Quotes of the Day

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.
— Koz'ma Prutkov