Friday, May 16

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
--Horace Mann (1796 - 1859)

Thursday, May 15

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
--John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963


Wednesday, May 14

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"
--George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
"Back to Methuselah" (1921), part 1, act 1

Tuesday, May 13
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.
--William Dement

Back-Log of Quotes (since spring break)
It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.
--Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954)


Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
--Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)


Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
--Henri-Fr?d?ric Amiel


Babel fish (n.) a fictional fish that has the ability to feed off sound waves; this feature of the fish has the bonus effect that if you put one in your ear, you can immediately understand anything else someone says to you in another language

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful [as the Babel fish] could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
--Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)


The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
--George Santayana (1863 - 1952)


Only the educated are free.
--Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD), Discourses


Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die today.
--James Dean (died at 23 years of age)


I shut my eyes in order to see.
--Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903)


The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
--Alvin Toffler


Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
--Bill Watterson (1958 - ), cartoonist, "Calvin and Hobbes"

4/10
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

--Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

4/9
Last night I dreamed I ate a ten-pound marshmallow, and when I woke up the pillow was gone.

--Tommy Cooper

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.

--Eddie Rickenbacker (1890 - 1973)

Monday, 4/7
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

--John Updike (1932 - ), Problems and Other Stories

Friday, 4/4
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

--Unknown

Thursday, 4/3
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

--Ellen Parr