Author	Quote	Date
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
Adams, Henry	Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.	2002-12-27F
Alcott, AB	To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.	2003-03-08S
Alighieri, Dante	In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost.	2002-06-27R
Alighieri, Dante	The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crises.	2002-12-07S
Archimedes	Give me one fixedpoint and I will move the earth.	2003-02-14F
Atwood, Margaret	If the mental illness of the United States is megalomania—that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.	2002-12-04W
Augustine	Endeavor to think well, for it is the only morality.	2002-12-27F
Augustine, Saint	It is solved by walking.	2004-12-16R
Augustine, Saint	Miracles happen, not in opposition to nature, but in opposition to what we know of nature.	2003-05-16F
Augustine, Saint	The first step forward is to see that attention is fastened on the truth.	2002-07-08M
Augustine, Saint	The universe was created with time and not in time.	2002-12-25W
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	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	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	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	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.	2002-07-09T
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
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	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	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
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
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	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	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	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	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	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 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
Barnett, Lincoln	The functional harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.	2003-07-24R
Barnett, Lincoln	The functional harmony of nature Berkeley, Descartes, Spinoza and Einstein attributed to God.	2003-01-30R
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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	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
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 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
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	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
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
Beckett, Samuel	Nothing is more real than nothing.	2002-11-28R
Beecher, Henry Ward	The philosophy of one century is the commonsense of the next.	2004-12-18S
Bek, Christopher	Alberta doctors are to health and wellness what quicksand is to surefootedness.	2003-01-06M
Bek, Christopher	All I want is a straight fucking answer.	2003-01-07T
Bek, Christopher	Aside from the coffee shop girls—Canada is nothing but one big nest of vampires.	2002-12-04W
Bek, Christopher	Christmas is first and foremost about paying homage to Christ.	2002-12-11W
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	Faith and reason separately have vanished into mere shadows—and only a combined notion of the two preserves any reality.	2004-12-16R
Bek, Christopher	I have this reoccurring dream that I am being paid Derek mo-money Morris money to philosophize.	2002-12-11W
Bek, Christopher	I know I am intelligent because I know that I know everything.	2002-12-22N
Bek, Christopher	I want to be the perfect philosopher.	2002-12-11W
Bek, Christopher	I won’t forget who my friends are when I’m standing on the podium in Stockholm.
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
Bek, Christopher	In Canada, honourable is just another word for gangster.
Bek, Christopher	It is said that every man is either born a Platonist or an Aristotelian. While Plato (428-347 BC) gazed in awe at the universe, Aristotle (384-322 BC) tried to explain how it worked. Plato’s theory of knowledge and theory of forms holds that true or a priori knowledge must be certain and infallible, and it must be of real objects or Forms. The foundation for Plato and Aristotle was laid by the Greeks Thales (624-546 BC) and Pythagoras (582-500 BC) in founding mathematics. Mathematics is the systematic treatment of Forms and relationships between Forms. It is the science of drawing conclusions and is the primordial foundation of absolutely all other science. The Greeks synthesized mathematical elements from both the Babylonians and the Egyptians in developing the concepts of proofs, axioms and the logical structure of definitions—all of which come together to produce what we call mathematical or a priori reason—which, when combined with empirical or a posteriori validation, enables us to arrive at a priori knowledge, which is the highest form of knowledge and is certainly the form of knowledge for which the Government of Canada refers when proclaiming—Knowledge le savoir. While Thales introduced geometry to ancient Greece, it was Pythagoras who first provided a mathematical proof of the Pythagorean theorem, which establishes a priori knowledge that the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. Interestingly, Einstein’s special relativity in 1905 is little more than an application of the Pythagorean theorem.	2002-09-16M
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	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
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	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
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	The pen is mightier than the Glock—and no one’s pen is mightier than mine.	2002-12-03T
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Berdyaev, Nicholas	Average goodness is no longer enough.	2002-12-03T
Berkeley, George	All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth—in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world—have not any substance without the mind. So long as they are not perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or in the mind of any spirit, they have no existence whatsoever.	2002-06-26W
Berkeley, George	To be is to be perceived.	2004-12-16R
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	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	Paradigm shifts are not unpredictable, just unthinkable.	2002-06-26W
Bernstein, Peter	The definition of risk is that more things can happen than will happen.	2002-07-04R
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
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
Bible, The	A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.
Bible, The	And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
Bible, The	And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
Bible, The	And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Bible, The	Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
Bible, The	But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
Bible, The	Christ looked at them and said—With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.	2002-12-26R
Bible, The	Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Bible, The	Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.
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
Bible, The	For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.
Bible, The	I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.	2004-12-09R
Bible, The	I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
Bible, The	Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Bible, The	The appetite of the lazy craves and gets nothing, while the appetite of the diligent is richly supplied.
Bible, The	The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.
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
Bible, The	This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press on toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ.
Bible, The	Those who hope in God will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles—they will run and not grow weary—they will walk and not be faint.
Bible, The	Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on thee; because he trusteth in thee.
Bible, The	Trust in the Lord with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, And he shall direct your paths.
Blalock, Jolene	I am a superior species.	2002-11-26T
Bohr, Niels	Anyone who is not totally offended by quantum theory does not understand it.	2002-07-08M
Bohr, Niels	We all agree that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough.	2003-01-28T
Bohr, Niels	We are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence.	2002-07-08M
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
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
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
Buddha, The last words of	Work out your salvation with diligence.	2002-12-15N
Burke, Edmund	The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.	2002-12-15N
Camus, Albert	A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
Camus, Albert	An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.	2002-07-05F
Camus, Albert	I am not interested in being a hero. What interests me is being a man.	2002-06-26W
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
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
Camus, Albert	I want to be the perfect actor.	2002-12-10T
Camus, Albert	If God exists, all depends on Him and we can do nothing against His will. If He does not exist, everything depends on us.
