836) [N]ever take seriously anybody who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection." I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Time and again, it has proved the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.

Richard Dawkins
River Out of Eden (1995)

837) Do good by stealth.

Richard Dawkins
River Out of Eden (1995)

838) He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.

Ursula K. LeGuinn
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

839) Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant) [...]

H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia (1905)
quoted by Ursula K. LeGuin in
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

840) The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human being to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

H.G. Wells
Love and Mr. Lewisham (1899) [B16]

841) "We begin well, sir," the fat man purred [...] "I distrust a man who says when. If he's got to be careful not to drink too much it's because he's not to be trusted when he does. [...] Well, sir, here's to plain speaking and clear understanding. [...] You're a close-mouthed man?"

Spade shook his head. "I like to talk."

"Better and better!" the fat man exclaimed. "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice."

Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929)

842) There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

Franz Kafka
"The Third Notebook" (10/20/1917) [PH]
published in
Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (1954)
and Blue Octavo Notebooks (1991)
edited by Max Brod
both translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

[Note: Alternate translations give "laziness" instead of "indolence" and "cardinal sins" instead of "main human sins."]

843) Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

Henry Ford (widely attributed)

844) History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Henry Ford
interviewed by Charles N. Wheeler in
Chicago Tribune (5/25/1916) [B16]

[Note: Given this quote, and Ford's nativist isolationism and support of anti-semitism, the quality of his own thinking must be suspect.]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[PH] - PoemHunter


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 658 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.