Posts in the category “quotations”

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
Gustave Flaubert

“You stopped breathing once when you were five weeks old. Did I ever tell you that?”

No, she certainly hadn’t.

“I was about to take a bath and then I thought I’d better check the crib, so I went in and you weren’t moving at all. I thought you were dead. I snatched you up and tore out of the house to the Jensens’ and pounded on the door, and right then you let out a cry. Anyway, we took you to the doctor.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it was a seizure. I guess it was just one of those things that happens sometimes.” Then she got up to make a salad for supper.

That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end. If she had gone ahead and run the bath water, I’d be dead right now. And it was “just one of those things that happens sometimes”? I felt a little weak myself. I had gotten over the fear that I’d stop breathing during the night, all those years I used to remind myself to breathe, and now this. So I wasn’t dumb to think that your breath could stop at any time. It could happen right now, sitting on a white kitchen chair in a cool breeze and drinking iced tea. Fall over dead on the linoleum. Thirteen years old, dead.
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Michael Crichton

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.
Dr. Jonas Salk

Youth has no age.
Pablo Picasso

The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. … The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
Adam Smith (June 5, 1723 – July 17, 1790)
Wealth of Nations

People who believe in absurdities will eventually commit atrocities.
Voltaire

There is pleasure in recognising old things from a new viewpoint.
Richard P. Feynman

“The appeal seems universal. To social historians it is a microcosm of the early 1900s. To nautical enthusiasts it is the ultimate shipwreck. To students of human nature it is an endlessly fascinating laboratory. For lovers of nostalgia it has the allure of yesterday. For daydreamers it has all those might-have-beens.”
Walter Lord, on the tale of the RMS Titanic