Author	Quote	Date
Lao-tse	He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.	2005-09-28W
Lee, Robert E.	The education of a man is never completed until he dies.	2005-09-28W
Leibniz, Gottfried	Let us calculate.	2005-09-28W
Leibniz, Gottfried	Monads are the real atoms of nature.	2005-09-28W
Einstein, Albert	Restricting a body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty.	2005-09-15R
Grossman, Marcel	It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unifying features of a complex phenomena which present themselves as quite unconnected to the direct experience of the senses.	2005-09-15R
Strathern, Paul	Albert Einstein discovered that even the most complex notions could be reduced to a simple set of fundamental principles.	2005-09-15R
Wilde, Oscar	Education is an admiral thing—but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.	2005-09-15R
Sartre, Jean-Paul	Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards.	2005-08-22M
Shakespeare, William	Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.	2005-08-22M
Weyl, Hermann	We have tried to storm heaven and have only succeeded in pilling up the tower of Babel.	2005-08-22M
Wheeler, John	When I became interested in gravitation and general relativity, I found myself forced to invent the idea of quantum foam—made up not merely of particles popping into and out of existence without limit, but of spacetime itself churned into a lather of distorted geometry.	2005-08-22M
Barnett, Lincoln	The gateway to universal knowledge may be opened by the unified field theory upon which Einstein has been at work for a quarter century. Today the outer limits of man’s knowledge are defined by relativity, the inner limits by the quantum theory. Relativity has shaped all our concepts of space, time, gravitation and the realities that are too remote and too vast to be perceived. Quantum theory has shaped all our concepts of the atom, the basic units of matter and energy, and the realities that are too elusive and too small to be perceived. Yet these two great scientific systems rest on entirely different and unrelated theoretical foundations. The purpose of Einstein’s unified field theory is to construct a bridge between them.	2005-08-03W
Hoffmann, Banesh	Quantum theory does not hold undisputed sway, but must share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity. And although these two bodies together have led to the most penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must remain enemies. Their fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our present painfully won fancies concerning such things as space, time, matter, radiation and causality. The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.	2005-08-03W
Kaku, Michio	While relativity uncovers the secrets of energy, gravity and spacetime—the other theory that dominated the twentieth century, quantum theory, is the theory of matter. What Einstein didn’t realize, as physicists do now, is that the key to the unified field theory is found in the marriage of relativity theory and quantum theory.	2005-08-03W
Lincoln, Abraham	I will prepare—and some day my chance will come.	2005-08-03W
Camus, Albert	The final conclusion of the absurdist process is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and the absurdist position realizes that it could not endorse suicide without abolishing its own foundations. It would consider such an outcome running away or being rescued. But it is plain that absurdist reasoning thereby recognizes human life as the single necessary good, because it makes possible that confrontation, and because without life the absurdist wager could not go on. To say that life is absurd, one must be alive. How can one, without indulging one’s desire for comfort, keep for oneself the exclusive benefits of this argument? The moment life is recognized as a necessary good, it becomes so for all men. One cannot find logical consistency in murder, if one denies it in suicide.	2005-05-28S
Durant, Will	Democracy means drift; it means permission given to each part of an organism to do just what it pleases; it means the lapse of coherence and interdependence, the enthronement of liberty and chaos. It means the worship of mediocrity and the hatred of excellence. It means the impossibility of great men—how could great men submit to the indignities and indecencies of an election? What chance would they have? What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs, is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the not-adorer, the man who is not a regular party-member. How can the superman arise in such a soil? And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical—not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate—the men become women and the women become men.	2005-05-28S
Durant, Will	The problem of politics is to prevent the businessman from ruling. For such a man has the short sight and narrow grasp of a politician, not the long view and wide range of the born aristocrat trained to statesmanship. The finer man has a divine right to rule—ie. the right of superior ability. The simple man has his place, but it is not on the throne. In his place the simple man is happy, and his virtues are as necessary to society as those of the leader—it would be absolutely unworthy a deeper mind to consider mediocrity in itself as an objection. Industriousness, thrift, regularity, moderation, strong conviction—with such virtues the mediocre man becomes perfect, but perfect only as an instrument. A high civilization is a pyramid; it can stand only upon a broad base; its prerequisite is a strongly and soundly consolidated mediocrity. Always and everywhere, some will be leaders and some followers; the majority will be compelled, and will be happy, to work under the intellectual direction of higher men.	2005-05-28S
Durant, Will	Too long have we been fragments, shattered pieces of what might be a whole. How can a great culture grow in an air of patriotic prejudice and narrowing provincialism? The time for petty politics is over—the compulsion to great politics has come. When will the new race of leaders appear?	2005-05-28S
Camus, Albert	The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions.	2005-05-08N
Camus, Albert	The sense of the absurd, when one first undertakes to deduce a rule of action from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, hence, permissible. If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important. There is no pro or con; the murderer is neither right nor wrong. One is free to stoke the crematory fires, or to give one’s life to the care of lepers. Wickedness and virtue are just accident or whim.	2005-05-08N
Camus, Albert	When man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God? Have we not arrived at absurdity? It is absurdity that Nietzsche meets face to face. The better to avoid it, he pushes it to extremities—morality is the final aspect of God which must be destroyed before the period of reconstruction begins. Then God no longer exists and no longer guarantees our existence; man, in order to exist, must decide to act.	2005-05-08N
McLuhan, Marshall	Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.	2005-05-08N
Bek, Christopher	It is well established that the greatest scientific problem of all time is how to marry relativity with quantum theory. Relativity is the natural law of space and time and is based on lightspeed. Quantum theory is the natural law of matter and is based on Planck’s constant. I have solved this problem with my theory of one by recognizing that lightspeed and Planck’s constant are the same boundary of the spacetime continuum. I further argue that even if my theory of one is wrong, it is still effectively right because it sets forth the pathway to truth—which is the question of how to unite relativity with quantum theory.	2005-02-05S
Bek, Christopher	Niels Bohr (1885-1962), one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, defined the complementary principle as the coexistence of two necessary and seemingly incompatible descriptions of the same phenomenon. One of its first realizations dates back to 1637 when Descartes revealed that algebra and geometry are the same thing. In 1860 Maxwell revealed that electricity and magnetism are the same thing—electromagnetism. In 1905 Einstein revealed that light is both waves and particles, that matter and energy are the same thing, and that space and time are the same thing—spacetime. In 1915 Einstein revealed that gravity and inertia are the same thing. In 1920 de Broglie revealed that matter is both waves and particles. In 1925 Dirac revealed that Schrödinger’s wave-based atomic model and Heisenberg’s matrix-based atomic model are the same thing—quantum theory. In 1930 Bohr and Heisenberg revealed that the complementary principle and the uncertainty principle are the same thing—the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In 2001 Bek revealed that lightspeed and Planck’s constant are the same thing—the boundary of spacetime.	2005-02-05S
Bek, Christopher	William James (1842-1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who developed pragmatism—the philosophy which calls for ideas and theories to be tested in practice to assess whether claims about truth, knowledge and morality can be verified and put to practical use. Pragmatism embodies the American faith in practicality and the distrust of abstract theories. Of course the darkside of this so-called distrust of theories is that rejecting a theory because it is a theory is easy. The very last thing the Everyman wants is the revelation of a higher truth which could call into question his existing beliefs. James is perhaps most famous for his depiction of the lifecycle of a theory. According to James, a theory is first ignored, then attached as absurd, then admitted to be true, but obvious—and finally seen to be so important that its adversaries claim to have discovered it themselves.	2005-02-05S
Einstein, Albert	No problem was ever solved by the same mind that created it.	2005-02-05S
Sartre, Jean-Paul	Can it be that what really scares Christians in the doctrine of existentialism is that it leaves man with the possibility of choice?	2005-01-27R
Schumacher, EF	To accept anything as true means to incur the risk of error. If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error, but at the same time I maximize the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important, and most rewarding things in life. Saint Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught that “The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.” “Slender” knowledge is here put in opposition to “certain” knowledge, and indicates uncertainty. Maybe it is necessarily so that the higher things cannot be known with the same degree of certainty as can the lesser things, in which case it would be a very great loss indeed if knowledge were limited to things beyond the possibility of doubt.	2005-01-27R
Socrates	No God seeks wisdom—for He is already wise.	2005-01-27R
Washington, George	It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being.	2005-01-27R
Camus, Albert	Integrity has no need of rules.	2004-12-21T
Democritus	Bitter and sweet, warm and cold, as well as all the colors—all of these things exist in opinion and not in reality. What really exist are unchangeable particles or atoms and their motion in empty space.	2004-12-21T
Descartes, René	And indeed it is no surprise that God, in creating me, should have placed this idea in me to be, as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work—not that the mark need be anything distinct from the work itself. But the mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness, and that I perceive that likeness, which includes the idea of God, by the same faculty which enables me to perceive myself.	2004-12-21T
Dirac, Paul	It is more important to have beautiful theories and equations than to have them fit the data.	2004-12-21T
Beecher, Henry Ward	The philosophy of one century is the commonsense of the next.	2004-12-18S
Bible, The	For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present. nor things to come, nor anything else, in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ our Lord.	2004-12-18S
Bible, The	For in much wisdom is much grief, and increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow.	2004-12-18S
Camus, Albert	The fate Sisyphus belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing.	2004-12-18S
Augustine, Saint	It is solved by walking.	2004-12-16R
Barnett, Lincoln	Modern science was born when Galileo began trying to explain how things happen and thus originated the method of controlled experiment which now forms the basis of scientific investigation.	2004-12-16R
Bek, Christopher	Faith and reason separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality.	2004-12-16R
Berkeley, George	To be is to be perceived.	2004-12-16R
Minkowski, Herman	Space and time separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality.	2004-12-14T
Oxenhandler, Neal	Saints are people who go against the grain, who defy their families and humble their desires—all for the love of God.	2004-12-14T
Pascal, Blaise	The last act is bloody, no matter how charming the rest of the play.	2004-12-14T
Wheeler, John	When I became interested in gravitation and general relativity, I found myself forced to invent the idea of quantum foam—made up not merely of particles popping into and out of existence without limit, but of spacetime itself churned into a lather of distorted geometry.	2004-12-14T
Bible, The	I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.	2004-12-09R
Gribbin, John	All of chemistry can be explained by the physics of the 1930s—and a very simple model is enough to give an insight into why atoms join together to make molecules in the way they do. We don’t need to worry about neutrinos or strong and weak forces. We certainly don’t have to worry about gravity, which is far too weak to be important in chemical reactions. And we don’t need to worry about wave-particle duality. We scarcely need to worry about the fact that the nucleus of an atom is made up of two different kinds of particle—the proton and the neutron. All we need to know to in explaining basic chemistry is that atoms are made up of negatively charged electrons arranged in accordance with the rules of quantum physics at some distance from the positively charged nucleus and are under the influence of electromagnetic forces. The basics of chemistry are incredibly simple—but the complexity of the molecules that can be built from the basic simple rules is astonishing.	2004-12-09R
Lincoln, Barnett	The gateway to universal knowledge may be opened by the unified field theory upon which Einstein has been at work for a quarter century. Today the outer limits of man’s knowledge are defined by relativity, the inner limits by the quantum theory. Relativity has shaped all our concepts of space, time, gravitation, and the realities that are too remote and too vast to be perceived. Quantum theory has shaped all our concepts of the atom, the basic units of matter and energy, and the realities that are too elusive and too small to be perceived. Yet these two great scientific systems rest on entirely different and unrelated theoretical foundations. The purpose of Einstein’s unified field theory is to construct a bridge between them. Believing in the harmony and uniformity of nature, Einstein hopes to evolve a single edifice of physical laws that will encompass both the phenomena of the atom and the phenomena of outer space. Just as relativity reduced gravitational force to a geometrical peculiarity of the spacetime continuum, the unified field theory will reduce electromagnetic force—the other great universal force—to equivalent status.	2004-12-09R
Wilde, Oscar	I dislike arguments of any kind. They are often vulgar and convincing.	2004-12-09R
Hoffmann, Banesh	The factors that first led physicists to distrust their faith in a smoothly functioning mechanical universe loomed on the inner and outer horizons of knowledge—in the unseen realm of the atom and in the fathomless depths of intergalactic space. To describe these phenomena quantitatively, two great theoretical systems were developed between 1900 and 1927. One was the quantum theory, dealing with the fundamental units of matter and energy. The other was relativity, dealing with space, time and the structure of the universe as a whole.	2004-12-06M
Pascal, Blaise	Thus all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let us then strive to think well—that is the basic principle of morality.	2004-12-06M
Sartre, Jean-Paul	When I declare that freedom in every concrete circumstance can have no other aim than to want itself, if man has once become aware that in his forlornness he imposes values, he can no longer want but one thing, and that is freedom, as the basis of all values. That does not mean that he wants it in the abstract. It means simply that the ultimate meaning of the acts of honest men is the quest for freedom as such.	2004-12-06M
Schumacher, EF	Faith is not in conflict with reason—nor is it a substitute.	2004-12-06M
Barnett, Lincoln	Just as Relativity reduced gravitational force to a geometrical peculiarity of the spacetime continuum, the unified field theory will reduce electromagnetic force—the other great universal force—to equivalent status. Moreover, as Relativity showed that energy has mass and mass is congealed energy, the unified field theory will regard matter simply as a concentration of field. From its perspective the entire universe will be revealed as an elemental field in which each star, each atom, each wandering comet and slow-wheeling galaxy and flying electron is seen to be but a ripple or tumescence in the underlying spacetime unity. And so a profound simplicity will supplant the surface complexity of nature.	2004-11-28N
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald	The best time to repair a roof is when the sun is shining.	2004-11-28N
Kierkegaard, Søren	The existentialist is first and foremost an individual who is in an infinite relationship with himself and his destiny.	2004-11-28N
Leibniz, Gottfried	Monads are the real atoms of nature.	2004-11-28N
Barnett, Lincoln	The irony of man’s quest for reality is that as nature is stripped of its disguises, as order emerges from chaos and unity from diversity, as concepts merge and fundamental laws assume increasingly simpler form, the evolving picture becomes ever more abstract and remote from experience—far stranger indeed and less recognizable than the bone structure behind a familiar face. For where the geometry of a skull predestines the outlines of the tissue it supports, there is no likeness between the image of a tree transcribed by our senses and that propounded by wave mechanics, or between a glimpse of the starry sky on a summer night and the four-dimensional continuum that has replaced our perceptual Euclidean space. In trying to distinguish appearance from reality and lay bare the fundamental structure of the universe, science has had to transcend the rabble of the senses.	2003-10-28T
Einstein, Albert	The idea that there are two structures of space independent of each other, the metric—gravitational and the electromagnetic, is intolerable to the theoretical spirit.	2003-10-28T
Einstein, Albert	The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.	2003-10-28T
Sartre, Jean-Paul	The essential consequence of existentialism is that man, being condemned to be free, carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. He is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of Being.	2003-10-28T
Jefferson, President Thomas	We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.	2003-08-28R
Poe, Edgar Allan	Truth and immutability are the same thing.	2003-08-28R
United Nations Charter (1945)	We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims. Accordingly, our respective governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.	2003-08-28R
Sartre, Jean-Paul	Existentialism is the doctrine that makes human life possible by declaring that every truth and every action implies a human setting and the starting point of human subjectivity founded on the Cartesian cogito.	2003-08-20W
Heisenberg, Werner	Just as relativity had to abandon the concept of simultaneity, so too does quantum theory have to abandon the concept of electron paths. The history of physics teaches us that the abandonment of earlier concepts is much more difficult than the adaptation of new ones.	2003-08-14R
Kaku, Michio	Neither relativity nor quantum theory by themselves provides a satisfactory description of nature. Einstein showed that relativity theory alone cannot form the basis for the unified field theory. Nor is quantum theory satisfactory without relativity. Quantum theory can only be used to calculate the behavior of atoms and not the large-scale behavior of galaxies and the expanding universe. Merging the two theories has consumed the Herculean efforts of scores of theoretical physicists for the past half century. Only in the last few years have physicists finally formulated, with the help of superstring theory, a possible synthesis of the two theories.	2003-08-14R
Kaku, Michio	Relativity asks questions like—Is there a beginning and end to time? Where is the farthest point in the universe? What lies beyond the farthest point? What happened at the point of Creation? By contrast, quantum theory asks the opposite questions—What is the smallest object in the universe? Can matter be divided into smaller and smaller units without limit? In many ways these two theories appear to be exact opposites. Relativity concerns itself with the cosmic motion of galaxies and the universe, while quantum mechanics probes the subatomic world.	2003-08-14R
Miller, Henry	There are two paths before us—one backward towards comfort and the security of death and the other forward to nowhere.	2003-08-14R
Guiterman, Michael	He who learns by finding out has sevenfold the knowledge of he who learns by being told.	2003-08-08F
Lindley, David	The idea that physical quantities do not take on any practical reality until someone measures them offended Einstein to the point where he asked the physicist Abraham Pais whether he believed the Moon really exists when no one is looking at it.	2003-08-08F
Locke, John	He who has raised himself above the alms-basket and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on the work to find and follow truth will, whatever he lights-on, not miss the hunter’s satisfaction—every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight and he will not have reason to think his time ill-spent even when he cannot boast of any great trophy for his efforts.	2003-08-08F
Millay, Edna St Vincent	I love humanity but I hate people.	2003-08-08F
Leibniz, Gottfried	Why is there something rather than nothing?	2003-07-30W
Locke, John	If the government violates the rights of individual citizens, then the people have the right to get rid of the government.	2003-07-30W
McLaughlin, Mignon	Society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.	2003-07-30W
Millay, Edna St Vincent	Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand—come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.	Shining Palaces = Parliament, Senate, Supreme Court 2003-07-30W
Barnett, Lincoln	The mathematical orthodoxy of the universe enables theorists like Einstein to predict and discover natural laws simply by the solution of equations.	2003-07-28M
Poe, Edgar Allan	Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought—from moods of minds exalted at the expense of general intellect.	2003-07-28M
Poe, Edgar Allan	The universe begins when God creates a primordial particle out of nothing. From it matter irradiates spherically in all directions in an inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.	2003-07-28M
Shakespeare, William	This was something of a paradox for which time now gives its proof.	2003-07-28M
Barnett, Lincoln	Right now it is a question whether scientific man is in touch with reality at all—or can ever hope to be.	2003-07-24R
Barnett, Lincoln	The functional harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.	2003-07-24R
Barnett, Lincoln	The human eye suppresses most of the light in the world and what man perceives of the reality around him is distorted and enfeebled by the limitations of his organ of vision.	2003-07-24R
Northrop, FS	If one makes a false or superficial beginning, no matter how rigorous the methods that follow, the initial error will never be corrected.	2003-07-24R
Barnett, Lincoln	Gradually philosophers and scientists have arrived at the startling conclusion that since every object is simply the sum of its qualities, and since qualities exist only in the mind, the whole objective universe of matter and energy, atoms and stars, does not exist except as a construction of the consciousness—an edifice of conventional symbols shaped by the senses of man.	2003-07-21M
Barnett, Lincoln	It is perhaps significant that in terms of simple magnitude man is the mean between macrocosm and microcosm. Stated crudely this means that a supergiant red star is just as much bigger than man as an electron is smaller.	2003-07-21M
Barnett, Lincoln	Quantum theory deals with fundamental units of matter and energy. Relativity deals with space, time and the structure of the universe as a whole. Both are accepted pillars of modern scientific thought.	2003-07-21M
Barnett, Lincoln	The fundamental question of whether light is waves or particles has never been answered. The dual character of light is, however, only one aspect of a deeper and more remarkable duality which pervades all nature.	2003-07-21M
King, Martin Luther Jr	Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.	2003-07-14M Calgary Police
Kipling, Rudyard	If any question why we died tell them because our fathers lied.	2003-07-14M
Millikan, Robert	I spent ten years of my life testing Einstein’s photoelectric effect theory and its attendant assertion that light exists as particles (ie. light quanta or photons) as well as waves and, contrary to all expectations, I am compelled to argue for it unambiguous verification in spite of its seeming unreasonableness.	2003-07-14M
Millikan, Robert	There are only two kinds of immoral conduct. The first is due to indifference, thoughtlessness and failure to reflect upon what is for the common good. The second is represented by the unpardonable sin that Christ spoke of—which is the deliberate refusal to follow the light when seen.	2003-07-14M
Miller, Henry	It is silly to go on pretending that we are all brothers under the skin. The truth is more like under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites and poltroons.	2003-07-12S
Miller, Joaquin	If you want immortality then go out and make yourself immortal.	2003-07-12S
Milton, John	None can love freedom but good men. The rest love not freedom but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants.	2003-07-12S
Milton, John	Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain—if her waters flow not in perpetual progression then they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man becomes a heretic in the truth if he believes things without knowing their reason but instead relies on his pastor’s says so or because the assembly so determines. Though his belief may be true, the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.	2003-07-12S
Miller, Arthur	When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.	2003-07-09W
Miller, Henry	Ideas have to be wedded to action—if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living.	2003-07-09W
Miller, Henry	The task the artist implicitly sets for himself is to overthrow existing values and make of the chaos about him an order which is his own. He seeks to sow strife and ferment so that by the achievement of emotional release those who are dead may be restored back to life.	2003-07-09W
Holmes, Oliver Wendell	Every opinion tends to become a law.	2003-07-07M
Homer	Put me on earth again and I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man than the king of all these dead men that are done with life.	2003-07-07M
Hoover, Herbert Clark	We are in danger of developing the cult of the Everyman—meaning a cult of mediocrity.	2003-07-07M
Solomon, Robert	Christ’s teachings encompassed themes that were already central to Jewish thought—for example, love and the importance of helping the unfortunate. But he also taught the by-no-means-orthodox thesis that the Jewish law could be summarized in terms of loving God with one’s whole heart. Christ sharply criticized those who made a great show of their holiness but who failed to show compassion—a theme again borrowed from the Hebrew prophets.	2003-07-07M
