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User:Piewalker

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My Wikipedia Article Contributions

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Favorite Authors

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Favorite Quotes

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On Science

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  • "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful." George Box George E. P.; Norman R. Draper (1987). Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, p. 424, Wiley. ISBN 0471810339. (more details at wikiquote)
  • "...Statistical models are sometimes misunderstood...Statistical models are never true. The question whether a model is true is irrelevant. A more appropriate question is whether we obtain the correct scientific conclusion if we pretend that the process under study behaves according to a particular statistical model." Zeger SL. Statistical reasoning in epidemiology. Am J Epidemiol 1991;134:1062-6.
  • "If there are major undiscovered sources of variability in a given set of data, any attempt to achieve subject or principle generality is likely to fail.” Murray Sidman (Tactics of scientific research; evaluating experimental data in psychology. 1960, New York,: Basic Books. p. 428)
  • "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be." Isaac Asimov
  • "An active field of science is like an immense anthill; the individual almost vanishes into the mass of minds tumbling over each other, carrying information from place to place, passing it around at the speed of light." Lewis Thomas (1913-1994) in The Lives of a Cell
  • "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" T.S. Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock,' The Complete Poems and Plays (1930), 96.
  • "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert Alexander Simon, economist and Nobel laureate (1916-2001)
  • "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." Carl Sagan
  • "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." Carl Sagan
  • "The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." Carl Sagan
  • "If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?" Carl Sagan
  • "The power of imagination makes us infinite." John Muir
  • "There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever." Thomas A. Edison

On Writing and the Media

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On Liberties and Responsibilities

  • "Enlighten the people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of a new day." Thomas Jefferson "In the spirit of Jefferson’s belief in universal education, the Library of Congress celebrates, preserves and makes available the ideas, the creativity and the intellectual heritage of its collections in its published books and calendars. Our hope is that through our publishing program, we can make our vast collections accessible to the American public." [1]
  • "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." Gore Vidal, author and dramatist
  • "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. To the sacrifice of time, labor, fortune, a public servant must count upon adding that of peace of mind and even reputation...It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nations of its benefits than is done by such abandoned prostitution to falsehood." Thomas Jefferson
  • "Yes, I think people should be allowed to criticize me all they want. And they do. The freedom of people to express themselves must be protected. The right for people to express themselves in the public square is a freedom." George W. Bush, 2006
  • "The First Amendment is the cornerstone of our democratic society. Unfortunately, young people don't live it enough. It becomes like the granite monument in the park we never visit." Sandy Woodcock, director, Newspaper Association of America Foundation, 2005, responding to survey finding that U.S. high school students know or care little about the First Amendment.

The Future of Newspapers and the Printed Word?

  • "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either." - New York Times publisher and CEO Arthur Sulzberger tells Israel's Haaretz newspaper that declining profits may force the Times to abandon the paper edition in favor of online delivery. (2/8/07 UPI)
  • "As loyal as I am to newspapers, I confess it's not even essential that the ink-on-paper medium survives. What matters is that journalism survive, that the craft of speaking truth to power with factual care not be snuffed out." Chris Satullo, editorial-page editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2004
  • "The day of the printed word is far from ended. Swift as is the delivery of the radio bulletin, graphic as is television's eyewitness picture, the task of adding meaning and clarity remains urgent. People cannot and need not absorb meanings at the speed of light." Erwin Canham, former Christian Science Monitor editor in a speech reported in the New York Times, 1958
  • The city where the printed word rules: "The printed word may be less powerful in America today than it was 20 years ago, in comparison with other media, and there may be cities in which the only people who matter are people with regular access to television and the immediacy of fame that it grants, but I don't think that is true of New York -- at least not yet...Here, at least, we are mercifully behind that particular curve instead of ahead of it. Not only are ideas still important in New York, but ideas are still seen as generated by books, so books are still disproportionately important within the culture of the city. For someone who makes his living writing books, and who can sense a general (and perhaps generational) devaluation of the role of print in society as a whole, the idea of living in a city where books and the printed word are still valued is extremely pleasant." David Halberstam (1934-2007), Pulitzer-winning journalist and author, was killed yesterday, April 23, 2007, in a car crash in Menlo Park, California. ([2])

