Maxims, quotations, etc.

compiled by B. Gerstman 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy: read it and weep 

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google 

• Computing the Cost by Arnie Cooper: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/399/computing_the_cost 

• The Doctor Fox Lecture: http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/r30034/PSY4180/Pages/Naftulin.html  

• Musicians must be cajoled into creating a particular kind of unison: not a robotic sameness of execution but a deeper unanimity in which spontaneous activities on the part of each player viscerally realize the conductor’s vision. There are videos in which you can see Bernstein striving for that unanimity, and it is not always pleasant to watch. When the feeling is absent, he exhibits irritation, rage, or—most unsettlingly—an unhappiness that threatens to spiral into despair. He tells members of the august Vienna Philharmonic that unless they try harder “there will be no Mahler,” and then he hangs his head, as if averting his eyes from an unspeakable crime. Usually, things turn around. The players fall in line—that trembling, hurtling line in which Bernstein seemed the most inspired follower rather than the leader. Although he basked in fame, he never accumulated power: each night, he gave away everything he had. ( http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/12/15/081215crat_atlarge_ross ) 

•  I've seen enough of the world to know how wrong I can be. (David Brooks, 2008)

• How to think like a scientist = Ask: What is the evidence? 

• God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. (Voltaire)

• To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered. (Voltaire)

• Let us read and let us dance ... two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. (Voltaire)

• "In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist; And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist; And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew; And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came... )

• "without epidemiology there is no public health; without public health there is no epidemiology" (Abe Lilienfeld as related by Michael Marmot in the European Journal of Epidemiology)

• Epidemiology, must be free from the constraints of philosophical speculation, politics, and religion; and instead turn it toward careful observation in identifying natural factors that influence health. (original) 

• We now judge college education at SJSU as entertainment--giving students what they want, not what they need; there is no longer a drive to act in the public interest. (based on this statement made by Ted Koppel's: We now judge journalism as entertainment--giving people what they want,  not what they need; there is no longer a drive to act in the public interest.)  

• The line is crossed when coercion and fraud are employed.  

•  I do good work because I care. (Daniel Lanois)

• Thank you for the day (mp3) (Daniel Lanois)

• This text is dedicated to every high school mathematics teacher whose high standards and sense of professional ethics have resulted in personal attacks upon their character and/or professional integrity. http://www.mathlogarithms.com/   

• Find comfort in the exchange between Richard Rich and Sir Thomas More in the play A Man For All Seasons (Robert Bolt)

• It is easy to oppress me, but it is difficult to degrade me. Rousseau 

• A few key features of a jerk: oppresses, humiliates, belittles, insults, teases, shames. (http://www.amazon.com/Asshole-Rule-Civilized-Workplace-Surviving/dp/0446526568 ) 

• The main point is gained if the student is put in a position not to be paralysed by the mere mention of such things but ... feels that they are inherently rational and manageable and that if he encounters them he will be in a position to find out , at need, what to do with them."  (RA Fisher quoted in Box, 1978, p. 405)

• "Teaching mathematical statistics in this way not only produced answers that were often irrelevant or misleading when applied to real situations but also led students to think not of the reality but of the mathematics as holding the key to statistical understanding. .... Many of them seem to have no experience of the valuable process known as "stopping to think." (RA Fisher quoted in Box, 1978, p. 436) 

• Most stress isn't brought on by doing too much but by knowing too little.

• The only way humans can do BETTER than computers is to take a chance of doing WORSE. So we have got to take seriously the need for steady progress toward teaching routine procedures to computers rather than to people. That will leave the teachers of people with only things hard to teach, but this is our proper fate.--John W. Tukey (1980)

• "a magnanimous spirit and zealous moderation" (said of Mme. de Boufflers, friend of Hume and Rosseau, in Edmonds and Eidinow, 2006, p. 226)

• Assumptions of higher education: You, the student, can appreciate this type of thought. I, the teacher, really want you to learn this type of thought. You, the student, are capable of learning and using the subject. You seek intellectual autonomy

• What did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think? (Ralph Nadar's father, The NYer,  Feb 5, 2007 p. 16)

• John Locke's distinction between the reasoning of a madman and a fool: The fool reasons incorrectly on correct premises, while the  madman reasons correctly on absurd premises (Emonds & Eidinow, 2006). 