Zednik, Richard	All the way I thought I was going to go five-hole, and I see he gave me the glove and then thought I’m going to go there. He probably knew I was going there, so too bad I didn’t go five-hole.	2003-07-07M
Bek, Christopher	Conscious is the perceptual apparatus by which we comprehend reality and the essence of reality is fundamentally different than our conscious perception of it.	2003-07-3R
Bek, Christopher	Relativity is the natural law of spacetime based on lightspeed. Quantum theory is the natural law of matter based on Planck’s constant. The theory of one unites relativity and quantum theory by recognizing lightspeed and Planck’s constant as the same boundary of spacetime. Sir James Jeans once described Einstein’s relativistic universe as the surface of four-dimensional soap bubbles. John Wheeler once described the universe as empty curved spacetime churned into lathering distorted geometry of quantum foam formed in the wake of electrons and positrons popping into and out of existence without limit—revealing that relativistic bubbles are thus equivalent to quantum foam.	2003-07-3R
Bek, Christopher	Socrates said that no god seeks wisdom—for he is already wise. Upon assuming behaviorism, doctors, judges, cops and educators effectively issued press releases declaring themselves gods. As gods, they have no need for soul-searching to solve problems beyond their defined roles. These self-anointed gods instead focus on projecting and enforcing their god-status. What society is left with is a bunch of fragile, narrow-minded egomaniacs who are totally out of their depth when faced with true freedom and responsibility.	2003-07-3R
Bek, Christopher	Those who believe in God strictly of the basis of faith are setting themselves up for failure for the reason that their conception of God is based on a static snapshot that is, by definition, not subject to reason. The Devil is the one who seeks out those who blindly follow. A true God most certainly wants to be constantly challenged by both faith and reason. Kevin Spacey tells us in the 1996 movie The Usual Suspects that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. And now we know the second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world we can know God by faith alone.	2003-07-3R
Brennan, Richard	Churchill was so angry that Niels Bohr had managed to influence Roosevelt that he demanded Bohr be arrested—but then grumpily settled for keeping Bohr and anyone under his influence under surveillance.	2003-07-1T
Brennan, Richard	In 1936 the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Johannes Stark and his followers unleashed a newspaper assault in Germany against Jewish physics, by which he meant theoretical physics, which he contrasted with German or experimental physics.	2003-07-1T The difference between 1936-Germany and 2003-Canada is not fucking much
Brennan, Richard	Nobody had shaken the world of science more than Einstein—and now came along another young upstart German in Heisenberg with still another attack on classical physics.	2003-07-1T
Dirac, Paul	Quantum theory explains most of physics and all of chemistry.	2003-07-1T
Einstein, Albert	Concern for man himself and his fate must always be the chief interest of all technical endeavors so that the creations of our mind shall become blessings and not a curses to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.	2003-06-28S
Einstein, Albert	The one thing that I have learned in a long life is that all science measured against reality is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.	2003-06-28S
Nicoll, Maurice	Once in Sunday school while going over the Greek New Testament, I asked a question regarding the meaning of a parable. The headmaster’s answer was so utterly confused and convoluted that I actually experienced my first true moment of consciousness—that is, I suddenly became aware with excruciating clarity that he knew nothing at all. From that moment forward I began to think for myself, or at least knew that I could. I remember clearly the classroom with its windows so high that we could not see out, the desks, the platform on which the headmaster sat, his thin scholarly face, his nervous habits of twitching his mouth and jerking his hands—and then suddenly this profound inner revelation that neither he nor anyone else knew about anything that mattered. It was this threshold moment that was to be the starting point of my liberation from the external world. I knew then for certain that true knowledge could only be arrived at by authentic inner perception—and that all my loathing of religion, as it was taught to me, was at last vindicated.	2003-06-28S
Oppenheimer, Robert	They should give the Nobel Prize to the first guy who doesn’t discover a new subatomic particle.	2003-06-28S
Gribbin, John	The fate of specialists in anyone area of science is to focus more and more narrowly on their special topic, learning more and more about less and less, until eventually they end up knowing everything about nothing.	2003-06-27F
Heisenberg, Werner	In the early twenties we knew that Bohr’s model of the atom could not be correct, but that it pointed in the right direction.	2003-06-27F
Hoffmann, Banesh	So abstract a matter as the quantum theory serves well as the basis for learned treatises whose pages overflow with the unfriendly symbols of higher mathematics. Here is a glimpse of the scientific theorist at work, pen and paper his implements, as he experiments with ideas. Not the least of his gifts is a talent for reaching valuable conclusions from what later prove to be faulty premises. For his insight is penetrating. Be it a hint here or a clue there, a crude analogy or a wild guess, he fashions working hypotheses from whatever material is at hand, and, with the divine gift of intuition for guide, courageously follows the faintest will-o-the-wisp till it show him the way toward truth.	2003-06-25W
Hoffmann, Banesh	The magnificent rise of the quantum to a dominant position in modern science and philosophy is a story of drama and high adventure often well-nigh incredible. It is a chaotic tale, but amid the apparent chaos one gradually discerns a splendid architecture, each discovery, however seemingly irrelevant or nonsensical, falling cunningly into its appointed place till the whole intricate jigsaw is revealed as one of the major discoveries of the human mind.	2003-06-25W
Hoffmann, Banesh	The story of relativity tells what happened to science when one provisional theory of space and time yields to another. The story of the quantum tells of adventures which recently befell our theories of matter and radiation, and of their unexpected consequences.	2003-06-25W
Hoffmann, Banesh	What are those potent wraiths we call space and time, without which our universe would be inconceivable? What is that mystic essence, matter, which exists within us and around in so many wondrous forms; which is at once the servant and master of mind, and holds proud rank in the hierarchy of the universe as a primary instrument of divine creation? And what is that swiftest of celestial messengers, radiation, which leaps the empty vastnesses of space with lightning speed? Though true answers there can be none, science is fated to fret about such problems. It must forever spin tentative theories around them, seeking to entrap therewith some germ of truth upon which to poise its intricate superstructure. The balance is delicate and every change sends tremors coursing through the edifice to its uttermost tip.	2003-06-25W
Jaeger, Werner	Once a human potentiality is realized, it exists.	2003-06-23M
Lavine, Thelma	According to the Cartesian cogito, the one truth that is safe and secure from any doubt is that of my own existence as a conscious subject—thereby introducing subjectivity into modern philosophy.	2003-06-23M
Schumacher, EF	On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said—We don’t show churches on our maps. Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. For which he responded—That is a museum and not a living church, which we don’t show. It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete—and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began instead to suspect the soundness of the maps.	2003-06-23M
Schumacher, EF	People for whom the power of self-awareness is poorly developed cannot grasp it as a separate power and tend to think of it as nothing more than a slight extension of consciousness.	2003-06-23M
Bek, Christopher	If one wishes to better understand the Dark Ages (430-1630) then the most suitable course of action is to turn on the television set.	2003-06-20F
Descartes, René	No beauty is comparable to the beauty of truth.	2003-06-20F
Lavine, Thelma	The principle concerns expressed by the writers of the Renaissance was the need to restore to man the capacities, strengths and powers of the individual person for which the Dark Ages (430-1630) had denied.	2003-06-20F
Lavine, Thelma	The way in which Plato solved the problems of philosophy was to identify what was true in each of the conflicting philosophies and then marshal these truths into a single, unified, original philosophy of his own.	2003-06-20F
Hampshire, Stuart	Until well past the time of Newton there was no distinction between philosophy and science. Natural philosophy was the common term used to describe what we now call both metaphysics and physics.	2003-06-19R
Heisenberg, Werner	Galileo turned away from the traditional science of his time that was based on Aristotle and took up the philosophical ideas of Plato. He replaced the descriptive science of Aristotle by the structural science of Plato.	2003-06-19R
Pascal, Blaise	When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and, which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there, why now rather than then.	2003-06-19R
Lindley, David	Physicists must hope that physics can be completed in a manner that the ancient Greeks imagined—by thought alone, unaided by empirical testing. Modern physics set on its path by the pragmatic methods of Galileo and Newton has in the past three centuries led to the elaborate physical understanding we currently posses—which now seems to have run its course.	2003-06-18W
Plato	The only thing worse than suffering an injustice is committing an injustice.	2003-06-18W
Schumacher, EF	Matter, life, consciousness and self-awareness—these four elements are ontologically—that is, in their fundamental nature—different, incomparable, incommensurable and discontinuous.	2003-06-18W
Socrates	Society attacks people early when they are most helpless.	2003-06-18W
Christ	No one goes to God who does not go through me.	2003-06-16M
Hall, Calvin	While nineteenth-century psychology was busy at work analyzing the conscious mind, psychoanalysis was engaged in explorations of the unconscious mind. Freud felt that consciousness was only a thin slice of the total mind, that like an iceberg, the larger part of it existed below the surface of awareness. Psychologists answered Freud by saying that the notion of an unconscious mind was a contradiction in terms; the mind, by definition, was conscious. The controversy never reached a final conclusion because both psychology and psychoanalysis changed their objective during the twentieth century. Psychology became the science of behavior and psychoanalysis became the science of personality.	2003-06-16M
Murdoch, Iris	Sartre rightly identified determinism as the primary enemy.	2003-06-16M
Solomon, Robert	Jewish religion stresses the fact that Scripture can be interpreted on many different levels.	2003-06-16M
Bek, Christopher	The theory of one brings the reader face to face with the stunning realization that the universe is bounded—rather than unbounded, as Einstein and others have asserted. The theory of one delivers the ocean. It is the theory that spells the end of physics. It is the monolith of 2001—a spacetime odyssey.	2003-06-04W
Clinton, William	If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses others even more fundamental. We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself, but essential to our people’s future.	2003-06-04W
Hawking, Stephen —concluding paragraph from A Brief History of Time (1996)	When we combine quantum theory and relativity, there seems to be the possibility that space and time might form a finite, four-dimensional continuum without singularities or boundaries. If we do discover a complete theory of everything, it should be understandable by everyone and not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and ordinary people, be able to take part in discussing questions as to why both we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would at last know the mind of God.	2003-06-04W
Lindley, David —concluding paragraph from The End of Physics (1993)	The final theory of everything will undoubtedly be a mathematical system of uncommon tidiness and rigor that accommodates the physical facts of the universe as we know it. The mathematical neatness will arrive first followed by its explanatory power. Perhaps one day physicists will find a theory of such compelling beauty that its truth cannot be denied—truth will be beauty and beauty will be truth. The theory will be, in precise terms, a myth. A myth is a story that makes sense on its own terms, offers explanations of everything we see before us, but can neither be disproved nor tested. This theory of everything will indeed spell the end of physics. It will be the end not because physics has been able to explain everything, but because physics has at last reached the end of all the things for which it has the power to explain.	2003-06-04W
Heraclitus	One cannot step in the same river twice.	2003-05-30F
Heraclitus	The way up and the way back are the same.	2003-05-30F
Socrates	I would rather die than give up philosophy.	2003-05-30F
Socrates	In order to know anything absolutely, we must be free from the body and behold actual reality with the eyes of the soul alone.	2003-05-30F
Hoffman, Philip Seymour	The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you are uncool.	2003-05-28W