Writing and Its Writers: Reverence, Envy, and Unwritten Laws

  • "There is one sacred rule of journalism. The writer must not invent. The legend on the [journalist's] license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP." John Hersey (1914-1993), writer and author of Hiroshima, 1946
  • "True literature is life translated into letters." -Ferenc Molnar, playwright, 1929
  • "Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life." Giorgos Seferis (1900-1971), poet, writer, ambassador, Nobel laureate
  • On writer envy: "He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose." -Fred Allen, comedian (1894-1956)
  • "This pen moved the more readily on the page whenever it explored my quicksilver days as a newspaperman east or west, or in between. The newspaper was my first love, and, come to think of it, my last. I smelled the ink of the press room when I was a printer's devil, and have found no other scent as stimulating except in the heart of a blue-spruce grove, or occasionally in that of a lady." Gene Fowler, newspaperman, 1961
  • "Each news story, I thought, had enlightening footnotes and marginal comments. Sometimes they were scrawled by the Devil's hand, or at other time by Gabriel's. These points of reference were of little use to the newspapers. News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day." Gene Fowler, newspaperman, 1961
  • "And above all, never forget that the pen is mightier than the plow-share. By this I mean that writing, all in all, is a hell of a lot more fun than farming. For one thing, writers seldom, if ever, have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and shovel manure. As far as I am concerned, that gives them the edge right there." Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize-writer, 1873-1947
  • "Books are doors that lead out into the street...You learn from them, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives, multiply your own life a thousand times. Where can you get more for your money? They also keep all sorts of bad things at bay: ghosts, loneliness, shit like that. Sometimes I wonder how you people that don't read figure out how to live like yourselves." Arturo Pérez-Reverte, writer, 2002
  • "[I]n bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic." Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies (2003)
  • From the Understatement Department: "The impact of television on our culture is . . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing." Carl Sandburg, poet, 1955
  • "We are losing our ability to manage ideas, to contemplate, to think. We are in a constant race to be the first with the obvious. We are becoming a nation of electronic voyeurs whose capacity for dialogue is a fading memory." Ted Koppel, anchor, "Nightline," 1986
  • "A newspaper is a device unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." George Bernard Shaw, writer (1856-1950)
  • On PR: "Wooing the press...is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last." Maureen Dowd, columnist, 1994
  • "The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off." Gloria Steinem, feminist and activist, 2005
  • "Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead." Ann-Marie MacDonald, author, The Way the Crow Flies, 2003
  • "A writer is someone willing to betray the people he loves in order to impress people he's never met." Ron Nyswaner
  • "Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts." William Strunk, Jr. But Strunk & White flout their own advice to "omit unnecessary words": Joseph Williams edits their 199-word paragraph to just 51 words (Williams, pp. 126-28), but Williams concedes that "in boiling down that original paragraph to a quarter of its original length, I've bleached out its garrulous charm."
  • "I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail." James A. Michener
  • "Mr. Clancy said none of his success came easily, and he would remind aspiring writers of that when he spoke to them. "'I tell them you learn to write the same way you learn to play golf,' he once said. 'You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired—it’s hard work.'" Tom Clancy (1947-2013) (NYTimes obit by Julie Bowman)
  • "Someone told me that there are two kinds of writers. There's the ones who write until they can't find a word, and then they sit around for two days until they get the right word. And, there's the kind who will leave a blank and go back and fill it in. I leave a blank. I will sometimes write a page or two and make a note, 'Better stuff than this.'" John Sayles
  • "The same afternoon Zucker presented the fall schedule to advertisers at Radio City Music Hall, Grant Tinker was four blocks away at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He was getting a prestigious Peabody award for his career running NBC and, before that, building MTM Enterprises, the legendary home of such series as "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Hill Street Blues." Receiving his medallion during the annual Peabody luncheon, Tinker, famously modest, called himself "a guy of no distinct or specific skills (who) always needed a lot of help." "And I've always had a lot of help," he added. "You know: really heavy lifters." That is his legacy: Recruiting the best creative people, and letting them do what they do best. Article by Frazier Moore Associated Press, Monday, June 6, 2005 Posted: 2:52 PM EDT (1852 GMT)
  • "When you're rewriting, you have to respect the writer who broke the page. If it wasn't for that, you wouldn't be doing those rewrites. A blank page, that's the toughest thing in the world." Bob Brummer
  • "You really don't fully understand your own script until about two weeks after the movie opens." David Koepp
  • "I'm not really that clever, so when I find something that is really apparent to me, I concentrate and fixate on it." Eduardo Sanchez
  • “The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.” John Cheever, writer, 1912-1982
  • "Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes, Art is knowing which ones to keep." Scott Adams

Clever

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  • "Just as I was getting used to today, along came yesterday." Unknown
  • "A lawyer's stock and trade is his advice and time." Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President. "Then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the Union." Dick Cheney
  • "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." -Robert Wilensky, speech at a 1996 conference
  • The world has broken into pieces and you and I are not on the same piece.
  • "In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice." Richard Bach - Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
  • "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." -Mel Brooks
  • "The musical blows the dust off your soul." Mel Brooks, from the PBS six-parter Broadway: The American Musical about the uniquely American art form.
  • "We're all weird. We just pretend to be normal." Andrea Bolingbroke
  • "If tears made you pretty, I'd be beautiful. I'm self destructive. I hide behind a smile. Everyone goes away in the end. No one understands me..." unknown
  • "If you can't accept anything on faith, then you're doomed for a life dominated by doubt." Chris Kringle, Miracle on 34th Street
  • "Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone." Robert Allen, The One Minute Millionaire

On Silence

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  • “Silence is also speech” Unknown
  • “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.” Helen Keller
  • "When you decide to speak, be sure that what you say is more profound than the silence." Quaker proverb
  • "There are times when silence has the loudest voice.” Leroy Brownlow
  • "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." -Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Wittgenstein's Logische-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and quoted in "In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art"
  • “Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.” Margaret Lee Runbeck
  • “After another moment's silence, she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason” -Albert Camus
  • “Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.” -Marcel Marceau
  • “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” -Aldous Huxley
  • “Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.” Unknown
  • “I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers” Kahlil Gibran
  • “In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.” Mahatma Gandhi
  • “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Abraham Lincoln
  • "If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." Vincent Van Gogh