• The difference between knowledge and truth is that knowledge is constantly change, but the truth is constant. (Unknown source.) 

• There are no "correct" answers to controversial issues, which is why they are controversial: scholars cannot agree. Answers to such questions are inherently subjective and opinion-based and teachers should not use their authority in the classroom to force students to adopt their positions. To do so is not education but indoctrination. (David Horowitz)

• You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there. (Yogi Berra)

• If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else. (Ibid)

• The purpose of education is liberation--to be able to think for yourself.

• Our decent then, is the origin of our evil passions!! ... The Devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather!" Charles Darwin (cited in the NYer, Oct 23, 2006, p. 57)

• We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. (from the last chapter in "The Descent of Man")

• Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft. ... What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind. (Bloom, 1987, p. 19)

• Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn. 

• ...not only research but sound research [is] required. ... Without this sort of scientific commitment, the society, its anchor cut, would drift at the mercy of any eloquent appeal (Joan Fisher Box, 1978, p. 194). 

• "he is just one of a type of a whole class of [individuals] with neither the inclination nor the capacity for critical thought." (Joan Fisher Box, 1978, p. 194). 

• Lying is so commonplace and yet, if you are on the receiving end, it's such an astonishing thing. (Philip Roth, Everyman, p. 121; a brilliant monologue by Phoebe follows) 

• amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work (Philip Roth, Everyman, p. 82) 

• a psychological imperialist = wanting both exploitation and allegiance.

• "mankind's passion for ignorance"

• "the ability to draw pure water from the most poisoned of wells" 

• It's in the DNA of lawyers not to be intimidated. Lawrence Lessig in The New Yorker, June 19., 2006, p. 38

• Whenever people are discriminated against, take a stand, especially when it is "politically incorrect."

• Statistical jokes: http://www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Pearson.html  

• What are words, anyway? If you tell a lie with words, yo ucause all kinds of people to get sick. If you tell people the truth, they get together and they get way. What that it? (Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory, p. 182).

• If you know how to do something only one way, you don't really know how to do it. Moshe Feldenkrais 

• One thing that I have learned is that belief doesn't change reality." C Everett Koop quoted in The New Yorker, March 13, 2006, p. 68 

• People are completely driven by their beliefs or their desires. Not the facts. C Everett Koop quoted in The New Yorker, March 13, 2006, p. 68 

• "No fear, no envy, no meanness" -- Liam Clancy to Bob Dylan

• "Psycho polemic babble" (Dylan, Chronicles, 2004, p. 283)  

• Finally a study showing a relation between teacher content knowledge and student achievement (Duh!) -- American Educator, Fall, 2005, pp. 18 - 19; http://www.nap.edu/catalog/9822.html  

• The truth respects neither democracy nor hierarchy. (Reverend George Coyne) 

• The four agreements: 1) Impeccable with your words 2) Make no assumptions 3) Don't take things personally 4) Always do your best (Toltec tradition, Ruiz, 1997)

• Fortes fortuna adiuvat (fortune favors the brave) 

• Say little and do much (Proverb)

• Marxismus sine stercore tauri. (This means "Marxism without the shit of the bull") -- http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050822crat_atlarge, SAY ANYTHING Three books find truth under cultural and conceptual assault.by Jim Holt The NYer, August 22, 2005) -- Link to the group: 

• Sospitas sine stercore tauri (Health without ...)

• Treat adults like children and children like adults (Kinky Friedman's father's guiding credos, The New Yorker,  Issue of 2005-08-22)

• [scientific inquiry] is nothing but a refinement of our everyday thinking" (Einstein) 

• I soon learned to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter the mind and divert it from the essentials." (Einstein in Hoffman, 1972, p. 8) 

• Fanaticism is the only kind of will that can be instilled in the weak and timid. (source unknown)

• If you are going to defend a program, you have to defend it as it is, not as you wish it to be. (source unknown)

• Don't try to get it all at one time. You'll drive yourself crazy. (legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee.) 

