917) You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (play, 1967)

918) We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (play, 1967)

919) If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans.

Tom Stoppard
Jumpers (play, 1972)

920) I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary. ... I forget the third thing.

Tom Stoppard
Travesties (play, 1975)

921) A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

Tom Stoppard
Night and Day (play, 1978)

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 639 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

914) There is no such thing as a unique scientific vision, any more than there is a unique poetic vision. Science is a mosaic of partial and conflicting visions. But there is one common element in these visions. The common element is rebellion against the restrictions imposed by the locally prevailing culture, Western or Eastern as the case may be. It is no more Western than it is Arab or Indian or Japanese or Chinese. Arabs and Indians and Japanese and Chinese had a big share in the development of modern science. And two thousand years earlier, the beginnings of science were as much Babylonian and Egyptian as Greek. One of the central facts about science is that it pays no attention to East and West and North and South and black and yellow and white. It belongs to everybody who is willing to make the effort to learn it.

Freeman Dyson
"The Scientist as Rebel" in
New York Review of Books (5/25/1995)

915) The progress of science requires the growth of understanding in both directions, downward from the whole to the parts and upward from the parts to the whole. A reductionist philosophy, arbitrarily proclaiming that the growth of understanding must go only in one direction, makes no scientific sense. Indeed, dogmatic philosophical beliefs of any kind have no place in science.

Freeman Dyson
"The Scientist as Rebel" in
New York Review of Books (5/25/1995)

916) The division between those who try to learn about the world by manipulating it and those who can only observe it had led, in natural science, to a struggle for legitimacy. The experimentalists look down on the observers as merely telling uncheckable just-so stories, while the observers scorn the experimentalists for their cheap victories over excessively simple phenomena. In biology the two camps are now generally segregated in separate academic departments where they can go about their business unhassled by their unbelievers. But the battle is unequal because the observers' consciousness of what it is to do "real" science has been formed in a world dominated by the manipulators of nature. The observers then pretend to an exactness that they cannot achieve and they attempt to objectify a part of nature that is completely accessible only with the air of subjective tools.

Richard C. Lewontin
"'Sex, Lies and Social Science': An Exchange" in
New York Review of Books (5/25/1995)
[reply to critical comments on his article
"Sex, Lies and Social Science" in
New York Review of Books (4/20/1995)]

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 641 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

She has a tattoo with the words "Thug Life" to honor the memory of Tupac Shakur, because she would "rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them."

895) The "Just So Story" evolved as a statement of principle - of rote application of the black box of natural selection in order to explain the origin of a particular function, structure, or item of behavior. The stories were probably on the money, more often than not. But there is no way of knowing for sure, and the entire exercise of adaptive storytelling began to strike many evolutionary biologists as inherently unsatisfying.

Thus, there was a great outcry against "just so stories" heard in many different quarters of evolutionary biology from the 1960s right on through the present day. Rudyard Kipling's famous fables recounting how the elephant got his trunk, the rhino his wrinkly skin, and the leopard his spots had the advantage of great style and manifest whimsy. But no one would mistake his yarns for historical proof, the more so that they universally relied upon the long-discredited mode of inheritance of acquired characteristics that had been expunged from biology since [...] the end of the nineteenth century. Even so, the Darwinian adaptive story of how giraffes got their long necks were often little better (and considerably less elegant) than Kipling's narratives. They were only stories about how natural selection may have acted to produce longer necks so that giraffes might take advantage of the leafy greens in tree canopies which were unavailable to antelopes and other African herbivores.

Plausibility and consistency with the basic tenets of population genetics provide the sole criteria for evaluating these historical reconstructions. In the typical just-so evolutionary tale, there was little of the "rigor" justly so revered by scientists. There was no way, in other words, to "test the hypothesis." Small wonder so many evolutionary biologists yearned to see the study of adaptations sharpened and brought up to academic snuff.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

896) Demographers showed long ago that most people alive at any one time do not have any living descendants, say, 500 years later. Put another way, all of us are descended from only a fraction of all those people alive 500 years ago. The same holds for species. The vast majority of species that have ever lived have not only become extinct, they also have left no descendants.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

897) I do passionately believe that there is a physical reality, a material universe. I do think that it is the job of "science" to describe that universe as accurately as possible. There is, in other words, a correct solution, a right answer. On the road to those answers (which, it seems, we will never fully recognize when and if we get them), all we have is successive approximations - competing claims to truth, always based on different "takes" on the nature of things. If science is always trying to obtain clearer snapshots of the physical reality, scientists are more like painters (or, for that matter, art photographers) whose tastes and objectives are bound to differ. No two painters render the same subject in precisely the same way. And so it inevitably is in science.