Spinoza, Baruch	Man is deceived if he thinks himself free.	2003-05-28W
Spinoza, Baruch	The true aim of government is liberty.	2003-05-28W
Strathern, Paul	Leibniz envisioned monads as being like souls—metaphysical, immortal and each one unique. A monad is windowless in that there is no perception or effect on the monads around it—yet, at the same time, each monad is said to mirror the entire universe. Together they exist in an exhaustive hierarchy. Superior monads have a higher degree of consciousness while others are dimmer and mirror the universe much less clearly and distinctly.	2003-05-28W
Hoffman, Philip Seymour	Listen, my advise to you, and I know you think these guys are your friends, if you want to be a true friend to them—be honest and unmerciful.	2003-05-26M
Kierkegaard, Søren	Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.	2003-05-26M
Mill, John Stuart	Over himself—over his own body and mind—the individual is sovereign.	2003-05-26M
Nietzsche, Friedrich	Man is a rope tied between the beast and the Superman—a rope over the abyss.	2003-05-26M
Heisenberg, Werner	Einstein once maintained against me that theory first decides what can be observed.	2003-05-22R
Lawrence, DH	Everything that can possibly be painted has been painted, every brush-stroke that can possibly be laid on canvas has been laid on. Then suddenly at the age of forty I began painting myself and became fascinated.	2003-05-22R
Poincaré, Henri	A mathematical argument is not a simple juxtaposition of Forms, it is Forms placed in a certain order. And the order in which these elements are arranged is much more important than the elements themselves.	2003-05-22R
Poincaré, Henri	What are the mathematical entities to which we attribute the character of beauty and elegance—and which are capable of developing in us a sort of aesthetic emotion? They are those elements harmoniously disposed so that without effort the mind can embrace their totality while also realizing the details.	2003-05-22R
Chesterton, GK	The primary objective of education is not to learn things—but to unlearn things.	2003-05-18N
Descartes, René	Conquer yourself rather than the world.	2003-05-18N
Frost, Robert	We dance around in a ring and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows.	2003-05-18N
Hall, Calvin	While nineteenth-century psychology was busy at work analyzing the conscious mind, psychoanalysis was engaged in explorations of the unconscious mind. Freud felt that consciousness was only a thin slice of the total mind, that like an iceberg, the larger part of it existed below the surface of awareness. Psychologists answered Freud by saying that the notion of an unconscious mind was a contradiction in terms; the mind, by definition, was conscious. The controversy never reached a final conclusion because both psychology and psychoanalysis changed their objective during the twentieth century. Psychology became the science of behavior and psychoanalysis became the science of personality.	2003-05-18N
Augustine, Saint	Miracles happen, not in opposition to nature, but in opposition to what we know of nature.	2003-05-16F
Bernstein, Peter	In 1654, a time when the Renaissance was in full flower, the Chevalier de Mere, a French nobleman with a taste for both gambling and mathematics, challenged the famed French mathematician Blaise Pascal to solve a puzzle. The question was how to divide the stakes of unfinished game of chance between two players when one of them is ahead. The puzzle had confounded mathematicians since it was posed some two hundred years earlier by the monk Luca Paccioli. This was the man who brought double-entry bookkeeping to the attention of the business managers of his day—and tutored Leonardo da Vinci in the multiplication tables. Pascal turned for help to Pierre de Fermat, a lawyer who was also a brilliant mathematician. The outcome of their collaboration was intellectual dynamite. What might appear to have been a seventeenth-century version of the game of Trivial Pursuit led to the discovery of the theory of probability, the mathematical heart of the concept of risk. Their solution to Paccioli’s puzzle meant that people could for the first time make decisions and forecast the future with the help of mathematics. In the medieval and ancient worlds, even in preliterate and peasant societies, people managed to make decisions, advance their interests, and carryon trade but with no real understanding of risk or the nature of decisionmaking.	2003-05-16F
Bernstein, Peter	The modern conception of risk is rooted in the Hindu-Arabic numbering system that reached the West seven to eight hundred years ago. But the serious study of risk began during the Renaissance, when people broke loose from the constraints of the past and subjected long held beliefs to open challenge. This was a time when much of the world was to be discovered and its resources exploited. It was a time of religious turmoil, nascent capitalism and a vigorous approach to science and the future.	2003-05-16F
Leibniz, Gottfried	Nature never makes leaps.	2003-05-16F
Bernstein, Peter	In 1952 a young graduate student named Harry Markowitz studying operations research demonstrated mathematically why putting all your eggs in one basket is an unacceptable strategy and why optimal diversification is the best one can do. His revelation touched off an intellectual movement that has revolutionized Wall Street, corporate finance and decisionmaking of all kinds. Its effects are still being felt today.	2003-05-15R
Bernstein, Peter	To judge the extent to which today’s methods of dealing with risk are either a benefit or a threat, we must know the whole story, from its very beginnings. We must know why people of past times did—or did not—try to tame risk, how they approached the task, what modes of thinking and language emerged from their experience and how their activities interacted with other events, large and small, to change the course of culture. Such a perspective will bring us to a deeper understanding of where we stand, and where we may be heading. Along the way we shall refer often to games of chance, which have applications that extend far beyond the spin of the roulette wheel. Many of the most sophisticated ideas about managing risk and making decisions have developed from the analysis of the most childish of games. One does not have to be a gambler or even an investor to recognize what gambling and investing reveal about risk.	2003-05-15R
White, EB	The only commonsense in the long run is the sense for change—which we all desperately avoid.	2003-05-15R
Wittgenstein, Ludwig	Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by the means of our language.	2003-05-15R
Barrett, William	From the beginning of Christianity Saint Paul has told us over and over again that the faith he preaches is foolishness to the Greeks for they demand wisdom—which Saint Paul believed meant rational philosophy and not religious faith.	2003-05-14W
Delacroix, Eugène	Genius is merely the art of generalizing and choosing.	2003-05-14W
Descartes, René	I do my best thinking in a warm bed.	2003-05-14W
Descartes, René	The first rule is never to accept anything as true if I did not have evident knowledge of its truth—that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it into doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many parts as possible and as may be required in order to resolve them better. The third, to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex, and by supposing some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. And the last, throughout to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure of leaving nothing out.	2003-05-14W
Barnett, Lincoln	Until a hundred years ago electricity and magnetism—while known and studied since early Greek times—were regarded as separate quantities.	2003-05-12M
Hegel, GW	There soon creeps in the misconception of already knowing before you actually know.	2003-05-12M
Hugo, Victor	To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century.	2003-05-12M
Kopp, Sheldon	The anti-hero of Franz Kafka’s hauntingly sinister novel, The Castle, is a wandering stranger, perhaps a land-surveyor. He is a hapless wayfarer, searching for some confirmation of his identity. He is K, a man with no more name than that. He strives desperately to attain a place for himself within the authority of The Castle, wishing to trade his lonely rootlessness, his permanent homelessness, for a sense of belonging to something greater than himself. But the harder he tries to make contact with the faceless authorities who run The Castle, the more he is confronted with the frustration of their vagueness and impersonality. He just cannot get the hang of their ambiguous procedures. He is ever in a state of doubt. At times he feels unfairly treated and so responds with ineffectual defiance. But more often, he feels vaguely guilty, as though his frustration must be his own fault. After all, if there is a rule, it must have some meaning. There must be some sense to their incomprehensible regulations. In his isolation and impotence, he senses that the problem must be the result of his own basic inferiority. He is again and again stuck in the obsessional mire of his indecision, his unwillingness to choose between freedom and obligation. He feels that he must keep on trying. There must be a way to satisfy the unclear requirements of the authorities, to behave satisfactorily so that they will accept him. If only he could figure out the rules, then he would follow them.	2003-05-12M
Hegel, GW	The finite has no genuine Being.	2003-05-10S
Plato	They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.	2003-05-10S
Porter, Katherine Anne	I can’t tell you what gives true intensity, but I know it when I find it, even in my own work—there perhaps first of all. It is not a matter of how you feel at any one moment, certainly not at the moment of writing. A calculated coldness is the best mood for that, most often. Feeling is more than mood, it is a whole way of being, it is the nature you are born with, you can’t invent it. The question is, how to convey a sense of whatever is there, as feeling, within you, to the reader; and that is a problem of technical expertise. I can’t tell you how to go about getting this technique either, for that is an internal matter, if it is to have any value beyond a kind of juggling or tightrope walking. You know it when you have it, and you will finally be able to depend on it somewhat. But for myself, unless my material, my feelings and my problem in each new piece of work are not well ahead of my technical skill at that moment, I should distrust the whole thing. When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit. Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don’t be so afraid of giving yourself away either, for if you write, you must. And if you can’t face that, better not write.	2003-05-10S
Schumacher, EF	People ask for bread and are given stones. They beg for advice on how to be saved and are told that salvation is an infantile neurosis. They long for guidance on how to live responsibly and are told they are machines, like computers, without freewill and therefore without responsibility.	2003-05-10S
Shakespeare, William	Some men never seem to grow old. Always active in thought, always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable with foggyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied, settled, yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is, are the first to find the best of what will be.	2003-05-10S
Bronner, Stephen	John Locke and Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire and others envisioned a new world in which the arbitrary authority of the Church and an arrogant aristocracy would cease to exist; a world in which reason and democracy would temper provincial ethnic and religious hatreds between states and races; a world of unfettered freedom, without radical differences in the distribution of wealth, in which an individual might better his lot through hard work and without fear of obstruction by the state. The constitution was the jewel in the crown of this new world. The individual would be no longer an object of domination but rather a subject vested with rights—a citizen.	2003-05-05M
Locke, John	Individuals have the right to the fruits of their labours only if they leave enough and as good for others.	2003-05-05M
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques	Man is good by nature and only made bad by institutions.	2003-05-05M
Voltaire	Once a nation begins to think, it is impossible to stop.	2003-05-05M
Camus, Albert	Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.	2003-04-30W
Locke, John	We are compelled by reason to acknowledge the existence of natural, inalienable rights and duties independent of convention, agreement or contract.	2003-04-30W
Scruton, Roger	As Kant himself pointed out, the moral law has an absolute character. Rights cannot be arbitrarily overwritten, or weighed against the profit of ignoring them. Duties cannot be arbitrarily set aside, or canceled by the bad results or due obedience. I must respect your right, regardless of conflicting interests, since you alone can renounce or cancel it. That is the point of the concept—to provide an absolute barrier against invasion. A right is an interest that is given special protection, and cannot be overwritten or canceled without the consent of the person who possess it. By describing an interest as a right we lift it from the account of cost and benefit, and place it in the sacred precinct of the self. Likewise duty, if it is to exist at all, must have an absolute moral character. In the final analysis, to treat a person as an end rather than a means is to acknowledge their rights against ours, and our duties towards him—and to recognize that neither right nor duty can be cancelled by some other good.	2003-04-30W
Scruton, Roger	The totalitarian system embodies the conviction that nothing is sacred. In such a system, human life is driven underground, and the ideas of freedom and responsibility—ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely—have no public recognition and no place in the administrative process.	2003-04-30W
Bek, Christopher	My unified field theory solves the problem Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life working on by recognizing conscious as electrons or monads—ie. metaphysical gonads. What we call consciousness is in fact the accumulation of inertial effects experienced by the monads as they travel through four-dimensional relativistic bubbles or, alternatively, through quantum foam.	2003-04-10R
Hobbes, Thomas	Unless sovereignty finds concrete expression in an individual, it neither commands the allegiance of the people nor supports the cohesion of the state.	2003-04-10R
Jeans, Sir James	The hard sphere has always a definite position in space; the electron apparently has not. A hard sphere takes up a very definite amount of room; an electron—well it is probably as meaningless to discuss how much room an electron takes up as it is to discuss how much room fear, anxiety or uncertainty takes up.	2003-04-10R
Palmer, Donald	The true philosopher attempts to transcend the purely human perspective and view reality from the perspective of reality itself.	2003-04-10R
Barnett, Lincoln	In this vast cosmic picture the abyss between macrocosmos and microcosmos—the very big and the very little—will be bridged, and the whole complex of the universe will resolve into a homogeneous fabric in which matter and energy are indistinguishable and all forms of motion from the slow wheeling of the galaxies to the wild flight of electrons become simply changes in the structure and concentration of the primordial field.	2003-03-28F
Flew, Anthony	To be illogical is to be stupid or to be incoherent or to be insufficiently concerned with the truth—or all three together.	2003-03-28F
Kennedy, Robert	Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.	2003-03-28F
Lincoln, Abraham	Be sure you put your feet in the right place and then stand firm.	2003-03-28F
Bek, Christopher	The word philosophy comes from ancient Greece and is defined as the love of wisdom. Socrates (470-399 BC) set the table for Plato (427-347 BC) by radically insisting that we must first answer the question of what X is before we can say anything else about X. Plato then founded philosophy by daring to ask what existence would be like outside the cave. Plato’s theory of knowledge and theory of Forms holds that true or a priori knowledge must be certain and infallible.  The Greeks Thales (624-546 BC) and Pythagoras (582-500 BC) founded geometry as the very first mathematical discipline.  Mathematics is the systematic treatment of Forms, the science of drawing conclusion and the primordial foundation of absolutely all other science.  While the Church was jumping up and down on everyone’s head in the Western world for over a millennium, Arab mathematicians like Muhammad al-Khwârizmî (780-850) were carrying the ball in founding algebra and algorithms. An algorithm is the procedural method for calculating and drawing conclusions with Arabic numerals and the decimal notation. Al-Khwârizmî served as librarian at the court of Caliph al-Mamun and as astronomer at the Baghdâd observatory. Interestingly, both the terms algebra and algorithm stem from the God, Allah. According to Arab philosophy, mathematics is the way God’s mind works. The Arabs believe that, by understanding mathematics, they are comprehending the mind of God. In fact the very core of their religion lies with the belief that the people must submit to the will of God’s sovereignty—meaning simply that the Godmade laws of nature (ie. mathematics) trump the manmade laws of government. The Latin version of al-Khwârizmî’s work is responsible for a great deal of the mathematical knowledge that resurfaced during the Renaissance. The notion that mathematics and God are the very same thing was adapted as the foundation for the Renaissance by thinkers like Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, Newton, Locke and Berkeley. Then, in what John Stuart Mill called the single greatest advance in the history of science, Descartes fulfilled the Pythagorean dream in conceiving analytic geometry and modern mathematics by synthesizing Greek geometry with Arab algebra.	2003-03-22S
Dowbiggin, Bruce	In the French language a crowd is known as a foule. After watching the booing boors at the Bell Centre in Montreal on Thursday 20 March 2003, I’d have to say the etymologists at the Acadmie Française got it just about right. Sticking your finger in the eye of your closest neighbour and friend in his time of crisis is the work of fools. For a nation like Canada where second-guessing comes in a close second to hockey as the national pastime, these smug outbursts are becoming commonplace. And the recent acid-etched words of Liberal cabinet ministers and backbenchers in the House of Commons describing Americans as bastards gives a whole new meaning to the term foule.	2003-03-22S
Morris, Jim	The United States anthem was greeted with cheers at hockey games in Vancouver and Calgary on Thursday 20 March 2003 and at the Toronto Raptors’ basketball game on Wednesday.	2003-03-22S
Solomon, Robert	Muhammad (570-632) was a merchant in Mecca who became the central prophet and founder of Islam. The term Islam derives from slam and means peace and surrender—namely, the peace that comes from surrendering to the will of God’s sovereignty. Before Islam the religions of the Arabic world involved the worship of many gods—Allah being one of them. Muhammad taught the worship of Allah as the only God, whom he identified as the same God worshipped by Christians and Jews. And Muhammad also accepted the authenticity of both the Jewish prophets and Christ—as do his followers.	2003-03-22S
Hutchins, Robert Maynard	The death of a democracy is not likely to be an assassination by ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference and undernourishment.	2003-03-20R
Jefferson, Thomas	A wise and frugal government shall restrain men from injuring one another and shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum total of good government.	2003-03-20R
Jefferson, Thomas	On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock.	2003-03-20R
Jung, Carl	Modern man has acquired the willpower to carryout his work proficiently without recourse to chanting, drumming or praying. He is able to translate his ideas into actions without a hitch, while primitive man was hampered by fears and superstitions at each step along the way. Yet in maintaining his creed, modern man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control that keep him restlessly on the run.	2003-03-20R
Heisenberg, Werner	The violent reaction to the recent developments of modern physics can only be understood when one realizes that the foundations of physics have started moving—and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.	2003-03-18T
Horowitz, Vladimir	Mozart is too simple for beginners and too difficult for experts.	2003-03-18T
Jefferson, Thomas	I know no safer depository for the ultimate powers of society but with the people themselves. And if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to shed light on their discretion.	2003-03-18T
Matrix, Morpheus from the 1999 movie Matrix	You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. And you are here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Like everyone you are a slave. You were born into bondage, born into a prison you cannot smell or taste or touch—a prison for your mind.	2003-03-18T
Einstein, Albert	The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research.	2003-03-16N
Flew, Anthony	To be illogical is to be stupid or to be incoherent or to be insufficiently concerned with the truth—or all three together.	2003-03-16N
Lincoln, Abraham	He who makes an assertion without knowing its truthfulness is guilty of falsehood—and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify the lie.	2003-03-16N
Russell, Bertrand	A pedant is someone who prefers their arguments to be true.	2003-03-16N
Einstein, Albert	My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details that we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.	2003-03-13R
Housman, AE	A moment’s thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time and thinking is a painful thing.	2003-03-13R
Russell, Bertrand	Most people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.	2003-03-13R
Socrates	We must follow the argument wherever it leads.	2003-03-13R
Boslough, John	Not all physicists believe that a unified theory is possible. The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-58) once joked—What God has put asunder, no man shall ever join.	2003-03-10T Why about a demigod?
Boslough, John	Physicists are searching for a single interaction at the heart of the universe that is the key to all physical phenomena.	2003-03-10T Planck’s constant equals lightspeed—Hello, wake up McFly
Boslough, John	The universe seems to operate according to several sets of different rules that act in layers independently of one another.	2003-03-10T The unified field theory
Penrose, Roger	I am able to show that space and time come to a physical, rather than a merely metaphysical, end.	2003-03-10T End of spacetime is, by definition, boundary between physical and metaphysical
Einstein, Albert	This is so simple that God could not have passed it up.	2003-03-09N
Hawking, Stephen	Nobody wants to believe that the truth is as simple as it is.	2003-03-09N
Hoffmann, Banesh	Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) made everybody realize that to treat gravity as an aspect of geometry but not to do so with electromagnetism was artless. At the time, gravity and electromagnetism were the two known universal forces.	2003-03-09N
Alcott, AB	To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.	2003-03-08S
Barrett, William	In Plato’s extraordinary emphasis upon mathematics we see the vestiges of Pythagoreanism, in which mathematics has been given a sacred, a religious status. Behind Plato’s emphasis upon mathematics lies his theory of Forms—the “really real” objects in the universe are the universals or Forms. Particular things are real only insofar as they exist eternally.	2003-03-08S
Barrett, William	The terror of confronting oneself in situations calling for subjective judgment is so great that most people immediately panic and run for cover under the first obvious argument that seems to apply.	2003-03-08S
Descartes, René	Make a simple set of rules and follow them.	2003-03-08S
Bible, The	The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.	2003-03-06R
Christ	I will lead the blind by a road they do not know, by paths they have not known I will guide them, I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I will do, I will not forsake them.	2003-03-06R
Churchill, Winston	We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.	2003-03-06R
Durant, Will	Let our students of philosophy enter the world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of brawn and men of cunning; in the mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their brows. This last and sharpest test shall go on ruthlessly for fifteen long years. Those that survive, scarred and fifty, sobered and self-reliant, shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict, can cooperate to give—these men at last shall become our leaders.	2003-03-06R
God	Thou shall have no other god before me.	2003-03-04T
Goethe, Johann —the last words	More light.	2003-03-04T
Hoffmann, Banesh	Great science transcends logic.	2003-03-04T
The Devil	Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know.	2003-03-04T
Heisenberg, Werner	The history of physics in this century teaches us that the abandonment of earlier concepts is much more difficult than the adaptation of new ones.	2003-03-03M
Pascal, Blaise	A soul weighs more than the whole universe.	2003-03-03M
Scruton, Roger	Freedom is lost when the subject surrenders to the object.	2003-02-28F
Shakespeare, William	All doubts are traitors—and make us lose the good we oft win by fearing to attempt.	2003-02-28F
Shakespeare, William	This above all—to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as night follows day, thou canst not then be false to any man.	2003-02-28F
Talbot, Michael	One of the most important experiment of the century was performed in 1982 by physicists Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, and Gerard Roger of the Institute of Optics at the University of Paris. It focused on the kind of interconnectedness that manifests itself between particles in the classic double-slit experiment. In the 1970s the technology became available to provide evidence that particles believed to be twins were actually connected—but it wasn’t until 1982 that Aspect and his team settled the matter conclusively. Their experiment was designed to determine if photons were interconnected in a seemingly faster-than-light manner. Aspect and his team allowed each photon to travel through 6.5 meters of pipe and pass through special optical switches that rerouted them towards one of two polarization analyzers. When Aspect and his team performed the experiment and tallied the results they discovered that the angles of polarization were indeed correlated in such a way that indicated the photons were instantaneously connected with one another. And this is a mind-boggling finding. It means that some of our most cherished and accepted notions about reality are radically in error. What is all the more astounding is that the Aspect experiment—an experiment which, most assuredly, will eventually change our understanding of reality as much as the revelations of Copernicus or Darwin—went almost completely unnoticed by the mass media. Even the scientific world, as evidenced by the response of the scientific journals, greeted it with an unusual lack of fanfare. Articles appeared announcing the results of the experiment and concluded with remarks such as leads to realities beyond our common experience and indicates that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality. But beyond that not much more has been said.	2003-02-28F
Barnett, Lincoln	In its popular sense, mass is just another word for weight. But as used by the physicist, it denotes a rather different and more fundamental property of matter—namely, resistance to a change of motion. A greater force is necessary to move a freight car than a velocipede; the freight car resists motion more stubbornly than the velocipede because it has greater mass. In classical physics the mass of any body is a fixed and unchanging property. Thus the mass of a freight car should remain the same whether it is at rest on a siding, rolling across country at 60 miles an hour, or hurtling through outer space at 60,000 miles a second. But relativity asserts that the mass of a moving body is by no means constant, but increases with its velocity. The old physics failed to discover this fact simply because man's senses and instruments are too crude to note the infinitesimal increases of mass produced by the feeble accelerations of ordinary experience. They become perceptible only when bodies attain velocities close to that of light. And this phenomenon does not conflict with the relativistic contraction of length. One is tempted to ask how can an object become smaller and at the same time get heavier? The contraction, it should be noted, is only in the direction of motion; width and breadth are unaffected. Moreover mass is not heaviness but simply the resistance to motion.	2003-02-27R
Barnett, Lincoln	In man’s brief tenancy on earth he egocentrically orders events in his mind according to his own feelings past, present, and future. But except on the reels of one’s own consciousness, the universe, the objective world of reality, does not happen—it simply exists. It can be encompassed in its entire majesty only by a cosmic intellect. But it can also be represented symbolically, by a mathematician, as a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. An understanding of the spacetime continuum is requisite to a comprehension of the general theory of relativity and of what it says about gravitation, the unseen force that holds the universe together and determines its shape and size.	2003-02-27R
Barnett, Lincoln	Relativity, like the quantum theory, draws man's intellect still farther away from the Newtonian universe, firmly rooted in space and time and functioning like some great, unerring, and manageable machine. Einstein's laws of motion, his basic principles of the relativity of distance, time, and mass, and his deductions from these principles comprise what is known as the special theory of relativity. In the decade following the publication of this original work, he expanded his scientific and philosophical system into the general theory of relativity, through which he examined the mysterious force that guides the whirling of the stars, comets, meteors, and galaxies, and all the moving systems of iron, stone, vapor, and flame in the immense inscrutable void. Newton called this force universal gravitation. From his own concept of gravitation Einstein attained a view of the vast architecture and anatomy of the universe as a whole.	2003-02-27R
Barnett, Lincoln	Since time is an impalpable quantity it is not possible to draw a picture or construct a model of a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. But it can be imagined and it can be represented mathematically. And in order to describe the stupendous reaches of the universe beyond our solar system, beyond the clusters and star clouds of the Milky Way, beyond the lonely outer galaxies burning in the void, the scientist must visualize it all as a continuum in three dimensions of space and one of time. In our minds we tend to separate these dimensions; we have an awareness of space and an awareness of time. But the separation is purely subjective; and as special relativity showed, space and time separately are relative quantities which vary with individual observers. In any objective description of the universe, such as science demands, the time dimension can no more be detached from the space dimension than length can be detached from breadth and thickness in an accurate representation of a house, a tree, or Betty Grable. According to the great German mathematician, Herman Minkowski, who developed the mathematics of the spacetime continuum as a convenient medium for expressing the principles of relativity—Space and time separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality.	2003-02-27R
Barnett, Lincoln	The element of caprice in atomic behavior cannot be blamed on man's coarse-grained implements. It stems from the very nature of things, as shown by Heisenberg in 1927 in a famous statement of physical law known as the Uncertainty Principle.	2003-02-25T
Barnett, Lincoln	The mathematical orthodoxy of the universe enables theorists like Einstein to predict and discover natural laws simply by the solution of equations.	2003-02-25T
—Concluding paragraph from The Universe and Dr. Einstein (1948) by Lincoln Barnett	In the evolution of scientific thought, one fact has become impressively clear—that there is no mystery of the physical world which does not point to a mystery beyond itself. All highroads of the intellect, all byways of theory and conjecture lead ultimately to an abyss that human ingenuity can never span. For man is enchained by the very condition of his Being, his finiteness and his involvement in nature. The further he extends his horizons, the more vividly he recognizes the fact that, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, we are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. Man is thus his own greatest mystery. He does not understand the vast veiled universe into which he has been cast for the reason that he does not understand himself. He comprehends little of his organic process and even less of his unique capacity to perceive the world about him in his rationality and his dreams. Least of all does he understand his noblest and most mysterious faculty—the ability to transcend himself by perceiving himself in the act of perception. Man’s inescapable impasse is that he himself is part of the world that he seeks to explore—his body and proud brain are but mosaics of the same elemental particles that compose the dark, drifting clouds of interstellar space. Man is, in the final analysis, merely an ephemeral confirmation of the primordial spacetime field. Standing midway between macrocosm and microcosm, he finds barriers on every side and can perhaps but marvel, as Saint Paul did nineteen hundred years ago in saying that the world was created by the word of God so that what is seen is composed of things which do not appear.	2003-02-25T
—Introductory paragraph from The Strange Story of the Quantum (1947) by Banesh Hoffmann	The story of the quantum is a confused and groping search for knowledge conducted by scientists of many lands on a front far wider than the world of physics had ever seen before—illuminated by flashes of insight, aided by accidents and guesses, and enlivened by coincidences that one would only expect to find in works of fiction. It is the story of turbulent revolution—of the undermining of a complacent physics that had long ruled a limited domain, of a subsequent interregnum predestined for its own destruction by its inherent contradictions, and of the tempestuous emergence of a much more chastened regime—quantum theory. And while quantum theory rules newly discovered land with a firm hand, its victory is not complete. What looks like mere scratches on the brilliant surface of its domain reveal themselves as fascinating crevasses betraying the darkness within and luring the intrepid on to new adventure. Nor does quantum theory hold undisputed sway but must share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity. And although together these two bodies have led to the most penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must remain enemies. Their fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our present painfully won fancies concerning such things as space, time, matter, radiation and causality. The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.	2003-02-25T
Bek, Christopher	The theory of one brings the reader face to face with the stunning realization that the universe is bounded—rather than unbounded, as Einstein and others have asserted. The theory of one delivers the ocean. It is the theory that spells the end of physics. It is the monolith of 2001—a spacetime odyssey.	2003-02-24M
Hawking, Stephen —concluding paragraph from A Brief History of Time (1996)	When we combine quantum theory and relativity, there seems to be the possibility that space and time might form a finite, four-dimensional continuum without singularities or boundaries. If we do discover a complete theory of everything, it should be understandable by everyone and not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and ordinary people, be able to take part in discussing questions as to why both we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would at last know the mind of God.	2003-02-24M
Lindley, David —concluding paragraph from The End of Physics (1993)	The final theory of everything will undoubtedly be a mathematical system of uncommon tidiness and rigor that accommodates the physical facts of the universe as we know it. The mathematical neatness will arrive first followed by its explanatory power. Perhaps one day physicists will find a theory of such compelling beauty that its truth cannot be denied—truth will be beauty and beauty will be truth. The theory will be, in precise terms, a myth. A myth is a story that makes sense on its own terms, offers explanations of everything we see before us, but can neither be disproved nor tested. This theory of everything will indeed spell the end of physics. It will be the end not because physics has been able to explain everything, but because physics has at last reached the end of all the things for which it has the power to explain.	2003-02-24M
Newton, Sir Isaac	I know not what the world thinks of me, but as for myself, I seem to be only a boy playing on the seashore, now and again finding a smoother stone or a more beautiful shell—all the while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me.	2003-02-24M
Camus, Albert	What is a rebel? A man who says no—but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself. He rebels because he categorically refuses to submit to conditions that he considers intolerable and also because he is confusedly convinced that his position is justified, or rather, because in his own mind he thinks that he has the right to.	2003-02-22S
Camus, Albert	When war breaks out people say its stupid and cannot last long. But being stupid does not prevent it from lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way, which we would see if we were not always so wrapped up in ourselves.	2003-02-22S
Barnett, Lincoln	Quantum theory deals with fundamental units of matter and energy. Relativity deals with space, time and the structure of the universe as a whole. Both are accepted pillars of modern physical thought.	2003-02-20R
Barnett, Lincoln	Right now it is a question whether scientific man is in touch with reality at all—or can ever hope to be.	2003-02-20R
Barnett, Lincoln	The fundamental question of whether light is waves or particles has never been answered. The dual character of light is, however, only one aspect of a deeper and more remarkable duality which pervades all nature.	2003-02-20R
Bek, Christopher	Recognizing lightspeed and Planck’s constant as the boundary between spacetime and nothingness reveals the mechanism that allows electrons and positrons to exit and re-enter the universe at any point in spacetime. We can also see that the boundary between spacetime and nothingness is the medium that supports both light and matter waves.	2003-02-20R
Archimedes	Give me one fixedpoint and I will move the earth.	2003-02-14F
Bek, Christopher	The separate concepts of faith and reason will now fade into the past to be replaced by the combined concept of mathematical reason.	2003-02-14F
Jefferson, Thomas	I swear my hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.	2003-02-14F
Minkowski, Hermann	The separate concepts of space and time will now fade into the past to be replaced by the combined concept of spacetime.	2003-02-14F
Locke, John	If the government violates the rights of individuals, then the people have the right to get rid of the government.	2003-02-01S
Locke, John	The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth—and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man but to have only the laws of nature for his rule.	2003-02-01S
Microsoft Encarta	John Locke argued that sovereignty resides in individuals, not rulers.	2003-02-01S
Microsoft Encarta	Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the social contract came from British political philosopher John Locke, who argued that government existed by consent of the governed and that people should rebel if their natural rights are violated.	2003-02-01S
Barnett, Lincoln	It is perhaps significant that in terms of simple magnitude man is the mean between macrocosm and microcosm. Stated crudely this means that a supergiant red star is just as much bigger than man as an electron is smaller.	2003-01-30R
Barnett, Lincoln	The functional harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.	2003-01-30R
Locke, John	The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth—and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man but to have only the law of nature for his rule.	2003-01-30R
Margenau, Henry	A second Enlightenment is now needed in which man can live in peace with his own discoveries and creations—enabled by a fuller comprehension to use them for his enrichment and pleasure. The realization of this second Enlightenment cannot be fulfilled by ordinary educational means. What we require are books with sufficient appeal and persuasive power to enlighten the intelligent but scientifically uninformed multitudes.	2003-01-30R
Barnett, Lincoln	A few years ago Einstein observed—The idea that there are two structures of space independent of each other, the metric—gravitational and the electromagnetic is intolerable to the theoretical spirit. Moreover, as Relativity showed that energy has mass and mass is congealed energy, the Unified Field Theory will regard matter simply as a concentration of field. From its perspective the entire universe will be revealed as an elemental field in which each star, each atom, each wandering comet and slow-wheeling galaxy and flying electron is seen to be but a ripple or tumescence in the underlying spacetime unity. And so a profound simplicity will supplant the surface complexity of nature; the distinction between gravitational and electromagnetic force, between matter and field, between electric charge and field will be forever lost; and matter, gravitation, and electromagnetic force will all thus resolve into configurations of the four-dimensional continuum which is the universe.	2003-01-28T