• It's real hard to be free when you are brought and sold in the marketplace. (Jack Nicholson's character in Easy Rider.) 

• Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme happiness. (David Hume) 

• A person who has freedom is not in bondage to someone else's command or someone else's ideas. A slave who is in bondage to a master belongs to him and is ruled by him, often cruelly. A person in bondage has no choices of his own. A free person can do what he believes is right, and can refuse to act or to believe in ways that are unfair or wrong. (From a Passover Hagadah)

• We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain free. (George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)  

• I cannot give any scientist of any age any better advice than this: The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not. ( Sir Peter Medawar, 1979)

• When I came to practice I was looking for answers like everybody else. For years I asked "what's the right answer?" Now I am learning "What is the right question?" (Katherine Thanas, Jan 2005)

• From the novel "The Egoist" by George Meredith

  • Shallow souls run to rhapsody (p. 198)

  • A steady worker, but easily discomposed (p. 193)

  • Few sights on earth are more deserving of our sympathy than a good man who has a troubled conscience thrust on him. (George Meredith) 

• Boasts of great success are a giveaway of someone's insecurities (Niederhoffer, 1998, p. 95)  

• Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. -Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

• When all think alike, no one is thinking very much. - Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

• . . . not that it is unimportant; on the contrary, it is very probably more important than either of the others, but because any account unaccompanied by a mass of detailed illustrations must be trivial or dogmatic. (Greenwood, 1935, p. 98)

• The mind that sets out on a walk without attending to the level of detail appropriate to the situation might get into trouble. [Zen writing]

• Socratic maxims:

  • Wisdom begins in wonder.

  • Better to do a little well than a great deal badly.

  • Know thyself.

  • We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is a habit.

  • Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

  • It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka areté) every day...for the unexamined life is not worth living.

  • I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

• Be quick, but don't hurry -- John Wooden  

• If our motive is to manipulate, our communication and our leadership in general will prove to be ineffective over time. (Stephen R. Covey) 

• Public health is an undisciplined field comprising many practitioners who do not always speak the same language, and we are undisciplined in our thinking, dabbling in many related fields without enough depth and understanding. (Bernard Guyer, Am J Epidemiol 2004; 160:607)

• Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. (Thomas Huxley, 1854; cited in Am J Epidemiol  2004; 160:605 and Moore, 2004, p. 321) 

• Formal rules . . . is what  Hume means by "justice" (NYer, Oct. 11, 2004, p. 95)

• Wisdom . . . begins with the acknowledgment of uncertainty--of the limits of what we know.  (NYer, Oct. 11, 2004, p. 93)

• Radically expanding one's own powers as a ploy for legitimacy has consequences you cannot imagine. (From Krakauer' s Under the Banner of Heaven)

• THE roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful. THE roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful.  -- Rabindranath Tagore, "Stray Birds"

• "Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate" (Abandon all hope, you who enter) - Dante's Inferno

• . . . an anti-intellectual undercurrent mixed with a air of superiority (can be said of many anti-intellectual environments, but said specifically of Atlanta, GA by Pico Iyer at the Capitola Book Store, April, 2004) 

• Accuse others of what you do. (a Marxists strategy for nullifying political opponents)

• In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual -- Galileo Galilei (The Writer's Almanac for April 12, 2004, http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/) 

• The reader and I are of course greatly influenced by this emotional atmosphere; some very wise men, such as Edmund Burke, have distrusted logic. But Burke and most other intelligent people thought it well to take stock of the logical aspects of a problem, and we must try to do so now. (Greenwood, 1935, p. 78) 

• Good scientific practice . . . places the emphasis on reasonable scientific judgment and the accumulation of evidence and not dogmatic insistence of the unique validity of a certain procedure (Jerome Cornfield cited in Vandenbroucke & de Craen, 2001)

• The best education for the best educated is the best education for all. (Source unknown)

• I'm not particularly intelligent, but I am inquisitive. (Einstein) 

• Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. -- Edgar Allen Poe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue) 

• [They]  lie in such ways that not even the opposite is not so.  

