“Since becoming a central banker, I have learnt to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said. ”
— Alan Greenspan
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite. ”
— Paul Dirac
“In the end, America is not ruled by ethics. It is ruled by law.”
— Steen Willadsen (quoted in New York Times, 12/2/97)
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agress with your own reason and your own common sense.”
— Buddha
“I have a weakness for grandiose, meaningless projects.”
— John Sulston, 1983 (quoted in Nature, 12/17/98, after completion of the C. elegans genome)
“The first casualty of any war is the truth.”
— Mark Twain
“Hofstadter’s Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.”
— Douglas Hofstadter
“‘Now take a sheep’, the Sergeant said. ’What is a sheep [but] millions of little bits of sheepness whirling around and doing intricate convolutions inside the sheep? What else is it but that?’”
— from The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brien
“In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.”
— Sandra Blakeslee (Science writer for the NY Times)
“... more difficult to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegan’s Wake in a wind tunnel. ”
— Dennis Miller
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”
— Anonymous
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
“Just because its a model doesn’t mean its necessarily wrong.”
— Robert ("Bob") Weinberg
“Even with railways it is better to keep a two-wheeled cart.”
— Koz'ma Prutkov
“Throwing stones in water, watch the ripples produced by them; otherwise such stone throwing will be a meaningless pastime.”