Monday, November 30, 2020

Fortune Quote #3044

If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail
from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where
to find a complete list. -- Henry David Thoreau

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Fortune Quote #3043

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in,
but to live in it, be it good or bad. -- Henry David Thoreau

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Fortune Quote #3042

Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never
manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually
putting in their way; and if one were to judge these men wholly by the
effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would
deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put
obstructions on the railroads. -- Henry David Thoreau

Friday, November 27, 2020

Fortune Quote #3041

...every sufficiently good analogy is yearning to become a
functor. -- John Baez, "Quantum Quandaries: a Category-Theoretic
Perspective"

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Fortune Quote #3040

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think
little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and
Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Many a
man can mark his ruin from some murder or other he committed and perhaps
thought little of at the time. -- Thomas De Quincey

Wednesday, November 25, 2020

Fortune Quote #3039

Learn to enjoy your own company. You are the one person you can count on
living with for the rest of your life. -- Ann Richards

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Fortune Quote #3038

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are
evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. --
Albert Einstein

Monday, November 23, 2020

Fortune Quote #3037

A society that exalts virtue has 270 million policemen. A society that
scorns virtue cannot have enough. -- Michael Novak

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Fortune Quote #3036

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the
past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their
faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility
all the way. Looking back, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their
mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them... were walking in fog, and
one might wonder: who is more blind? -- Milan Kundera

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Fortune Quote #3035

If we are to deny new developments whenever they require relinquishment of
the ideas of the past, we shall be serving not truth but only our own
vanity. -- Hedrick, 1933 (about intuitionism in mathematics)

Friday, November 20, 2020

Fortune Quote #3034

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale
returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. --
Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi"

Thursday, November 19, 2020

Fortune Quote #3033

The very use of language commits the historian, like the scientist, to
generalization. The Peloponnesian War and the Second World War were very
different, and both were unique. But the historian calls them both wars,
and only the pedant will protest. -- Edward Hallett Carr, Oxford
historian

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Fortune Quote #3032

Where there is Marriage without Love, there will be Love without
Marriage. -- Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard's Almanac"

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Fortune Quote #3031

And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its
restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God
unencumbered? -- Kahlil Gibran

Monday, November 16, 2020

Fortune Quote #3030

We have tried since the birth of our nation to promote our love of peace
by a display of weakness. This course has failed us utterly. --
General George C. Marshall, 1945

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Fortune Quote #3029

If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot
of poetic crap, no, I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.
-- "Sam", "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny

Saturday, November 14, 2020

Fortune Quote #3028

This is but a taste of the perplexities and the innocent pleasures that
await us all if the practicioners of this modern school of
anthropology--and the spokesmen for cultural relativism--would try to bring
to an explicit statement the premises on which they earn their livings and
offer teachings to the world. It is mainly because the effort has rarely
been made that the merriment has not yet broken out. -- Hadley
Arkes, "First Things"

Friday, November 13, 2020

Fortune Quote #3027

I deplore the horrible crime of child murder. No matter what the
motive--love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn
innocent--the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. --
Susan B. Anthony, 1869

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Fortune Quote #3026

...if you think unity is the highest political value, you need to ask
yourself: Would you rather have national agreement on positions you
fundamentally oppose, or would you rather have divisiveness with a chance
for victory another day? -- Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Fortune Quote #3025

If someone says "I don't believe in labels," what he usually means is "the
other side should give up its ideological objections in favor of my
ideological objectives." This is an attempt at rhetorical alchemy by
transmuting a political agenda into a "pragmatic" one. -- Jonah
Goldberg

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Fortune Quote #3024

In the official and quotable comments of the esteemed president, this
sentence and comment does not exist. -- President Mohammed Khatami
of Iran, Feb. 2004

Monday, November 9, 2020

Fortune Quote #3023

Joe McCarthy must have had many defects, and I know some of them, but I
will admit none -- not because he is dead... but because he was hated and
hunted for his virtues. He was hated, above all, for his impregnable
innocence... He had seen the truth -- and it killed him. -- William
S. Schlamm, May 18, 1957

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Fortune Quote #3022

This is the first time I've ever seen the Executive Branch of the
Government take the Fifth Amendment. -- Senator Joseph McCarthy,
May 20, 1954

Saturday, November 7, 2020

Fortune Quote #3021

It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have
been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the
benefits that the wealthiest nation on hearth has had to offer-- the finest
homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we
can give. -- Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1950

Friday, November 6, 2020

Fortune Quote #3020

The whole earth is the tomb of heroes... I speak not of that in which
their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives.
-- Pericles

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Fortune Quote #3019

As long as I have any choice in the matter, I will live only in a country
where civil liberties, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the
law are the rule. -- Albert Einstein, 1933

Wednesday, November 4, 2020

Fortune Quote #3018

If all the young people in America were to share your beliefs and act as
you intend to act, the country would be defenseless against attack and
easily delivered into slavery. -- Albert Einstein, 1941, to a young
pacifist facing jail for refusing to serve in the military

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Fortune Quote #3017

Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of
science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not
unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference--science
and the nation will suffer. -- Philip Handler; former pres.,
National Academy of Sciences

Monday, November 2, 2020

Fortune Quote #3016

The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It
is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all
eternity. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sunday, November 1, 2020

Fortune Quote #3015

It takes a long time to be really married. One marries many times at many
levels within a marriage. If you have more marriages than you have divorces
within the marriage, you're lucky and you stick it out. -- Ruby Dee