Topic
quotes
- Principles
Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
- Organized knowledge
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
- Murray On English
The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre, but no discernible circumference.
- Scruton Inheritance
We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are…
- Rhetoric Poetry
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
- Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand on tradition. From How Buildings Learn.
- Jose Ortega Y Gasset
“The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.” —José Ortega y Gasset
- Calvin Coolidge
“When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don’t do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.” —Calvin Coolidge
- James Murray
The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre, but no discernible circumference. —James Murray)
- F Scott Fitzgerald
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. —F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Edsger Djikstra
Simplicity is the hallmark of truth — we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audie…
- David Deutsch
A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set…
- The Shirky Principle
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky
- Kirk
Captain Kirk making the case for “muddling through.”
- Are They Funny?
From an interview with Jerry Seinfeld at HBR: HBR: You and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together, without a traditional writers’ room, and burnout was one reason you stopped. Was there a more sustainable way to do it? C…
- Popper on Great Man Theory
This just showed up in my Readwise highlights today, from Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies: It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of d…
- Ask Fewer Questions
Seneca had great advice 2000 years ago on how to calm ourselves down: "It is not to your benefit to see and hear everything. Many injuries ought to pass over us; if you ignore them, you get no more injury from them. Y…
- The Quality of Your Thoughts
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature. — Marcus Aurelius
- Form Defining Function
I'm currently reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene, a history of the building block of living things. A great read, the right mix of history and discussion of future possibilities like gene manipulation, splicing,…
- Table Alphabeticall
Gentle reader, thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the e…
- The Modern World
>The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being correct…
- Spending Money
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can s…
- The 72-hour Expert
P.J. O'Rourke on his time in Afghanistan: "Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions…