Quotes
clock | January 15, 2009True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
clock | January 14, 2009Dullard, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy, have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were driven by stress of starvation, their dulness having blighted the crops. For some centuries, they infested Philistia, and many of them are called Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they withdrew thence and gradually…
clock | January 13, 2009Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
- Richard David Bach
purepedantry | September 17, 2008USA Today prints a (sort of) joke job description for the next generation of doctors:
Idealistic Generation X/Y overachievers with low- to mid-six-figure student loans to work in imploding health care system currently subject to runaway entitlement spending. Future salary to be subject to government whim and guaranteed not to keep up with inflation. Will be subject to unreasonable expectations of patients and held responsible for less-than-perfect outcomes by consumer advocates and trial lawyers. Must be able to work 70-80 hours per week, not including on-call duties, and place family…
purepedantry | September 10, 2008From Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek:
There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians. I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity. Let's get money out of politics by making politicians less powerful.
neurophilosophy | August 21, 2008William James on consciousness and memory:
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
neurophilosophy | July 24, 2008This quote comes from Recollections of My Life, by Santiago Ramon y Cajal:
Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind.
neurophilosophy | June 7, 2008Here's another great quote about the brain, from Ian McEwan's novel Saturday:
He's looking down at a portion of [the] brain...with its low hills and enfolded valleys of the sulci, each with a name and imputed function...Just to the left of the midline, running laterally away out of sight under the bone, is the motor strip. So easy to damage, with such terrible, lifelong consequences. How much time he has spent making routes to avoid these areas, like bad neighbourhoods in an American city...For all the recent advances, it's still not known how this well-protected one kilogram or so of cells…
neurophilosophy | May 25, 2008Here's a beautiful quote by the great neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington (1857-1952), from his 1941 book Man on His Nature:
Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.
Sherrington made a significant contribution to the discovery of the neuron, and coined the terms neuron and synapse. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work.
purepedantry | January 15, 2008Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes had this to say of cosmologists who are speculating about disembodied brains spontaneously generated in empty space:
If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through…
purepedantry | December 22, 2007Jesse Walker at Hit and Run had this to say about anti-immigrant activist Tom Tancredo dropping out of the GOP Presidential race:
Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. He will be replaced by Montezuma Aztlan Calderon, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca who will denounce the Brown Peril for just $3 an hour plus room and board.
Priceless.
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan
purepedantry | November 5, 2007Dark matter has worked its way into political cliche:
Rosenbaum's Political Physics: Do you ever sense there is some large mass of dark matter, an unseen Scandal Star, the gravitational pull of which is warping the coverage of what seems, on the surface, a pretty dull presidential race? I do. So does Ron Rosenbaum. I thought the Dark Star was the Edwards affair allegation. But Rosenbaum says "everyone in the elite Mainstream media" knows about another juicy scandal that the LAT is supposedly sitting on. I guess this is proof that I'm not in the elite, because I don't know what he's talking…
clock | October 25, 2007If the scissors are not used daily on the beard, it will not be long before the beard is, by its luxuriant growth, pretending to be the head.
- Hakim Jami (1414-92)
clock | October 8, 2007The curricula were unsophisticated, with a great deal of time wasted on penmanship and geography in the early grades and repetitions of the trivial history of New York City in higher grades.
- Martin Lewis Perl
clock | October 7, 2007Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.
- Sydney J. Harris
clock | September 29, 2007It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.
- Professor Scott Elledge
clock | September 28, 2007The most dangerous words in the English language are, "This time it's different."
- Sir John Templeton
clock | September 27, 2007Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.
- Doug Larson
clock | September 26, 2007No man whose sex life was satisfactory ever became a moral censor.
- Mina Loy