Indecision is the key to flexibility.

- Janis "Pete" Petersons, in Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs

To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.

- Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force

Time's like wine and love. You can have it or lack it, lose it or abuse it, but you can't waste it.

- Pasquale in Così Fan Tutti by Michael Dibdin

People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.

- Marian Wright Edelman

another old quote in its new home

I know that whatever is published in a book — correct or incorrect — will most certainly become public knowledge. This is why so many wrong ideas are popular among people.

- Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides, also known as "the Rambam"), in Letter on Martyrdom (translation by Abraham Halkin). The Rambam lived in the 12th century: surely in these days he would add, whatever is published in newspapers and in magazines and on the Web,...

another old quote in its new home

We see only what we know.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Meditations in Time of Civil War: The Stare's Nest at My Window



This is an old quote of the day, from a couple of years ago, which I have moved from my old page.
In Richard Powers' recent novel Plowing the Dark, the workers on a big virtual reality project are gathered at a bar watching the news: the Soviet Union crumbling, Yugoslavia balkanizing, Iraq occupying Kuwait,... One of them recalls the following bit of poetry and recites: in a moment not unlike the present...

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed or a house burned.

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



A barricade of stone or of wood

Some fourteen days of civil war

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty nest of the stare.



We have fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

- William Butler Yeats

[. . .] we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

Keith Olbermann, "Beginning of the end of America", special commentary on Countdown (MSNBC)

Why do you pity the fool? "You pity the fool because you don't want to beat up a fool," Mr. T explained. "You know, pity is between sorry and mercy. See, if you pity him, you know, you won't have to beat him up."

Interview with "Mr. T" in The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 October 2006



Hat tip: Zuska

I have generalized this with a catchy acronym-aphorism — CITOKATE ... or... Criticism is the Only Known Antidote to Error. A practicing scientist knows this, in his or her bones, even as the Cro Magnon ego inevitably tugs in the other direction, murmuring to each of us that we are 100% correct and that critics are all vile fools.

David Brin

[Hat tip: Blake Stacey]