• If anything, I'm diligent. -- Steve Martin (when Terry Gross "accused" him of being intelligent, 10/6/03)

• falso in uno, falsus in omnibus (Latin for "if he lied in this, he lied in all.")

• Science is the holding of multiple working hypotheses -- Chamberlain (Source: Tukey, 1986, p. 72)

• A picture is worth 1,000 words, but to be so, it may have to include 100 words. -- Tukey (1986, p. 74)

• Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses--remember the every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. -- Henry James (Source: Theroux, T., Dark Star Safari, p. 433)

• A modest man with much to be modest about. -- Churchill 

• Be sure you give the poor the aid they most need. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce the misery which he strives in vain to relieve. -- Thoreau (Source: Theroux, P., Dark Star Safari, 2003, p. 328 )

• Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. --Alexander Pope

• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. -- Alexander Pope

• Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals cooperate. -- Hippocrates (Source: Major, 1945, p. 3)

• Nor can nature be commanded, except by being obeyed, and so these twin objects, human knowledge and human power, do really meet in one; and it is from ignorance of causes that operation fails. -- Francis Bacon (Source: Susser, 1973, p. x)

• Better an imprecise measure of something important than a precise measure of something unimportant. -- David Byar

• It is time to realize what the problem really is, and solve that problem as well as we can, instead of inventing a substitute problem that can be solved exactly, but is irrelevant. (Anscombe, JASA, 1958, 53, 702-719).

• If it is not worth doing superficially, it is not worth doing at all. -- Paul Erlich (in reference to studying whether the world is exhausting certain commodities)

• A mathematician in the most primitive sense is a guy who starts out a sentence 'Consider.'" -- Ian C. Ross

• If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable. -- T. S. Eliot (Four Quartets).

• Gossip is black magic at its very worst because it is pure poison. -- don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements, 1997)

• You can't dance at two weddings at the same time. (Yiddish Proverb)

• The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may deride it; ignorance may attack it. But in the end, there it is. -- Churchill

• The Internet can make you smarter faster than any other technology in history. It can also make you dumber faster than any other technology in history -- Thomas Friedman

• He calls his opponents "a rabblement of lemmings," made prisoners of a "ghastly conformity" by the fear of political censure. He finds ridiculous the sorts of criticisms which imagine that, by unmasking insidious political messages in literature, they are contributing to political a freedom struggle. He considers multiculturalist theory a condescending, sterile form of social work, its proponents ignorant cheerleaders. (Harold Bloom in The New Yorker, Sept. 30, 2002).

• Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called. -- John Stewart Mill

• . . . myself. I have an old-fashioned faith in saturating the services with facts. -- Jerry Morris (Smith, 2001, p. 1149)

• Scientists, like poets, should be on the side of intellectual freedom. (said in memory of Stephan Jay Gould)

• That arguments are fiercest where the facts are fewest. -- Bertrand Russell (Lasky & Stolley, 1994, p. 9)

• The great tragedy of science was the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. -- Thomas Huxley (Source: Susser, 1989, p. 485)

• Beware the quick answer: It might be the right answer to the wrong question. -- William Knight (University of New Brunswick)

• [This is] a theory which was initially genuinely scientific degenerated into pseudo-scientific dogma. (Source unknown)

• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. -- William James (Principles of Psychology)

• post hoc, ergo propter hoc (Latin for "after, therefore because of," indicating a common logical mistaking)

• The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. (Russell's illustration of Hume's Problem of Induction as stated Edmonds & Eidinow, 2001, p. 170)

• As most lawyers know, eyewitnesses often err . . . If an event suggests some tempting interpretation, then this interpretation, more often than not, is allowed to distort what has actually been seen. -- Karl Popper

• Scientists formulate and test (by refutation) etiologic hypotheses whereas policymakers formulate and test (by implementation and criticism) ethical hypotheses. -- Maclure (Rothman, 1988, p. 137)

• There are three assumptions inherent in even simple statements (Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions). For example, the statement "The king of France in bald." has the following assumptions: (1) There is a king of France. (2)  There is only one King of France.(3) Whatever is King of France is bald.