Barnett, Lincoln	Completion of the Unified Field Theory will climax the long march of science towards unification of concepts. For within its framework all man’s perceptions of the world and all his abstract intuitions of reality—matter, energy, force, space, time merge finally into one. It touches the grand aim of all science, which, as Einstein defines it, is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms. The urge to consolidate premises, to unify concepts, to penetrate the variety and particularity of the manifest world to the undifferentiated unity that lies beyond is not only the leaven of science; it is the loftiest passion of the human intellect. The philosopher and mystic, as well as the scientist, have always sought through their various disciplines of introspection to arrive at a knowledge of the ultimate immutable essence that undergirds the mutable illusory world. More than twenty-three hundred years ago Plato declared—The true lover of knowledge is always striving after being. He will not rest at those multitudinous phenomena whose existence is appearance only.	2003-01-28T
Barnett, Lincoln	The other gateway to this knowledge may be opened by the Unified Field Theory upon which Einstein has been at work for a quarter century. Today the outer limits of man’s knowledge are defined by Relativity, the inner limits by the Quantum Theory. Relativity has shaped all our concepts of space, time, gravitation, and the realities that are too remote and too vast to be perceived. Quantum Theory has shaped all our concepts of the atom, the basic units of matter and energy, and the realities that are too elusive and too small to be perceived. Yet these two great scientific systems rest on entirely different and unrelated theoretical foundations. The purpose of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory is to construct a bridge between them. Believing in the harmony and uniformity of nature, Einstein hopes to evolve a single edifice of physical laws that will encompass both the phenomena of the atom and the phenomena of outer space. Just as Relativity reduced gravitational force to a geometrical peculiarity of the spacetime continuum, the Unified Field Theory will reduce electromagnetic force—the other great universal force—to equivalent status.	2003-01-28T
Bohr, Niels	We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough.	2003-01-28T
Camus, Albert	I grew in the sea and poverty was my wealth, then I lost the sea, then all luxury seemed grey, poverty intolerable. Since then, I wait. I wait for the return voyage, the house by the sea, the clear light of day. I wait, I struggle to be polite. People see me pass in elegant cultured streets, I admire the views, I applaud like everyone else, I shake hands, it’s not really me speaking. People praise me, I daydream a little, I’m offended, but show almost no surprise. Then I forget and smile at whoever insults me, or I greet those I love too courteously. What’s to be done if I can only remember a single image? Finally they urge me to say who I am. Still nothing, still nothing.	2003-01-23R
Chrétien, Canadian Prime Minister Jean	I've never tried marijuana. I don't even know what it smells like.	2003-01-23R May God help us all—marijuana is a natural, healing drug
Heidegger, Martin	Thinking only begins at the point where we come to know that human reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thought.	2003-01-23R
Pascal, Blaise	Man escapes freedom by means of the two sovereign anodynes of habit and diversion. He chases a bouncing ball or rides to hounds after a fleeing animal—or the ball and fleeing game are pursued through the labyrinth of social intrigue and amusement—anything, so long as he manages to escape from himself.	2003-01-23R What about chasing a puck or writing about chasing pucks?
Freud, Sigmund	This alone I know with certainty, namely that the moral judgment of man is absolutely guided by his desire for happiness—and is therefore merely an attempt to bolster his delusions with arguments.	2003-01-22W
Nietzsche, Friedrich	Never trust human reason at face value for it seeks to mask what it fears to confront—the most unpleasant truth of all.	2003-01-22W
Schumacher, EF	The maps produced by modern materialistic scientism leave all the questions that really matter unanswered; more than that—they deny the validity of the questions. The situation was desperate enough in my youth half a century ago; it is even worse now because the ever more rigorous application of the scientific method to all subjects and disciplines has destroyed even the last remnants of ancient wisdom—at least in the Western world. It is being loudly proclaimed in the name of scientific objectivity that values and meanings are nothing but defense mechanisms and reaction formations; that man is nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energizes computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information.	2003-01-22W
Skinner, B.F. from the telling title of his 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity	Many anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have used their expert knowledge to prove that man is free, purposeful and responsible. This escape route is slowly being closed as new evidence of the predictability of human behavior is discovered. Any personal exemption from complete determinism is being revoked as scientific analysis progresses—particularly when accounting for the behavior of the individual.	2003-01-22W Working for the clampdown
Barnett, Lincoln	Today most newspaper readers know vaguely that Einstein had something to do with the atomic bomb—beyond that his name is simply a synonym for the abstruse. While his theories form part of the body of modern science, they are not yet part of the modern curriculum. It is not surprising therefore that many a college graduate still thinks of Einstein as a kind of mathematical surrealist rather than as the discoverer of certain cosmic laws of immense importance in man's slow struggle to understand physical reality.	2003-01-21T
Matrix, Neo from the 1999 movie Matrix	That’s why its going to work.	2003-01-21T
Matrix, Trinity from the 1999 movie Matrix	Neo. No one’s ever done anything like this before.	2003-01-21T
Stevenson, Adlai during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis	Don’t worry. If they’re still sticking to their stonewalling tactics—I’ll get them.	2003-01-21T
Barrett, William	Essences Plato called Forms. These Forms, as we saw in the previous chapter, were for him “really real,” more real than the particular things that derived their own individual being from participation in the Forms. The circle, that is, about which the geometrician reasons is the essence common to every individual circle in nature, and without which the individual circles could not exist; it is more real than the individual circle that he may draw on the blackboard for illustration. Now, the circle that the mathematician reasons about is one he never draws upon the blackboard; it cannot be drawn because it never comes into existence; it is outside time and therefore eternal. So too it never comes to be in actual physical space; and it is non-spatial in the same sense in which it is non-temporal. All the Forms, for Plato, thus constitute a realm of absolute realities beyond time, change, and existence, and existence is merely a shadowy replica of essence. When an Idea comes into existence, it is through a fall (a kind of original sin) from some higher realm of Being. Time itself—that invisible and tormenting medium of our own individual existence—becomes merely a shadowy image of eternity.	2003-01-20M
Barrett, William	Existentialism is an attempt to gather all of the elements of human reality into a total picture of man.	2003-01-20M
Barrett, William	The psychology of a Pascal is different from that of a Saint Augustine in that Pascal’s observations of the human condition are among the most negative that have ever been made. Readers of Sartre who have protested that his psychology is too morbid or sordid, and possibly therefore only an expression of the contemporary Paris school of despair, would do well to look into Pascal. They will find his view of our ordinary human lot every bit as mordant and clinical as Sartre’s. “The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition,” Pascal says, “is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us.” Men escape from considering it closely by means of the two sovereign anodynes of habit and diversion. Man chases a bouncing ball or rides to hounds after a fleeing animal; or the ball and fleeing game are pursued through the labyrinth of social intrigue and amusement; anything, so long as he manages to escape from himself.	2003-01-20M
Barrett, William	There is a story is told by Kierkegaard of an absent-minded man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead.	2003-01-20M
Bek, Christopher	Totalitarianism is the practice of governance that attempts to monopolize all possible influences affecting the behavior of individuals. It atomizes people and existentially alienates them from themselves and each other, thus forcing them to capitulate to the to the external authority of government in order to survive. Totalitarianism depends upon the masses to control the masses by either physical or metaphysical force. The Canadian Government defines itself as totalitarian in that it denies the children access to the mind of God by buggering them with a wrongheaded education that is founded on a false, flat, dehistorized version of mathematics.	2003-01-18S
Kennedy, Robert	The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of society.	2003-01-18S
Palmer, Donald	The true philosopher attempts to transcend the purely human perspective and view reality from the perspective of reality itself. From this perspective, one comes to realize that the human has no privileged position in the cosmos, that the human has no more and no less dignity than anything else in nature.	2003-01-18S
Socrates	Know thyself.	2003-01-18S
Ecclesiastes 8:9	Where the word of a King is—there is power.	2003-01-17F
Lopez, Jennifer	My mind. My rules.	2003-01-17F
Peter 2:13	Respect all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the King.	2003-01-17F
Socrates (the last words)	Only those who have lived an evil life hope that death is the end of everything for them. This is perfectly reasonable, for it is in their best interests that it should be so. However, I am convinced that the souls of the wicked wander desolately through the lower world of Tartarus—ie. the lowest region of the underworld. Only those who have lived good lives will be admitted to the Real World.	2003-01-17F
Microsoft Encarta	No simple, agreed-upon definition of consciousness exists. Attempts to define consciousness have tended to be merely tautological or descriptive—such as awareness, sensations, thoughts or feelings. In spite of this, the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history and at one time was the primary subject matter of psychology, although has since suffered an almost complete and total downfall.	2003-01-14T
Sartre, Jean-Paul	There can be no other truth to take off from this—I think, therefore I exist—ie. the Cartesian cogito. There we have the absolute truth of consciousness becoming aware of itself. Every theory which takes man out of the moment in which he becomes aware of himself is, at its very beginning, a theory which confounds the truth, for outside the Cartesian cogito, all views are only probable, and a doctrine of probability which is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin air. In order to describe the probable, you must have a firm hold on the true. Therefore, before there can be any truth whatsoever, there must be an absolute truth; and this one is easily arrived at; it is on everyone’s doorstep; it is a matter of grasping it directly.	2003-01-14T
Schumacher, EF	Man has the power of life like the plants, the power of consciousness like the animals, and something more—the power of consciousness recoiling upon itself—which is the power of self-awareness. Man is not merely a conscious being, but a being capable of consciousness of his own consciousness—not merely a thinker, but a thinker able to watch and study his own thinking. This power of self-awareness opens up unlimited possibilities for purposeful learning, investigating, exploring and of formulating and accumulating knowledge.	2003-01-14T
Skinner, B.F.	Consciousness? Can you see it? Measure it? Pass it around? Then how is it different than something that does not exist at all?	2003-01-14T Skinner 1904-90 was the father of modern behaviorism
Camus, Albert	I sometimes wonder what future historians will say of us. It seems to me a single sentence should suffice for modern man—He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.	2003-01-13M
Freeloader, Freddie	If you hear hoofbeats, don’t think zebras.	2003-01-13M
Einstein, Albert	Great spirits are always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.	2003-01-11S
Hoffmann, Banesh	Quantum theory does not hold undisputed sway, but must share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity. And although these two bodies together have led to the most penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must remain enemies. Their fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our present painfully won fancies concerning such things as space, time, matter, radiation and causality. The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.	2003-01-11S T1 unites quantum theory and relativity—thus delivering the planet into salvation
Nietzsche, Friedrich	God is dead. We have killed him, you and I.	2003-01-11S
Einstein, Albert	I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.	2003-01-08W I know God’s thoughts—So who am I?