On War

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  • On enemies: "Why do you try to make friends of them? You should try to destroy them," said an associate of President Lincoln. Lincoln replied: "Am I not destroying my enemies when I make them my friends?" Abraham Lincoln
  • "A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake." Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
  • Our fallen heroes: "[W]e cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863.
  • "In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of thermonuclear war, the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs would be dropped all over the world. At the Hiroshima death rate of some hundred thousand people killed per equivalent thirteen-kiloton weapon, this would be enough to kill a hundred billion people. But there were less than five billion people on the planet in the late twentieth century." Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Who speaks for Earth?
  • “Every minute, hundreds of bombs and shells are exploding,” said Fadril al-Badrani, a resident who lives in the center of Fallujah, said after nightfall Monday. “The north of the city is in flames. I can also see fire and smoke ... Fallujah has become like hell.” -NBC, MSNBC and news services; Updated: 9:33 a.m. ET Nov. 9, 2004
  • Gunfire and Thunderstorms: Beirut, perched between the sparkling Mediterranean and a green mountain range, has been badly shaken by the violence – the worst sectarian clashes the country has seen since the 15-year civil war from 1975-1990. The skirmishes echo off the mountains, amplifying the sound of explosions as they occur. Throughout Thursday night, heavy fighting took place, with machine gun fire, rocket-propelled grenades and pistol shots making sleep almost impossible for most residents. Compounding the magnitude of the sound was a thunderstorm, which unexpectedly erupted in the same way the armed conflict had a few hours earlier. "The thunderstorm… eerie timing" said Hanna Defuria, visiting her sister who just moved to Beirut two weeks ago. "It was hard to tell what was thunder and what were gunshots, but when the storm passed there were no gunshots." Irina Prentice, MSNBC World Blog, IN BEIRUT, GUNFIRE AND THUNDER MAKE FOR AN EERIE MIXTURE, Posted: Friday, May 09, 2008 2:36 PM, http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/05/09/1003826.aspx
  • "My nerves are in perfect order," Owen wrote his mother. "I came out again in order to help these boys; directly, by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can." Wilfred Owen, 1918
  • After the Scott Peterson Death penalty verdict, the mother of Laci Peterson: "There are no winners in a case like this. We are families who are suffering horrendous losses," Sharon Rocha wrote in a statement posted this week on the family's Web site. "People tell me, 'Now you can have some closure.' There is no closure. We are only turning the page and beginning the next chapter in our book of life," she wrote. "Closure will only occur for me when I complete my book of life, when I die."
  • "'There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,' he said. Bush did admit that 'freedom, by its nature, must be chosen,' and he promised 'America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.' For the most part, Bush’s address was free of any doubt or skepticism. It was instead a prose hymn to human freedom, as loftily idealistic as any of Woodrow Wilson’s high-flown rhetoric." -Tom Curry quoting George W. Bush at the inauguration address for his second term, MSNBC.com, Updated: 8:20 p.m. ET Jan. 20, 2005
  • In his inaugural address last month, President Bush did not mention North Korea by name. But he said U.S. efforts have lit "a fire in the minds of men...It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world," he said.
  • Bush also used Saturday's address to celebrate Easter and remember military members overseas. "Easter is the victory of light over darkness," Bush said. "In this season of renewal, we remember that hope leads us closer to truth, and that in the end, even death itself will be defeated. That is the promise of Easter morning." President Bush addressing the Minnesota school shootings where a boy shot to death five fellow students, a teacher and a security guard. CNN reporting, "Bush praises fallen security guard", Saturday, March 26, 2005 Posted: 11:21 AM EST (1621 GMT)
  • "Look, Kim Jong Il is a dangerous person. He's a man who starves his people. He's got huge concentration camps. And, as David accurately noted, there is concern about his capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon. We don't know if he can or not, but I think it's best, when you're dealing with a tyrant like Kim Jong Il, to assume he can...One of the reasons why I thought it was important to have a missile defense system is for precisely the reason that you brought up: Perhaps Kim Jong Il has got the capacity to launch a weapon; wouldn't it be nice to be able to shoot it down?" CNN reporting from a transcript of the President's news conference Thursday, April 28, 2005 Posted: 11:04 PM EDT (0304 GMT).
  • "Ladies and gentlemen, we are so privileged to be citizens of this great republic. I was reminded of that time and again when I was in my former job as secretary of defense. I traveled a lot, and when I came home, my plane would land at Andrews Air Force Base and I'd return to the Pentagon by helicopter. When you make that trip from Andrews to the Pentagon and you look down on the city of Washington, one of the first things you see is the Capitol, where are the great debates that have shaped 200 years of American history have taken place. You fly down along the Mall and see the monument to George Washington, a structure as grand as the man himself. To the north is the White House, where John Adams once prayed that none but honest and wise men may ever rule under this roof. Next, you see the memorial to Thomas Jefferson, our third president and the author of our Declaration of Independence. Then you fly over the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, this greatest of presidents, the man who saved the Union. And then you cross the Potomac on approach to the Pentagon. And just before you settle down on the landing pad, you look out upon Arlington National Cemetery, its gentle slopes and crosses row on row. I never once made that trip without being reminded of how enormously fortunate we all are to be Americans and what a... (INTERRUPTED BY APPLAUSE) . . I never made that trip without being reminded of how enormously fortunate we are to be Americans and what a terrible price thousands have paid so that all of us and millions more around the world might live in freedom." Dick Cheney address accepting the GOP nomination for vice president, August 2, 2000[3]
  • "During my Oval Office interview with the president, I asked him to complete the sentence "President Bush was...[fill in the blank]." He responded (uncharacteristically in third person): "President Bush was the president at a time when our nation was attacked, he clearly saw the dangers, he pursued the enemy, he put tools in place so the professionals could better protect the people, and the homeland was not attacked." -Tara Wall, Commentary: Bush will be vindicated[4]
  • "Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages." Samuel Johnson, writer, 1758
  • "There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever." Thomas A. Edison
  • We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that one way or another. J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Human Condition