• The meaning of a proposition is the method by which it is verified. (a maxim of logical positivism.)

• Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose (French for "The more things change, the more they stay the same.")

• ...the pitfall is in adopting procedures as things in their own right rather than by having regard to the central objectives the procedures are intended to achieve. -- Cox (in Armitage, 1983, p. 332)

• the scope [of an introductory statistics course] is necessarily limited, and they can scarcely be expected to endow the average ... student with a high level of expertise. But if they familiarize hem with the aims and achievements of the statistical approach, and encourage a critical attitude toward numerical data, they will have served a useful purpose. (Armitage, 1983, p. 329)

• ...the best is the enemy of the good (Voltaire on why you shouldn't let the need for perfection stifle good work in Dictionnaire philosophique tome 1, 1819, p. 608)

• One must go seek more facts, paying less attention to technics and far more to the development and perfection of methods of obtaining them. (Hill, 1953)

• In politics, after me, I'm for you. (Anon)

• [In Washington] a gaff is when someone blurts out the truth. (Michael Kinsley, Feb 2001)

• It is easier to point out an error than to enunciate the truth (G. K. Gilbert cited in Goodman & Kruskal, 1959)

• We only see what we know. (Anonymous)

• . . . the idiocy of defining human beings by race. -- Mark Twain

• As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. -- Abraham Lincoln (source: d'Souza, 2001)

• Ultimately a victim wants nothing more than to exchange places with his oppressor' -- Frantz Fannon (Source: d'Souza, 2001)

• pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate (Literally "multiplicity ought not be posited without necessity." This is Occam's Razor, the assumptions and entities used to explain a thing should not be multiplied beyond necessity.)

• I AM the autumn cloud, empty of rain; see my fullness in the field of ripened rice. -- Rabindranath Tagore (Stray Birds)

• Nature is the final arbiter.

• Nature is a set of statistical tendencies.

• What is to keep this [society] from turning into a mob with a head-cutter? . . . partly churchgoing and partly club-joining and partly shopping. (Adam Gopnick explanation of Tocqueville's "How the Taste for Material Enjoyments Among Americans is United with Love of Freedom and with Care for Public Affairs"; in "How the pursuit of happiness is still our most radical idea" in The New Yorker, Oct 15, 2001, p. 215)

• Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.

• Don't press. (Jack Benny, said to harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler about trying to impress an unreceptive audience)

• Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. (Wendell Berry)

• Evil communications corrupt good manners. [Corinthians 15:33]

• Chance favors the prepared mind. --Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

• The honored ideals of the medical profession imply that the responsibility of the physician extends not only to the individual, but also to society. (American Medical Association's Principles of Medical Ethics, Section 10)

• Reminds me of that old Steve Martin routine where he stands before a stadium crown and gets thousands of people to chant in unison, "We are all individuals, we all have our own ideas."

• Forgive me for writing such a long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one. (George Bernard Shaw?)

• Any man aged forty who is not a misanthrope has never loved mankind. -- Chamfort

• A man of integrity is but one species of humanity. -- Chamfort

• In taking a wife, choose only the one you would choose as a friend if she were a man. (Joubert)

• If you want to be heard in the public, which is deaf, speak in a lower voice. (Joubert)

• When one writes with ease one always thinks oneself more talented than one really is. (Joubert)

• When one of my friends is one-eyed I look at him only in profile. -- (Joubert)

• Surtout, Messieurs, point de zele. ("Above all, gentlemen, no zeal.") - Talleyrand

• Frustration will ensue when you try to do too much. (Anon)

• There is nothing so eloquent as fact. -- Mailer

• Part of what I do is more of 'what I don't do' -- trying to avoid making too many decisions, because eventually the best results is still what happens naturally. -- Linus Torvalds

• The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts. -- Norman Mailer (1979, p. 600)

• What makes some things shoddy, pretentious, and second rate, while others are honest, retrained, and true? -- Norman Mailer

• He who knows best knows how little he knows. -- Thomas Jefferson

• An interesting argument, like a musical composition, should generate several interpretations of the same idea. (Am J Epidemiol:150:127).

