Great Quotations

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maximus otter
 
I love poetry.
W.B. Yeats' insightful An Irish Airman Foresees His Death is written in plain language, as the stoical Irish Airman would have spoken.

The poem was published in 1918 at a time when flying was new and dangerous; on top of that, our Airman is aware that he could be shot down at any moment.
He doesn't care. He loves to fly. Even his death is worthwhile if it happens when he is flying.

My favourite line from it is

A lonely impulse of delight

which sums up our Airman's joy of flying. It seems to soar upwards itself: try saying it without hearing your voice rise. It ends on a grin.

For 50 years, that line has been my justification for taking a chance. It's a lonely impulse of delight.
Might go well, might not, but the joy of trying is worthy in itself.

The very essence of the human spirit. :cool:
 
Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Thomas Moore says

God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.
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My grandparents used it as a response to anyone saying girls shouldn't be educated - which was very common when they started teaching in the late 1920s (I think)
 
Force has no place where there is need of skill.
-Herodotus

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.
-Albert Einstein

There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

All battles are first won or lost, in the mind.
-Joan of Arc
 
Some Carl Sagan quotes

"In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us."

"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Sir David Attenborough, commenting on the fact that the human population has tripled during his 50 year involvement with the BBC:

"Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist."
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This perfectly complements the David Attenborough quotation:

" If we add another 4 billion homo-sapiens to the 7.8 billion already on the planet, we should accept that our kids will live on a planet devoid of nature."

- Environmental author and campaigner Donnachadh McCarthy.
 
Bigphoot2 said:
Some Carl Sagan quotes

"In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us."

"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
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...All genius, all worrying, all inspiring, and all pretty mind blowing...
Clever bloke was ol’ Carl...
 
So many clever people, so many brilliant quotes, so few lessons learned.

I particularly like Sir David Attenborough's, although unlike 90% of the population I'm not a great fan of him in general. If we accept that interplanetary travel is largely pointless within the Solar system, and impractical beyond that, it's just a simple statement of fact. Maybe I read too much Sci-Fi as a teenager, but we seem to have turned inwards.
 
Cochise said:
So many clever people, so many brilliant quotes, so few lessons learned.

I particularly like Sir David Attenborough's, although unlike 90% of the population I'm not a great fan of him in general. If we accept that interplanetary travel is largely pointless within the Solar system, and impractical beyond that, it's just a simple statement of fact. Maybe I read too much Sci-Fi as a teenager, but we seem to have turned inwards.
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I want to see a Star Trek future, where humans settle on other planets... then we won't have to be quite so worried about overcrowding on Earth. But small-minded people seem to be actively working against such an outcome.
 
Just came across this today:

“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.”

Allegedly Margaret Thatcher. I'm in no way in agreement with all of her policies, but she was the most intelligent PM we've had since Attlee.
 
Cochise said:
Just came across this today:

“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.”

Allegedly Margaret Thatcher. I'm in no way in agreement with all of her policies, but she was the most intelligent PM we've had since Attlee.
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Yes... we are in dire need of another intelligent one.
 
Cochise said:
Just came across this today:

“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the eggs.”

Allegedly Margaret Thatcher. I'm in no way in agreement with all of her policies, but she was the most intelligent PM we've had since Attlee.
Click to expand...
One 'intelligent' leader is one that depends on all others around them to also be intelligent!
 
Saw Marilyn Manson on TV being asked/goaded about American school shootings, obviously in the hope he'd inadvertently admit blame.

Interviewer - If you could talk directly to the kids at Columbine and the people of that community, what wold you say to them if they were here right now?
Manson - I wouldn't say a single word to'em, I would listen to what they have to say and that is what no-one did.

Bryan was on the defensive and would have been carefully primed by his handlers for this sort of question and possibly been coached in the exact wording of the answer. It comes across perfectly. Masterful deflection there.
 
Re-watched Connections a few weeks ago....

Does the cycle that goes, interest in something, involvement in it, tiring of it, and rejection of it, looking into something else, get shorter every decade?
--James Burke

… Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing.
--James Burke
 
“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

“Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.”

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.”

Richard P. Feynman
 
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