[3460] in SIPB bug reports
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (carpe diem)
Sat Jan 23 13:28:00 1993
To: fortune@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 13:27:35 EST
From: carpe diem <rplotkin@Athena.MIT.EDU>
ok, so there's a lot, but i just happened to have these
sitting around. i promise i won't do it again.
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I have been informed repeatedly, by persons who considered
themselves hard-headed realists, that men in business normally desire to
grow rich. Observation has convinced me that the persons who gave me
this assurance, so far from being realists, were sentimental idealists,
totally blind to the most patent facts of the world in which they live.
If business men really wished to grow rich more ardently than they wish
to keep others poor, the world would quickly become a paradise.
Bertrand Russell
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism
is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.
Rebecca West
A hallmark of crank manuscripts is that they solve
everything... A second hallmark of cranks is that they are humorless.
A third hallmark of the crank is that he is sure everyone is out to
steal his ideas. A fourth hallmark of the crank is that he is
determined to bring the newspapers in somehow. A fifth hallmark of
cranks is that they use a lot of capital letters. Jeremy Bernstein
While the tabloids appeal to our craving for the mysterious, the
real world offers every bit as much drama--actually more, because editors
have limited imaginations, but nature has no such constraints. Howard
A. Smith
The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition
wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a
reversed order. Francis Bacon
You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You
might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you have them.
George Bernard Shaw
There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human
affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is
powerless; without love, science is destructive. Bertrand Russell
Great spirits often encounter violent opposition from mediocre
minds. Albert Einstein
Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the
animals don't understand us. Chazal
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in
avoiding them. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Whistling to keep up courage is good practice for whistling.
Henry Haskins
Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a
crime to examine the laws of heat. John Morley
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are
consequences. Robert Ingersoll
Those who know the least obey the best. George Farquhar
The three rudenesses of this world: youth mocking at age, health
mocking at sickness, a wise man mocking a fool.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking
others to live as one wishes to live. Oscar Wilde
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people. It is very difficult to
make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell. Walter Bagehot
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the
real with the ideal never goes unpunished. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is questionable whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel,
we aren't lapsing into precisely the mistake of the child who hits the
chair he bumps into. Georg Christoph Licthenberg
It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.
Bernard de Fontenelle
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
When you say that you agree to a thing on principle, you mean that
you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
Otto von Bismarck
Truth does less good in the world than its appearances do harm.
La Rochefoucauld
There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some
mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an
essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of
intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been
programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so
I call it Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Natural man has only two primal passions: to get and to beget.
Osler
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only
animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what
they might have been. Nietzsche
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one.
Halifax
Nothing so much prevents our being natural as the desire to seem
so. La Rochefoucauld
How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound!
Joubert
He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.
Montaigne
Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we
resort to to hide them. La Rochefoucauld
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough. Thomas Fuller
He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he
will do very few things. Halifax
Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes. Oscar Wilde
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually
fearing you will make one. E. Hubbard
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the
neighbors will say. Connoly
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.
Their tastes may not be the same. George Bernard Shaw
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is
to fill the world with fools. Herbert Spencer
It's always been and always will be the same in the world: the
horse does the work and the coachman is tipped.
The great tragedy of science--the slaying of a beautiful
hypothesis by an ugly fact. T.H. Huxley
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute
rejection of authority. T. H. Huxley
Nothing hath an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not of
our side. Halifax
What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.
Bertrand Russell
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. Francis Bacon
A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of
finding nothing still more disgusting before the day is over. Chamfort
One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
Oscar Wilde
A very popular error--having the courage of one's convictions;
rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's
convictions. Nietzsche
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire
The girl who can't dance says the band can't play. Yiddish Proverb
He who lies for you will lie against you. Bosnian Proverb
Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight
acquaintance and without any visible reason. Halifax
Most men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.
Gourmont
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking
together in the same direction. Saint-Exupery
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable
sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled.
The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog. T.H.
Huxley
Every great scientific truth goes through three states: First,
people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been
discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.
Attirbuted to Louis Agassiz
What will people say--in these words lies the tyranny of the world,
the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of
our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere. Berthold Auerbach
You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas
Death hangs over thee. While thou still live, while thou may, do
good. Marcus Aurelius Antonius
Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be so sure he shall never
hit the mark, yet as sure as he is, he shall shoot higher than he who
aims at a bush. Sir Phillip Sidney
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock
strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to
instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and
unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one
starts lawsuits over their wills. Voltaire
A vixen sneered at a lioness because she never bore more than one
cub. 'Only one,' she replied, 'but a lion.' Aesop
A dog, lying in a manger, would neither eat the barley herself nor
allow the horse, which could eat it, to come near it. Aesop
