(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
-- H Beam Piper, "Space Viking"
And when he cannot answer and stares at you dumbfounded while drooling a little,then you tell him he's crazy :)
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker
"From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense."
--John Quiggin
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/22/the-ideology-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/
-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
"The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed" - C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew
Used as .sig quote by Glen C. Perkins e.g. here.
--E. T. Jaynes (on the infamous eponymous theorem)
William T. Powers
-- David Sirlin, Playing to Win
-- Da... (read more)
People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"
Relevant anecdotal evidence: I have a cousin who was really in to astrology a few years ago: so obviously my sister and I insisted she partake in an experiment. We had her do three specific readings (not just with signs but with the mercury rising nonsense for which she needed exact birth-dates and birth locations): for me, my sister and my brother who wasn't there. She read them to us without indicating who they belonged to and we tried to see if we could tell which ones referred to us. The second one she read was just shocking to hear. It described me perfectly. I was in awe for about 10 minutes until the experiment finished and I learned that the reading that described me perfectly belonged to my sister.
-- Donald E. Knuth
“Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.” - Lawrence Lessig
-- "TheWama" on Reddit
-Poster found in school classrooms
(Anyone know the original source?)
It's a paraphrase of T.E. Lawrence:
I heard an interview with the guys who do South Park that for their 9/11 conspiracy episode they were considering making the real culprits the American flag manufacturers, because they clearly benefited the most.
-- Orson Scott Card, "Characters and Viewpoint"
-- Aristotle
"If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well." -Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
I desire to know which interpretation of this quote was intended by the author, but I know which one I prefer.
-Patrick Henry
-- Dennis Overbye
"First Law of Communication: The purpose of communication is to advance the communicator." - Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat
Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Selected Writings on Computing"
G.K. Chesterton
-G. K. Chesterton
Only if you think violence is never justified ;)
It's a warning to rationalists, especially Hollywood Mister Spock type rationalists, that even though promoting true beliefs is a charitable act on par with patching up someone's slashed tires, people will often take rather unkindly to it.
(Osmo A.) Wiio's first law of communication
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."
C. S. Lewis "The Magician's Nephew"
Leibniz (quoted in Maat, "Philosophical languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz")
"If you understand something in only one way, then you do not really understand it at all." -- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
From comp.lang.c++.moderated:
... (read more)"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky (pre-LW/OB, so it counts)
-- P. C. Hodgell
Cicero, De Re Publica
-- Lawrence Watt-Evans, Ithanalin's Restoration
-- Apenwarr
"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California." -- Edward Abbey
"You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words." -- William Congreve
Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"
"Plod forever, but never believe you are going to get there."
-Sir Ranulph Fiennes
EDIT: I found this quote funny and strangely motivational, if you read it within the context. But looks like some people really dislike it.
-- Aristotle
Someone is always praying as the plane Breaks up, and smoke and cold and darkness blow Into the cabin. Praying as it happens, Praying before it happens that it won't. Someone was praying that it never happen Before the first window on Kristallnacht Broke like a wine glass wrapped in bridal linen. Before it was imagined, someone was praying That it be unimaginable. And then, The bolts blew off and people fell like bombs Out of their names, out of the living sky. Surely, someone was praying. And the prayer Stuck the blank face of the earth, the ocean's face, The rockhard, rippled face of facelessness. -Mark Jarman
"If something's hard to do, it's probably not worth doing!" - Homer Simpson, slightly misquoted
"...any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch...Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.
Fortunately, there is a way out."
~ John Boyd, Destruction and Creation