It is a fact that the world is flat. It is a fact that Thalidomide stops morning sickness. It is a fact that feeding dead sheep to cows is an efficient method for raising livestock. That antibiotics do not remain in livestock at the time of human consumption. That cigarettes do not cause cancer. That men are more rational than women. That the Maginot Line will stop the German army. That deregulated money-markets will produce an efficient economy. That large mechanical fishing boats will create a more efficient fishery. That radiation-based foot-measurement machines are helpful in buying the right-sized shoe. That spraying asbestos on our walls and ceilings creates an effective insulation for buildings. That spraying insecticides onto roadsides will reduce governmental mowing costs. That deregulated airways will encourage competition among airlines.
Among all of these, the fact to last the longest as a fact is the one which states that the world is flat. It must therefore be the truest of the group. Indeed, the most rational.
On Equilibrium
I live a quiet Life, but not a pleasant one: My Children govern without loving me, my Servants devour & despise me, my Friends caress and censure me, my Money wastes in Expences I do not enjoy, and my Time in Trifles I do not approve. every one is made Insolent, & no one Comfortable. my Reputation unprotected, my Heart unsatisfied, my Health unsettled.
In her diary entry for 26 September -- 1 October 1782
Even a library cataloguing system is stylized and reflects the interests and reading habits of librarians and library users. The only framework inclusive enough to embrace all man's undertakings with equal objectivity is the garbage dump.
The Tuning of the World
Clarity is not everything, but there is little without it.
Envisioning Information
"I am afraid of cows. I think I have cow phobia. I have nightmares about cows. Once upon a time a cow chased me in Yugoslavia and I can't forget it. So you can just imagine what it was like: every time I left the tent to get food, this cow would come up and stare at me, and I'd be terrified. I even learned to say, 'Get lost, mate,' or something Australian like that to the cow ... but no good ... so I bought a cow."
"You were afraid of cows and you bought a cow?"
"Yes. When you have one of these big fears, you should confront it; and it was better for me to be frightened of my own cow than by somebody else's cow. Anyway, we needed the milk."
Interviewing Valentina Makeev in A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia
Consistently, the less time spent with one's children, the more positive one's parenting experience.
In a dying civilisation, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.
A Coffin for Dimitrios
New and significant prehuman fossils have been unearthed with such unrelenting frequency in recent years that the fate of any lecture notes can only be described with the watchword of a fundamentally irrational economy -- planned obsolescence. Each year, when the topic comes up in my courses, I simply open my old folder and dump the contents into the nearest circular file. And here we go again.
"Bushes and Ladders in Human Evolution", in Ever Since Darwin
Why not telegraph to London, I thought, for some music to review? Reviewing has one advantage over suicide. In suicide you take it out of yourself: in reviewing you take it out of other people.
In "Criticism and Suicide", 3 January 1890
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.
Opticks
"I regularly get emails from strangers telling me about this Terribly Important new XML language they've cooked up, to which the standard rejoinder is 'get in touch when you have some software to show me.'"
"Or less Canadianly, 'Shut up and show me the code.'"
In all other respects his paper is a wonderful example of what a multitude of words can do towards obliterating meaning.
As far as I can tell, calling something philosophical is like greasing a pig to make it hard to catch.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
The Things They Carried
I hate Hyndland. You'll find its like in any large city. Green leafy suburbs, two cars, children at public school and boredom, boredom, boredom. Petty respectability up front, intricate cruelties behind closed doors.
The Cutting Room
He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
In "Watts' Allegorical Paintings"
Ruin, in an ancient country like China, amid appealing simplicity like this, can be accepted smilingly; even the final and greatest ruin of death. Further, since in imagination human beings can prefigure this last irreparable loss, and then retrospectively assay once more the transitoriness of mortal existence, one learns not to reproach oneself excessively for errors of the past, and conceding ultimate defeat, to consult one's intimate moods, one's own quiet and small desires.
The Years That Were Fat: The Last of Old China
In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never legally sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.
Cryptonomicon
On one occasion, I took him [Harry Houdini] to a magicians' meeting in my car, which that season was a Ford Model T coupe with a front seat of only two-person width and with the doorcatches inconveniently placed behind a person's elbow. When he tried to twist around and work the catch, Houdini found it stuck and in all seriousness, he demanded, "Say -- how do you get out of this thing?" It wasn't until I had reached across and pulled the knob for him that he began laughing, because he, of all people, couldn't get out of a Ford coupe.
In Houdini on Magic
When, shortly after taking office as president, George W. Bush was asked what he would do about global warming, his answer was, "We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America." Asked whether the president would call on drivers to sharply reduce their fuel consumption, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, replied, "That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one."
The President of Good and Evil
The US presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
In Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton
... during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer, whose name I have long forgotten. He was engaged in some sort of planning exercise and wanted to know how many Rwandans had died, how many were refugees, and how many were internally displaced. He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify risking the life of one American soldier. It was macabre, to say the least.
Shake Hands With The Devil
"There is today too much pleading of sincerity," Brigge said. "Let me have men who are doubtful, who struggle with their consciences, who sometimes are confused by right and wrong, whose perceptions fail, whose troubled minds lead them this way and that and even to dark places they should not go. I do not care for these certain men who insist that what they feel is the truth as though their sincerity alone were enough to excuse their fanatic hearts. Doliffe's virtues bring suffering and agony in their wake. His sincerity is neither here nor there."
Havoc in Its Third Year