the majority

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
-Mark Twain

Quote of the day 7/06

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
- Thomas Jefferson

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
- Charles Wadsworth

Happiness

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
- Bertrand Russell

Eccentricity is not madness

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
- Edith Sitwell

Politics and TV

When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
- Edward R. Murrow

What is real?

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

Numbers

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
- Richard Feynman

Today's latin saying

Avarus animus nullo satiatur lucro.
--A greedy mind is satisfied with no (amount of) gain.

Reading

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
- George Bernard Shaw

Real terror

This is so true for me and 80% of Americans

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power -- governments, employers -- exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient -- not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who either because they're heroically brave, or because they're insane, or because they know themselves to be safe are free from fear.

Quote is from The Likeness, a novel set in Ireland, by Tana French

logic

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
- Brendan Behan