Saturday Quotathon: Mixed Bag

Before today's quotes, I think I need a recap of the entries to the win the cards contest. What I need from everyone still interested in the cards, is confirmation that they are. I'm also going to list the great ideas people gave me who weren't interested. The contest continues through today and, Monday, I'll announce the winner.

Great ideas but don't want cards:

• Project Savior - What inspires me (already used it!)

Great ideas that might be entrants into the contest if they DO want cards. Do you? Let me know in a comment if you want the cards!

• flit - feeble attempt to get me to write papers for her
• Patricia Rockwell - What do I think of the Hadron Collider
• Shakespeare - Start a poem or a short story in a session and see if commenters will continue it
• Shakespeare - "What would I do when..." blog - not sure if she meant me to start another blog or just do this periodically.

And thank you to everyone who wished me happy birthday.

Now, enough dilly-dallying... Bring on the quotes.

Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides.
-- Frank Tyger

Me, I'm dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for. Because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.
-Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Carribean: Curse of the Black Pearl

All sunshine makes a desert.
-Arabic Proverb

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."
-Stephen Crane

I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
- Booker T. Washington

With great power comes great responsibility.
- Stan Lee

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world.
- Tony Benn

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.
- Garrison Keillor

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth — that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
- H. L. Mencken

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
- Niels Bohr

Money is a good servant but a bad master.
-French Proverb

There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
-Mark Twain

Painting is easy when you don’t know how but very difficult when you do.
-Edgar Degas [Ed. This applies to writing as well.]

No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.
-Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If lawyers had been present on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments would have twelve hundred amendments, all summing to the conclusion: The rich may ignore the rules, the poor will be hanged if they violate the smallest subordinate clause.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Only the madman is absolutely sure.
-Robert Anton Wilson

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Saturday Quotathon: Mixed Bag

I've been almost completely diverted by the metric argument - no writing done at all yesterday, and I really must get back. Still, it's a topic I enjoy. Since I'm in a weird mood and have this on the brain, I figured I'd just pick random quotes that seemed to suit my current mindset.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
-- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
-- Bernard Berenson

(These really are the first two unused quotes I've run into so far.)

No cause is helpless if it is just. Errors, no matter how popular, carry the seeds of their own destruction.
-- John W. Scoville

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.
-Abraham Lincoln

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us
- Bill Watterson

Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
- Charles H. Spurgeon

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
- Elbert Hubbard

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
- Leo Tolstoy

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
- Otto von Bismarck

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
- Gautama Buddha

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.
- David Hume

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
- Bill Cosby

Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
-William Osler, M.D.

I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
-Diane Sawyer

Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you want can’t be done and why. Then do it.
-Robert A. Heinlein

It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
-Baltasar Gracián

Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel. We generally call this "conservatism" or "stupidity", but it appears in all parts of the political spectrum, and in learned societies as well as in the Ku Klux Klan.
-Robert Anton Wilson

Eh, I'll keep it short today. Must get back to my novel.

P.S. For Relax Max' amusement:

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done. This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.
-Douglas Adams

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-Douglas Adams

I wrote an ad for Apple Computer: 'Macintosh - We might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'
-Douglas Adams

First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure.
-Douglas Adams

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