Some of DPR's favored quotes

By topic

• Truth:
  • Speak the truth, even if your voice trembles.
  • No pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
    -- Francis Bacon
  • If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
    -- René Descartes
  • Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.
    -- Mahatma Gandhi
  • In this life-long fight, to be waged by every one of us singlehanded against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth - the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. For such loyalty, as it grows in perfection, asks ever more and more of us, and sets before us a standard of manliness always rising higher and higher.
    -- Thomas Hughes
  • At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart...that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience.
    -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Chase after truth like hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
    -- Clarence Darrow
  • Peace if possible, truth at all costs.
    -- Martin Luther
  • Not to oppose error is to approve of it, and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and, indeed, to neglect to confound evil men, when we can do it, is not less a sin than to encourage them.
    -- Pope Felix III
  • No man spreads a lie with so good grace as he that believes it.
    -- John Arbuthnot
  • If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities.
    -- Voltaire
  • If the box contains a diamond,
    I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
    If the box does not contain a diamond,
    I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
    Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
    -- one version of the Litany of Tarski
• Rationality:
  • I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don't know anything like enough yet... that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom, and I wouldn't have it any other way... take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way.
    -- Christopher Hitchens
  • If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.
    -- Confucius
  • The diseases of the mind are more destructive than those of the body.
    -- Marcus Tullinus Cicero
  • The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
    -- Muhammad
  • It is never to late to give up your prejudices.
    -- Henry David Thoreau
  • The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever.
    -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
  • John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
    -- Isaac Asmiov
  • A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
    -- William A White
  • Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
    -- Randall Munroe
  • Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?
    Engineer: Yep.
    Philosopher: How?
    Engineer: Lookin'.
    -- Scrollover of SMBC #1879
  • A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.
    -- Confucius
  • What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
    -- Christopher Hitchens
  • If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
    -- Isaac Asimov
  • if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.
    -- kevinpet at Hacker News
  • The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
    -- Isaac Asimov
  • The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
    -- Plutarch
  • You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
    -- Randall Munroe
  • On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
    -- Nietzsche
  • The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math.
    -- Ambrose Bierce
  • The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
    -- Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham)
  • Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
    -- Philip K. Dick
  • Ist's zu Sylvester hell und klar, ist am nächsten Tag Neujahr. ("If it's bright and clear on New Year's Eve, the next day will be New Year's.")
    -- folk saying
  • What is true is already so.
    Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
    Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
    And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
    Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
    People can stand what is true,
    for they are already enduring it.
    -- Litany of Gendlin
  • "If we are fervently passionate about the idea that fire is hot, we are more rational than the man who calmly and quietly says fire is cold."
    -- Tom McCabe
  • "How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
    -- Abraham Lincoln
  • "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires."
    -- Black Belt Bayesian
  • "If you're interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
    -- Black Belt Bayesian
  • "The best part about math is that, if you have the right answer and someone disagrees with you, it really is because they're stupid."
    -- Quotes from Honors Linear Algebra
  • "We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts. Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them."
    -- John K Clark
  • "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change."
    -- John K Clark
  • "Goals of Man: ☑ Don't get eaten by a lion ☑ Get out of Africa ☐ Get out of Earth ☐ Get out of Solar System ☐ Get out of Galaxy ☐ Get out of Local Group ☐ Get out of Earth-Visible Universe ☐ Get out of Universe"
    -- Knome
  • Trust, but verify
    -- Russian saying
  • Song: Die Gedanken Sind Frei