• Technology always promises to save time but actually consumes it. -- Jane Smiley

• 90% of the game is half mental. -- Yogi Berra

• You can observe a lot by watching. -- Yogi Berra

• I'm willing to be an Existentialist, provided I'm not aware of the fact. -- Andre Gide

• But man, proud man,
  Dressed in a little brief authority,
  Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
  His glassy essence, like an angry ape
  Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
  As makes the angels weep. (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 2 )

• People are being cheated out of the experience of 'becoming.' It's the computer which becomes now. People think, 'Oh, boy, wait until I get this new program.' Bill Gates will give you a program to write a perfect Shakespearean sonnet . . . [Instead] people should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous." -- Vonnegu

• When you ask people what made the modern West different from other cultures around the world, most of the answers are terribly negative: the disenchantment of the world, the destabilization of the earth, the death of God, the death of the Goddess, nightmare after nightmare. These naysayers tend to overlook the 40 years of life extension that the West has given us, the wonders of modern physics, modern medicine, the abolition of slavery, the rise of democracies, the rise of feminism, and so on. Until we honor both the good and bad news of modernity, we're not going to see our situation clearly. -- Ken Wilber

• The dignity of the West stems from what scholars from Max Weber to Jurgen Habermas call the "differentiation of the cultural values spheres," namely, morals, science, and art. -- Ken Wilber

• Whenever someone wants to get us from "bad" state to a "good" state, violence is not far behind. Of course, you want to move from pollution to a clean environment, but don't pretend that G-d sits on one side and the devil on the other. No matter how peaceful you're trying to be, this split will always lead to aggression. . . . Without this awareness, we find ourselves on crusades, whether fundamentalist or ecological. Fanatics are fanatics. (Ken Wilber)

• The Warrior Dreams vulnerability. The average person waits in long lines, with the mass of like others, for a vision of invulnerability. John Wayne & Rambo & Rocky & Bruce Lee triumph again and again. Again, a gain, in dominance, the idea of strength triumphing over weakness, of good over evil, of effort over ease, no pain without gain, again. For the Warrior, to be vulnerable is to be able to deploy strength or weakness, weakness in strength, strength in weakness. The very idea... Person angry with Moshe snidely asking "How can I be a genius like you?" Moshe responding to the need and not the anger, "Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate the weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare... The warrior dreams a dynamic stability, an active passivity, a creative insecurity. What do you do when you don't know what to do? How do you act when you don't know how to act? To whom do you turn when there is no one to turn? You gotta love the questions. (Leri, D. The Feldenkrais Journal, 2: Fall, 1986.)

• The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. -- Mark Twain

• . . . every time we fail to use words with care for their truthfulness, the honesty of everything we use words to express becomes progressively forsaken -- N. Manea (The New Yorker, June 14, 1999, p. 68)

• It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you in trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so. -- Artimus Ward

• A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great. -- Saul Bellows

• From John Wooden's Pyramid of Success: Worthwhile things come from hard work and careful planning. There is no substitute for work. Excellence comes from knowledge and the ability to properly execute the fundamentals, from being prepared, and by covering every detail. Help others and see the other side. Cultivate the ability to make decisions, think alone, and the desire to excel. Be observing constantly and be quick to spot a weakness and correct it or use it as the case may warrant. Respect without fear, confidence without cockiness, faith in yourself and in knowing that you are prepared.

• The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win. (Anon)

• Teaching the Three `M's in the New Millennium: (Multi-tasking, Materialistics, and Mind Management) by Edward Miller (misuse of computers and  mind control in the 21st century)

• It is time to elect a world leader for your country, and your vote counts. Here's the scoop, i.e. the true moral count, on the three leading candidates: 

• Candidate A associates with wart heelers and consults with astrologists. He's had two mistresses. He chain-smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.

• Candidate B was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of brandy every evening.

• Candidate C is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer and hasn't had any illicit affairs.

• Which of these candidates is your choice? (scroll down for additional information)

• Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt

• Candidate B is Winston Churchill

• Candidate C is Adolph Hitler