right or wrong alone decide!
God was never on your side!
No, no, no!
[...]

Motorhead - God Was Never on Your Side