Pithy Quote Parade

Having generally saved up quotations and such that have caught his eye, TOF now dumps them in yours.

You tell 'em Chrissy!

When Women Were Chattel and Kept in Ignorance

"One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge."
         -- Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430), The City of Ladies

(Christine initiated the first public literary debate in French letters by a trash review of the Romance of the Rose.)

David Warren

On Compact Cars

The smaller a man’s mind, the easier it is to drive him out of it.
     -- David Warren

The Ill Fortune of Good Fortune

Observe the behaviour of the winners of lotteries, who are often, if not usually, destroyed by their sudden prizes. Money gave them the ability to buy what they always wanted. The problem was with what they always wanted.
     -- David Warren "The Pursuit of Ignorance"

(Could it be that the solution to poverty is not money?)
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Is Are Children Learning?

Day care is how we prepare our children for the day they'll decide to dump us in nursing homes.
     -- Ishmael Alighieri



(What goes around comes around.)
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Brigg's Rule for Archery

If you don’t have a target it is futile to take aim. It is worse to shoot. It is insane to ask strangers to pay for your arrows.
     -- Wm Briggs, Statistician to the Stars


(Maybe we can paint the target after the arrow has struck.)
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Chastek's Law

“We can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’; therefore we ought not to try.”
     -- James Chastek

('Nuff said....)

It's the Little Things that Count

The difference between a Relativistic and Newtonian view of the world is negligible in everyday practical units. In the same way the free actions of human beings are a negligible amount of total actions in the universe (or even the total actions in a single human body) and so the difference between a universe of complete determinism (like Einstein's) and one with free human action is negligible. Nevertheless, the great scientific revolutions turned on seeing the significance in things that were negligible within their context. This has been true since the beginning: the difference between a circular orbit and the actual elliptical orbits that the planets follow is negligible.
     -- James Chastek, Free Will as Negligible



(The fallacy of the Argument from Relative Size)
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The criterion of truth resides in the
heightening of the feeling of power.

The Unlikely Hero of the Postmodern Progressive:
Hey, He's a Transgressive Atheist!

If we cast a look a century ahead and assume that my assassination of two thousand years of opposition to nature and of dishonoring humans succeeds, then that new party of life will take in hand the greatest of all tasks—the higher breeding of humanity, including the unsparing destruction of all degenerates and parasites.
     -- Fred Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 

(One may always depend on Crazy Fred to shed a sentimental tear or two.)

Would you trust your
kids to this guy?

Get Fichte'd

”Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”
     -- Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 – 1814) Addresses to the German Nation. 

(The inspiration of Horace Mann and other modern educators.)