Favourite Quotes

[Iain Aschendale]

"Everything looks like a conspiracy theory if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about."

-Nic, the Fat Electrician

 

[Louanne Learning]

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.”​

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

 

[Louanne Learning]

"For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies."

- Ursula Le Guin

 

[CatrionaGrace]

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."

Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried.

 

[JLT]

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

--Isaac Asimov

 

[Heartlet Happer]

Brasier’s razor:
"The most boring answer is probably the correct one".
-- Martin Brazier. Prof. of Paleobiology at the Univ. of Oxford

 

[Naomasa298]

I was wrong. The three worst words for a pilot aren't, "I was wrong". They are, "Brace for impact".
-- YouTuber Captain Steeeve.

 

[GrahamLewis]

"You cannot talk to a power politician
As if he were a wise man.
If he seeks to understand you,
If he looks inside himself
To find the truth you have told him,
He cannot find it there.
Not finding, he doubts.
When a man doubts,
He will kill."

Chuang Tzu. "Symphony for a Sea Bird"

From Thomas Merton's The Way of Chuang Tzu (New Directions 1969) p.103

 

[Donnie]

"We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or we can rejoice because thorn bushes have roses," Abraham Lincoln.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

In the later months of 1863, Lincoln was angered by General George B. McClellan's inactivity, despite his superiority in numbers over the Confederate forces.

In the end he wrote McClellan a single-sentence letter: "If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.

Yours respectfully,
A. Lincoln."

 

[Rath Darkblade]

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” -- Isaac Asimov

And that's my question: why are many people proud of being ignorant? When these people called themselves the "Know Nothing" party in the 1850s, at least they were honest about it.

 

[JLT]

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” -- Isaac Asimov

I think those seeds of ignorance are in every culture, at every time, but there seems to be more fertile ground here for them to sprout. What's curious is that things like the Internet, which was supposed to lead to more knowledge, also led to the growth of ignorance, in that it became harder to filter out good information from bad. Previously, information came from news sources that came to be trusted because they were vetted by editors who took their jobs seriously. Now that vetting has largely disappeared.

And that's my question: why are many people proud of being ignorant? When these people called themselves the "Know Nothing" party in the 1850s, at least they were honest about it.

I'm ot sure that the "Know Nothings" were proud of their ignorance. From Wikipedia, which I think can be considered a trusted source in this case:

The American Party, known as the Native American Party before 1855 and colloquially referred to as the Know Nothing or the Know Nothing Party, was an Old Stock nativist political movement in the United States from the 1840s through the 1850s. Members of the movement were required to say "I know nothing" whenever they were asked about its specifics by outsiders, providing the group with its colloquial name.

The Know Nothings were largely a "Nativist" party which was anti-Catholic (because they feared a Papist plot tor rule the country and anti-immigration (because all those Catholics were coming from undesirable places in Europe like Italy, Germany and Ireland). It could be argued that they were the MAGAs of their day.

The whole lurid story may be found here: Know Nothing - Wikipedia

 

[Louanne Learning]

why are many people proud of being ignorant?

ignorant people often think they know a lot more than they do

 

[Naomasa298]

Because people like to reject anything, including scientific knowledge, that is at odds with what you believe. If you've been taught and really believe that God created man, you reject evolution because it tells you your beliefs were wrong. No one likes being told they've been an idiot for most of their lives.

 

[Louanne Learning]

ignorant people

I just read this just now -

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

 

[Donnie]

"A theory need not entirely be correct, to be useful".
( I've heard this before but have no person to credit to.) A quick Google search yeilded nothing.

 

[Louanne Learning]

"A theory need not entirely be correct, to be useful".

Always good when it raises more questions

 

[GrahamLewis]

"It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there." Bob Dylan

 

[Louanne Learning]

"The Sun Also Rises"

- Hemingway

 

[defaux]

"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

~ Max Planck

(I think I spelled his name right...)