Thoughts & Quotes
As the title suggests, this is a page for random thoughts which I'd like to share with anyone interested enough to read them. Let's face it, if you weren't interested, you wouldn't be here (unless you're a search engine); and if I weren't prepared for these thoughts to be made public, I wouldn't have hit the button marked Upload. :-)
Some of these thoughts are my own... many come from the mouths of others. Where I know the origin of a quote, I have given it.
Oliver Tearne: "Find and two-pence-ify the screamers."
Vic Smith: "Is that code?"
— 13th June 2006, just before the final filming session for G103.
"Nice equals minus bad."
— Oliver Tearne, 9th March 2006. (Truly, a moment of genius!)
"Omnia illa et ante fiebant, omnia illa et rursus fient. Ita dicimus omnes."
["All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. So say we all."]
— The Pythian Prophecy, "Kobol's Last Gleaming", Battlestar Galactica.
"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
— Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1792)
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason." — Thomas Paine
"Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto."
["I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me."]
— Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), Heauton Timorumenos
Six Stages of Moral Reasoning, Kohlberg (1969)
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
The great poem Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1842)
"Unclouded vision ahead requires that you deal with what is. To deal with what is, you must free your forebrain of your personal value system and personal preferences. You must discard all, or at least most, of your prejudices. Not just simple intolerance about race, religion and so on. It is much more difficult than that. You must free your mind of those values dearest of all to you: affection for your home, your background, your country, its customs, your own culture, your religious beliefs. The more precious the belief to you, the more certainly it must go if you are to free your forebrain to use its perception and logic."
— Gene Roddenberry
"[I]t may be concluded that a pure democracy... can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole... and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever found themselves incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
— James Madison as 'Publius' in The Federalist
"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffeable game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e., everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
— Terry Pratchett
"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."
— Falsely attributed to Caius Julius Caesar, but a sound warning nonetheless
"The trouble with the light at the end of the tunnel is that it is almost indistinguishable from an oncoming train."
— Unknown
"Iron is full of impurities that weaken it; through forging, it becomes steel and is transformed into a razor-sharp sword. Human beings develop in the same fashion."
— O-Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba
"Omnem credere diem tibi diluxisse supremum.
Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora."
["Believe that each day that has dawned is your last.
Some hour to which you have not been looking forward will prove lovely."]
— Horace, Epistles, Bk. 1, No. 4, 1.13