• Enlightened self-interest:
  • He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
    -- Thomas Paine
  • If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
    -- Carl Schurz
  • It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own. -- Thomas Jefferson
  • The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
  • First they came for the communists,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
    Then they came for the Jews,
    and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
    Then they came for me
    and there was no one left to speak out for me.
    -- Martin Niemoeller
  • William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
    Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
    William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
    Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
    -- from "A Man for All Seasons"
• Free Speech:
  • As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
    -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
  • Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
    -- Benjamin N. Cardozo
  • Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
    -- George Orwell
  • What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
    -- Salman Rushdie
  • He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
    -- Thomas Jefferson
  • When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
    -- Robert A. Heinlein
• Freedom and Liberty:
  • Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
    -- John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
  • If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
    -- Samuel Adams
  • They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
    -- Benjamin Franklin
  • Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew.
    -- Kenneth W. Royce
  • For so long as but a hundred of us remain alive, we will in no way yield ourselves to the dominion of the English. For it is not for glory, nor riches, nor honour that we fight, but for Freedom, which no good man lays down but with his life.
    -- From the Declaration of Arbroath, 1302
  • Freedom cannot be bestowed - it must be achieved.
    -- Elbert Hubbard
  • If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
    -- W. Somerset Maugham
  • Even a tyrant is slave to a tyranny
    -- Sylvia Harper
  • Freedom is a Verb
    -- Sylvia Harper
  • Song: Lincoln and Liberty
  • Song: Oh Freedom
• Life Extension
  • I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
    -- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview
  • I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.
    -- Evil Overlord List #230
  • I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.
    -- Woody Allen
  • Cryonics is an experiment. So far the control group isn't doing very well.
    -- Dr. Ralph Merkle
  • I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
    -- Rick Potvin
  • Give me immortality or death.
    -- Nick de Jongh
  • Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.
    -- Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Violence:
  • Molon labe!
  • Covenants without swords are but words.
    -- Thomas Hobbes
  • Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe.
    -- John Milton
  • Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
    -- Robert A. Heinlein
  • Violence stinks no matter which side of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.
    -- Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1976)
  • "The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil. Gandhi's non-violent resistance against the British occupiers had some effect because Britain was wrong, but not Evil. The same is true of the success of non-violent civil rights resistance against de jure racism. Most people, including those in power, knew that what was being done was wrong. But Evil is an entirely different beast. Gandhi would have gone to the ovens had he attempted non-violent resistance against the Nazis. When one encounters Evil, the only solution is violence, actual or threatened. That's all Evil understands."
    -- Robert Bruce Thompson
  • Song: March of Cambreadth
  • Song: La Marseillaise
  • Songs: Both No Man's Land and Willie McBride's Reply
  • Song: God Bless The U.S.A.
  • Song: Song Of The Patriot
  • Song: The Southrons' Chaunt of Defiance
  • Song: The Bonnie Blue Flag
  • Song: When This Cruel War Is Over
  • Song: Dixie, the land of King Cotton
  • Song: both versions of Battle Cry of Freedom



• Hope:
  • When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
    -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • The discovery that the universe has no purpose need not prevent a human being from having one.
  • Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
  • And perhaps the horse will learn to sing.
  • While there's life, there's hope!
    -- Cicero
  • Song: We Shall Overcome
  • Song: Bread and Roses
  • Song: I won't Want Your Millions, Mister
  • Song: We are Moving on to Victory
  • Song: These things shall be
  • Song: It could be a wonderful world
  • Song: Baba Yetu