Niles Eldredge
Reinventing Darwin (1995)

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 644 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

PRESIDENT BUSH VOWS TO PROTECT ONE-CELLED PEOPLE.

The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act passed the Senate 63-34, but President Bush promises a veto. He said the use of embryonic stem cells in research "crosses a moral line." In case you're wondering where this "moral line" is drawn, WN has looked into it. George W. Bush and other conservative theologians believe a "soul" is assigned to the fertilized egg at the instant of conception. That makes it a person, even though it's not counted in the census. In-vitro fertilization makes a lot more of these one-celled people than it needs; leftovers are stacked in the freezer until it starts filling up. President Bush cares deeply about these helpless one-celled people and wants to ensure they are properly flushed down the disposal rather than exploited by godless scientists interested only the reduction of suffering.

Heroes come in two varieties. There are life-long heroes: people who dedicate their whole life to a mission, to a cause, to sacrificing themselves – Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Gandhi, to mention a few. These are extraordinary individuals. Most people in the world who engage in heroic acts are [...] individuals who find themselves in a particular situation – one in which other people are looking the other way or continuing to perpetrate an evil behavior – and who, for some reason we don’t know, take heroic action. They do something to stop it – blow the whistle or otherwise challenge it in a direct way. That action is "heroic," even if the people are "ordinary." My sense is that the typical notion we have of heroes as super-stars, as super heroes, as Superman, and Batman, and Wonder Woman, gives us a false impression that being a hero means being able to do thing that none of us can actually accomplish. I want to argue just the opposite: that what we have to be doing more and more is cultivating the "heroic imagination" – especially in our children. The models of behavior that we want to give them are not rock stars, are not hip-hop artists, are not media celebrities or sports celebrities, – or even comic book heroes. Rather, it is the ordinary New York subway hero, Wesley Autrey, the 50-year old African-American construction worker who saved the life of a young man who had fallen on the train tracks from a seizure. While 75 others passively watched, he handed his two daughters over to a stranger and jumped down to save someone he did not know from death or dismemberment from and on coming subway. "I did what anyone would do, I did what everyone ought to do," were Autrey’s classic ordinary hero lines.

885) Documentation [for computer software] is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; when it is bad, it is still better than nothing."

Gerald Weinberg
The Psychology of Computer Programming (1976)
posted by Jim Hargrove [UAQ] (5/2/95)

886) Tenses, Gender and Number: For the purpose of the rules and regulations contained in this chapter, the present tense includes the past and future tenses, and the future, the present; the masculine gender includes the feminine, and the feminine, the masculine and the singular includes the plural, and the plural the singular.

California Dept. of Consumer Affairs Revised 1973 Code
posted by Deborah Ann Pisarek [UAQ] (5/17/95)

887) I have never let schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
(widely attributed)
not listed in [QMT]
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/6/95)

888) Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

Sir Claus Moser
London Daily Telegraph (8/21/90) [CQ]

889) Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson (4/18/1775)
quoted by James Boswell in
A Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) [B16]
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/6/95)

890) Anglo-American culture seems to be governed by the perverse belief that portrayals of the body's abuse or destruction are harmless, even fortifying, while those that show the body in pleasure act like poison.

Walter Kendrick (attributed)
posted by Tom Parsons [UAQ] (5/5/95)

891) Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.

Johann Christoph Friederich von Schiller
Wallenstein's Camp (1798) [B16]

892) In Germany, under the law everything is prohibited except that which is permitted. In France, under the law, everything is permitted, except that which is prohibited. In the Soviet Union, under the law, everything is prohibited, including that which is permitted. And in Italy, under the law, everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.

Newton N. Minow
speech to Assoc. of American Law Schools
posted by Deven Naniwadekar [UAQ] (5/13/95)

893) The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Allen Kay
quoted in The Wit's Thesaurus (1994)
Lance Davidson (ed.)
posted by Bill Thomas [UAQ] (5/12/95)

894) But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we're all dead.

John Maynard Keynes
Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) [ODQ]
posted by Alfred M. Kriman [UAQ] (5/28/95)

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[CQ] - Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[ODQ] - Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)
[QMT] - The Quotable Mark Twain (1998), R. Kent Rasmussen, ed.
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup


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 644 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.