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  • "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." Horace Mann
  • "The three most important things in life are to be kind, to be kind, to be kind." Henry James
  • "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Ian Maclaren (Rev. John Watson). This quote that has been widely misattributed to Plato or Philo of Alexandria. The quote's more common variation is "...a hard battle." The quote's origin has been traced to Ian MacLaren, which is the pen name, or pseudonym, of the Scottish theologian and author John Watson. See http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/
  • "No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." Aesop
  • "When once the wife of Philo was asked in an assembly of many women why she alone of all her sex did not wear any golden ornaments, she replied: "The virtue of a husband is a sufficient ornament for his wife." SER. CXXIII. From fragments of Philo's writings extracted from The Parallels of John of Damascus
  • "The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it...And, lastly, we learn Chess by the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable chance, and that of preserving in the search of resources." Benjamin Franklin, from his essay The Morals Of Chess:
  • "I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved." Soren Kierkegaard
  • "I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both. Soren Kierkegaard
  • "During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk." Soren Kierkegaard
  • "Alas, his worst fears were justified, as the heavens roar and great hailstones beat down upon the proudly standing corn." Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, Sonnets: Presto, Summer
  • "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." -Ariel to Prospero, citing the cries of the king's son, Ferdinand. The Tempest Shakespeare,
  • "To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level." Bertrand Russell
  • "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." Carl Sagan
  • "I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star." Carl Sagan
  • "I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students." Carl Sagan
  • "One other possible title has occurred to me: Till We Have Faces. My heroine says in one passage, ‘How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?’ CS Lewis, February 29, 1956 [cited at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]
  • "How can they (i.e. the gods) meet us face to face till we have faces? The idea was that a human being must become real before it can expect to receive any message from the superhuman; that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona." -CS Lewis in a letter to Dorothea Conybeare [cited at Constance Babington Smith, Letters to a Sister from Rose Macaulay (1964) 261; also at Hooper, Companion (see IX) 252]
  • "It is the ferment of ideas, the clash of disagreeing judgments, the privilege of the individual to develop his own thoughts and shape his own character that makes progress possible." Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. president, 1925
  • "Einstein to his dying day rejected quantum mechanics as ultimate truth, saying in a letter to Max Born in 1924, "The theory yields much but it hardly brings us closer to the Old One's secrets. I, in any case, am convinced that he does not play dice."" Albert Einstein, 1879-1955, quote and description from The Next Einstein? Applicants Welcome by Dennis Overbye, published in the New York Times March 1, 2005
  • "There is nothing in the world more powerful than an idea. No weapon can destroy it; no power can conquer it, except the power of another idea." Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
  • "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Mark Twain
  • "Grief only streaks their hairs with silver, but has never greyed their hopes." Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight
  • "They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." Andy Warhol
  • "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world... Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion... No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul." C.S. Lewis, p.81 and 83 from The Problem Of Pain
  • "The murky waters of fear boil up from the mud of selfishness." Wayne Brickey, Making Sense of Suffering
  • "They are the architects of greatness. Their vision lies within their souls. They never see the mirages of Fact, but peer beyond the veils and mists of doubt and pierce the walls of unborn Time...They are the Argonauts, the seekers of the priceless fleece—the Truth...In lace of stone their spires stab the Old World's skies and with their golden crosses kiss the sun." Herbert Kaufman, The Winning Fight (book c.1910) from the essay "The Dreamers"
  • "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him." Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
  • "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
  • "You can't be in a place where you're trying to justify the nature of the violence. The anthropological argument is that violence in film ritualizes it—by putting in on the stage it's out of ordinary life. But in the end, you can't lie to your kids. You have to try to create a framework where witnessing real, unstructured violence illuminated your child's understanding of the human condition." David Self
  • "I have this thing I call the 'trickle up' theory, which is, you find some small microcosm that represents the thing you are really interested in on a human level, and you try to hit people in their hearts and their emotions, and then you hope it will trickle up and they'll think about it with their heads." Naomi Foner
  • "Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come." Chinese proverb
  • "I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. Willa Cather (1873-1947), O Pioneers 1913
  • "Do not be afraid to go out on a limb ... That's where the fruit is." Anonymous
  • "Trees stand with us and the rest of Earth's lifeforms on the brink of destruction precipitated by our carelessness. We need each other to survive."
  • "If you seek strength and majesty and patience, welcome the company of trees." Hal Borland, Beyond Your Doorstep
  • "What a noble gift to man are the forests! What a debt of gratitude and admiration we owe for their utility and their beauty!" Susan Fenimore Copper
  • "Too many people simply give up too easily. You have to keep the desire to forge ahead, and you have to be able to take the bruises of unsuccess. Success is just one long street fight." Milton Berle
  • "That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding." Edward Abbey, author, 1927-1989
  • "Far better it is to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States (1901–1909)
  • "One time, when I was little, I lost a quarter in my front yard. Then a few months later, after the snow melted, I found that quarter. Some things you never forget." Author Unknown
  • "The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it...And, lastly, we learn Chess by the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable chance, and that of preserving in the search of resources." Benjamin Franklin
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