By source

• Eliezer S. Yudkowsky:
  • "When you walk past a bookstore you haven't visited before, you have to go in and look around. That's the family rule."
  • "World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimization."
  • "Suppose you come into work and see your coworker kicking his desk. You think, 'what an angry person he must be'. Your coworker is thinking about how someone pushed him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behavior, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behavior. People's stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don't see people's histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don't see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context."
  • ... researchers have found that people are always very optimistic, like they say something will take two days and it takes ten, or they say it'll take two months and it takes over thirty-five years. Like, they asked students for times by which they were 50% sure, 75% sure, and 99% sure they'd complete their homework, and only 13%, 19%, and 45% of the students finished by those times. And they found that the reason was that when they asked people for their best-case estimates if everything went as well as possible, and their average-case estimates if everything went as normal, they got back answers that were statistically indistinguishable. See, if you ask someone what they expect in the normal case, they visualize what looks like the line of maximum probability at each step along the way - namely, everything going according to plan, without any mistakes or surprises. But actually, since more than half the students didn't finish by the time they were 99% sure they'd be done, reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy, and the best way to fix it is to ask how long things took the last time you tried them. That's called using the outside view instead of the inside view. But when you're doing something new and can't do that, you just have to be really, really, really pessimistic. Like, so pessimistic that reality actually comes out better than you expected around as often and as much as it comes out worse. It's actually really hard to be so pessimistic that you stand a decent chance of undershooting real life.
  • I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
  • "... true science really isn't like magic, you can't just do it and walk away unchanged like learning how to say the words of a new spell. The power comes with a cost, a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it."
    "And that cost?"
    "Learning to admit you're wrong."
    "Um, you going to explain that?"
    "Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do true science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted, and every time you change your mind, you change yourself."
  • Science began as a rebellion against grand philosophical schemas and armchair reasoning. So Science doesn't include a rule as to what kinds of hypotheses you are and aren't allowed to test; that is left up to the individual scientist. Trying to guess that a priori, would require some kind of grand philosophical schema, and reasoning in advance of the evidence. As a social ideal, Science doesn't judge you as a bad person for coming up with heretical hypotheses; honest experiments, and acceptance of the results, is virtue unto a scientist...
    So that's all that Science really asks of you - the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it. It's not much, but it's enough to sustain a scientific culture.
    ... I was learning a new Way, stricter than Science. A Way that could criticize my folly, in a way that Science never could. A Way that could have told me, what Science would never have said in advance: "You picked the wrong hypothesis to test, dunderhead."
    But the Way of Bayes is also much harder to use than Science. It puts a tremendous strain on your ability to hear tiny false notes, where Science only demands that you notice an anvil dropped on your head.
    In Science you can make a mistake or two, and another experiment will come by and correct you; at worst you waste a couple of decades.
    But if you try to use Bayes even qualitatively - if you try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust you to do, and reason rationally in the absence of overwhelming evidence - it is like math, in that a single error in a hundred steps can carry you anywhere. It demands lightness, evenness, precision, perfectionism.
  • "I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very creative"
  • If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven't visited yet ...
  • When there's a confusing problem and you're just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don't worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. Just check as fast as possible whether your ideas are false before you start investing huge amounts of effort in them.
  • "Death is bad. Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."
  • "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other..."
  • "See, there's this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum!"
  • "There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"
  • Look, sometimes you've just got to do things because they're awesome.
• Thomas Jefferson:
  • The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
  • I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed [...] with inherent and inalienable Rights; that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
  • Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
  • We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
• Heinlein:
  • There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
  • An armed society is a polite society.
  • There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe.
  • TANSTAAFL
  • A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
  • Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
  • Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors - and miss.
  • Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something. Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?
  • Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
  • God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
  • If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
  • If tempted by something that feels "altruistic," examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!
  • If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
  • Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run these are the only people who count.
  • Most "scientists" are bottle washers and button sorters.
  • Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
  • The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
  • Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
  • What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
  • You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
  • To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
  • In this complex world, science, the scientific method, and the consequences of the scientific method are central to everything the human race is doing and to wherever we are going. If we blow ourselves up we will do it by misapplication of science; if we manage to keep from blowing ourselves up, it will be through intelligent application of science.
  • I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape.
  • The hardest part about gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. As long as that niche is occupied, evidence and proof and logical demonstration get nowhere. But once the niche is emptied of the wrong idea that has been filling it - once you can honestly say, "I don't know", then it becomes possible to get at the truth.
  • I said that "Patriotism" is a way of saying "Women and children first." And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.
    In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.
    One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.
    But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck -
    Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free ... and the train hit them.
    The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed - and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.
    The husband's behavior was heroic ... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.
    This is how a man dies.
    This is how a man ... lives!



• H. L. Mencken:
  • I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
  • It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
  • I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom ... the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.
  • The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.
  • The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
  • One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty.
  • No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
  • My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors. [...] But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they'd be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible.
• The Cynic's Book of Wisdom
  • Capitalism is a dog eat-dog-system. However, with most other alternitives, the dog starves.
  • An efficient legal system operates on the assumption that everyone is guilty of something.
  • Governments are always more at risk from their subjects than from external threats.
  • Artificial Intelligences are feared more for the latter than the former.
  • Anyone who doesn't fight for his own self-interest has volunteered to fight for someone else's.
  • Guns don't kill people, bullets do.
  • When you rattle your sabre, it becomes difficult to stab someone in the back.
  • What you don't know will kill you.
  • Any government will kill you if it feels threatened.
  • Between too good to be true and worse than you imagine, bet on worse.
  • Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
  • Half of knowledge is knowing the questions.
  • When in doubt, duck.
  • Look behind the curtain.
  • It is never too late for something bad to happen.
• From the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, and the Book of Mormon:
  • Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.
    -- Proverbs 3:13
  • Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not
    -- Proverbs 4:5
  • Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
    -- Proverbs 4:7
  • For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.
    -- Proverbs 8:11
  • How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!
    -- Proverbs 16:16
  • Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.
    -- Proverbs 23:23
  • Wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth darkness. The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness
    -- Ecclesiastes 2:13-14
  • I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things -- Ecclesiastes 7:25
  • ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
    -- John 8:32
  • Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
    -- 1 Thessalonians 5:21
  • Say: Bring your proof (of what ye state) if ye are truthful.
    -- Quran 2:111
  • a guess can never take the place of the truth.
    -- Quran 53:28
  • this derangement of your minds comes because of the traditions of your fathers, which lead you away into a belief of things which are not so.
    -- Alma 30:16