Einstein, Albert	No problem was ever solved by the same mind that created it.	2003-01-08W ie. Chrétien—Kyoto
Pascal, Blaise	If Cleopatra’s nose would have been shorter, the entire face of the world would be different.	2003-01-08W
Pascal, Blaise	Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him—a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this.	2003-01-08W
Bek, Christopher	All I want is a straight fucking answer.	2003-01-07T
Einstein, Albert	Does the moon really exist when no one is looking at it?	2003-01-07T
Einstein, Albert	Only daring speculation can lead us further—and not simply the accumulation of facts.	2003-01-07T
Kidman, Nicole	All I want is a straight fucking answer.	2003-01-07T
Bek, Christopher	Alberta doctors are to health and wellness what quicksand is to surefootedness.	2003-01-06M
Camus, Albert	My mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.	2003-01-06M
Klein, Alberta Premier Ralph	Give a man a barbequed child and he will eat for a day. Teach a man how to force a wrongheaded education on the children and he can feed off them for an entire political lifetime.	2003-01-06M
Microsoft Encarta	Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian writer whose unorthodox theories on communications sprang from his conviction that electronic media themselves have a far greater impact than the actual material they communicate—as represented by his famous claim that the medium is the message. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, McLuhan was educated at the universities of Manitoba and Cambridge, and later taught at various universities in the United States and Canada.	2003-01-06M
Russell, Bertrand	Ever since I was engaged on Principia Mathematica, I have had a certain method of which at first I was scarcely conscious, but which has gradually become unequivocal in my thinking. The method consists in an attempt to build a bridge between the world of sense and the world of science. I accept both as, in broad outline, not to be questioned. As in making a tunnel through an Alpine mountain, work must proceed from both ends in the hope that at last the labour will be crowned by a meeting in the middle.	2002-12-31T
Russell, Bertrand	I believe that to a mind of sufficient intellectual power, the whole of mathematics would seem to be utterly trivial—as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal.	2002-12-31T Happy Birthday to my great dog/god Camus—who taught me all the math I will ever need
Russell, Bertrand	I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in it thirty Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.	2002-12-31T
Russell, Bertrand	To my mind, the process of sound philosophizing consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow.	2002-12-31T ie. Platonic Forms
Jeans, Sir James	A soap-bubble with corrugations on its surface is perhaps the best simple and familiar representation of the new universe revealed to us by Einstein’s relativity. The universe is not the interior of the soap-bubble but its surface, and we must always remember that while the surface of the soap bubble has only two dimensions, the universe bubble has four—three spatial and one of temporal. And the substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded onto empty time.	2002-12-30M
Keller, Helen	Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst evil of them all—the apathy of human beings.	2002-12-30M Philosophymagazine is the cure
Socrates	The only good is knowledge—the only evil, ignorance.	2002-12-30M Knowledge le savior
Davis, Geena from the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise	Something has crossed over in me.	2002-12-29N
Davis, Geena—the last words from the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise	Go.	2002-12-29N
God	You have failed me.	2002-12-29N
Pascal, Blaise	If there is a God, He is infinitely beyond our comprehension, since, being indivisible and without limits, He bears no relation to us. We are therefore incapable of knowing either what He is or whether He is. That being so, who would dare to attempt an answer to the question? Certainly not we, who bear no relation to Him.	2002-12-29N God is not beyond my comprehension—Bek
Bek, Christopher	The single greatest thought problem occupying the world of physics during the past seventy-five years involved the attempt to unite the macrocosmos of relativity with the microcosmos of quantum theory. The theory of one resolves this seventy-five year old thought problem by recognizing the fact that lightspeed and Planck’s constant are the very same boundary of the spacetime continuum.	2002-12-28S
Marshall and Zohar	Planck’s constant is one of the two most important constants in the whole of modern physics, the other being the speed of light. Max Planck was one of the early founding fathers of quantum physics. His main contributions were the theory that electromagnetic radiation happens in discrete quanta, and the discovery that the size of each quanta is associated with a universal constant, a physical ratio or proportion that stays the same in all circumstances and in all frames of reference.	2002-12-28S
Marshall and Zohar	The speed of light in a vacuum is one of nature’s few universal constants. Special relativity established that the speed of light is the universal speed limit. No material object can actually reach this speed. Since any object gains apparent mass as it goes faster, gaining an infinite amount at the lightspeed, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate to this speed. By the same token, this would become zero if light could slow down.	2002-12-28S
Pascal, Blaise	The art of revolution lies in dislodging established customs by probing down into their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice. There must be a return to the basic and primordial laws of the state which unjust custom has since eradicated.	2002-12-28S
Adams, Henry	Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.	2002-12-27F
Augustine	Endeavor to think well, for it is the only morality.	2002-12-27F
Barnett, Lincoln	Gradually philosophers and scientists have arrived at the startling conclusion that since every object is simply the sum of its qualities, and since qualities exist only in the mind, the whole objective universe of matter and energy, atoms and stars, does not exist except as a construction of the consciousness—an edifice of conventional symbols shaped by the senses of man.	2002-12-27F
Barnett, Lincoln	The human eye suppresses most of the light in the world and what man perceives of the reality around him is distorted and enfeebled by the limitations of his organ of vision.	2002-12-27F
Bible, The	Christ looked at them and said—With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.	2002-12-26R
Camus, Albert	May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy ape who presides over the fate of this establishment. In fact, he speaks nothing but Dutch. Unless you authorize me to plead your case, he will not guess that you want gin. There, I dare hope he understood me—that nod must mean that he yields to my arguments. He is taking steps—indeed, he is making haste with prudent deliberation. You are lucky—he didn’t grunt. When he refuses to serve someone he merely grunts. No one insists. Being master of one’s moods is the privilege of the larger animals. Now I shall withdraw, monsieur, happy to have been of help to you. Thank you—I’d accept if I were sure of not being a nuisance. You are too kind. Then I shall bring my glass over beside yours.	2002-12-26R
Einstein, Albert	The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.	2002-12-26R
2001—A Space Odyssey	I am sure that you are all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation if the facts were suddenly made public without adequate presentation and conditioning.	2002-12-25W
Augustine, Saint	The universe was created with time and not in time.	2002-12-25W
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Intellect annuls fate. So long as a man thinks he is free.	2002-12-25W
Microsoft Encarta	Historians are unsure exactly when Christians first began celebrating the Nativity of Christ. However, most scholars believe that Christmas originated in the 4th century as a Christian substitute for pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. Before the introduction of Christmas, each year beginning on December 17 Romans honored Saturn, the ancient god of agriculture, in a festival called Saturnalia. This festival lasted for seven days and included the winter solstice, which usually occurred around December 25 on the ancient Julian calendar. During Saturnalia the Romans feasted, postponed all business and warfare, exchanged gifts, and temporarily freed their slaves. Many Romans also celebrated the lengthening of daylight following the winter solstice by participating in rituals to glorify the ancient Persian god of Light.	2002-12-25W
Devil, The	Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.	2002-12-24T
God	Thou shall have no other god before me.	2002-12-24T
Hegel, G.W.	History teaches us that we have never learned anything from history.	2002-12-24T
Hoffmann, Banesh	Quantum theory does not hold undisputed sway, but must share dominion with that other rebel sibling—relativity. And although these two bodies together have led to the most penetrating advances in the search for knowledge—they must remain enemies. Their fundamental disagreement will not be resolved until both are subdued by a still more powerful theory that will sweep away our present painfully won fancies concerning such things as space, time, matter, radiation and causality. The nature of this theory may only be surmised—but it will ultimately come down to the very same certainty as to whether our civilization as a whole survives—no more no less.	2002-12-24T
Einstein, Albert	Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.	2002-12-23M
Einstein, Albert	I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought—but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.	2002-12-23M
Einstein, Albert	When the solution is simple, God has answered.	2002-12-23M The Theory of One
Eliot, T.S.	Man cannot bear very much reality at all—and it is doubtful whether he can even bear the reality of being told so.	2002-12-23M
Bek, Christopher	I know I am intelligent because I know that I know everything.	2002-12-22N
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It will be as if a conflagration has broken out in a great city—and no man knows what is safe or where it will end.	2002-12-22N
Shakespeare, William	Not one wise man in twenty will praise himself.	2002-12-22N
Socrates	I know I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing.	2002-12-22N
James, William	The world is all the richer for having the Devil in it—so long as we do not forget to keep our foot firmly planted on his neck.	2002-12-21S
Plotinus	Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself to be beautiful yet—act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful—he cuts away here, smoothes there, makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also never cease chiseling your statue.	2002-12-21S
Sartre, Jean-Paul	Empirical psychoanalysis (ie. Freudian) and existential psychoanalysis both search within an existing situation for a fundamental attitude which cannot be expressed by simple, logical definitions because it is prior to all logic, and which requires reconstruction according to the laws of specific syntheses. But whereas empirical psychoanalysis seeks to determine the complex, existential psychoanalysis seeks to determine the original choice.	2002-12-21S
Sartre, Jean-Paul	Existential psychoanalysis is guided from the start towards a comprehension of being, and must not assign itself any other goal than to discover being and the mode of being of the being confronting this being. It is forbidden to stop before attaining this goal.	2002-12-21S
Barrett, William	The price one pays for having a profession is a déformation professionelle, as the French put it—a professional deformation. The reaction of professional philosophers to Existentialism was merely a symptom of the philosophers imprisonment in the narrowness of their own discipline. Never before has there been a déformation professionelle more in evidence. The divorce of mind from life was something that simply happened as the result of philosophers pursuing their own specialized interests.	2002-12-20F ie. the agency problem
Sayers, Dorothy	War is a judgment which overtakes societies that have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws of nature.	2002-12-20F
Shaw, George Bernard	The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them—and that is the essence of inhumanity.	2002-12-20F
Barnett, Lincoln	The element of caprice in atomic behavior cannot be blamed on man’s coarse-grained implements. It stems from the very nature of things, as shown by Heisenberg in 1927 in a famous statement of physical law known as the Uncertainty Principle.	2002-12-19R
Jung, Carl	Modern man has acquired the willpower to carryout his work proficiently without recourse to chanting, drumming or praying. He thoughtfully and skillfully translates his ideas into actions without a hitch—while primitive man was hampered by fears and superstitions at each step along the way. Yet in maintaining his creed, modern man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control that keep him restlessly on the run.	2002-12-19R
Jung, Carl	My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.	2002-12-19R
Karr, Alphonse	Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.	2002-12-19R
Nietzsche, Fredrick	We can never see around our own corner.	2002-12-18W
Pascal, Blaise