Camus, Albert	Integrity has no need of rules.	2004-12-21T
Camus, Albert	Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
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
Camus, Albert	Memory is the enemy of totalitarianism.	2003-04-30W
Camus, Albert	My mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.	2003-01-06M
Camus, Albert	Of whom and of what indeed can I say—I know that! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects that it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor of these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain undefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. Socrates’ Know thyself has as much value as the Be virtuous of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate insofar as they are approximate.	2002-12-10T
Camus, Albert	One recognizes one’s course by the paths that stray from it.	2002-07-04R
Camus, Albert	The absurdist method, like that of systematic doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like the method of doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, disclose a new field of investigation. Reasoning follows the same reflexive course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my own proclamation and I am compelled to believe, at least, in my own protest. The first, and only, datum that is furnished me, within absurdist experience, is rebellion.
Camus, Albert	The actor teaches us that there is no frontier between being and appearing.
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 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
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
Camus, Albert	The only true philosophical question is that of suicide.	2002-12-10T
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	To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand it only in human terms.
Camus, Albert	We may then decide not to act at all, which comes down to condoning other people’s murder, plus a little fastidious sorrow over human imperfection. Or we may hit upon tragic dilettantism as a substitute for action; in this case, human lives become counters in a game. Finally, we may resolve to undertake some action that is not wholly arbitrary. In this case, since we have no higher value to direct our action, we shall aim at efficiency. Since nothing is true or false, good or bad, our principle will become that of showing ourselves to be the most effective, in other words the most powerful. And then the world will no longer be divided into the just and the unjust, but into masters and slaves. Thus, whichever way we turn in the depths of negation and nihilism, murder has its privileged position.
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 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
Camus, Albert	When one has no character, one has to apply a method.	2002-12-10T
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
Canadian Government	Knowledge le savior. (as depicted on the 2000 two-dollar coin)	2002-09-16M
Carlyle, Thomas	History is the biography of great men.	2002-12-03T
Carlyle, Thomas	What is philosophy but a constant battle against tradition?	2002-12-15N
Carroll, Lewis	The time has come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things.	2002-12-15N
Chesterton, GK	The primary objective of education is not to learn things—but to unlearn things.	2003-05-18N
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
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
Christ	No one goes to God who does not go through me.	2003-06-16M
Christ	The number of times a person should be forgiven is seven times seventy.	2002-07-05F
Christ, King	In exercising the Divine Right of Kings, I, Christopher Lloyd Bek, acting under the legitimate agency of God and having demonstrated my morally superiority, lawfully and rightfully claim My Kingship and sole Sovereignship to the Sovereignty of Canada. May anyone who morally stands against me speak now or forever hold your peace. As the King of Canada, I will hold no political power, will walk among the people, and will be above the manmade laws of government. I answer only to God, but will endeavor to respect the salient manmade laws of government—28 September 2002.
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
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
—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
Coward, Noel	I’ve over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn’t have known at all.
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
Delacroix, Eugène	Genius is merely the art of generalizing and choosing.	2003-05-14W
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
Descartes, René	Aristotle’s most enthusiastic contemporary followers have an interest in my refraining from publishing the principles of the philosophy I use. For my principles are so very simple and evident that in publishing them I should, as it were, be opening windows and admitting daylight into that cellar where they have gone down to fight.
Descartes, René	As to the fact that there can be nothing in the mind, in so far as it is a thinking thing, of which it is not aware, this seems to me to be self-evident. For there is nothing that we can understand to be in the mind, regarded in this way, that is not a thought or dependent on a thought. In view of this I do not doubt that the mind begins to think as soon as it is implanted in the body of an infant.
Descartes, René	At that time I was in Germany, where I had been called by the wars that are not yet ended there. While I was returning to the army from the coronation of the Emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stoveheated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts.
Descartes, René	But immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth I am thinking, therefore I exist was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.
Descartes, René	But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition—I think, therefore I exist—is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.
Descartes, René	Conquer yourself rather than the world.	2003-05-18N
Descartes, René	Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world—for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call good sense or human reason—is naturally equal in all men.
Descartes, René	How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire—when in fact I am lying undressed in bed. As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep.
Descartes, René	I do my best thinking in a warm bed.	2003-05-14W
Descartes, René	I have noticed certain laws which God has so established in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our minds, that after adequate reflection we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything which exists or occurs in the world.	2002-12-16M
Descartes, René	I understand the term idea to mean the form of any given thought, immediate perception of which makes me aware of the thought. Hence, whenever I express something in words, and understand what I am saying, this very fact makes it certain that there is within me an idea of what is signified by the words in question.	2002-12-16M
Descartes, René	I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.
Descartes, René	If I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error. But if in such cases I either affirm or deny, then I am not using my free will correctly. In this incorrect use of free will may be found the privation which constitutes the essence of error.
Descartes, René	If the sense of hearing transmitted to our mind the true image of its object then, instead of making us conceive the sound, it would have to make us conceive the motion of the parts of the air which is then vibrating against our ears. Everyone knows that the ideas of tickling and of pain, which are formed in our mind on the occasion of our being touched by external bodies, bear no resemblance to these bodies. Suppose we pass a feather gently over the lips of a child who is falling asleep, and he feels himself being tickled. Do you think the idea of tickling which he conceives resembles anything present in this feather? I see no reason which compels us to believe that what it is in objects that gives rise to the sensation of light is any more like this sensation than the actions of a feather are like a tickling sensation.
Descartes, René	In the bodies we call colored the colors are nothing other than the various ways in which the bodies receive light and reflect it against our eyes.
Descartes, René	It does not seem to me that the human mind is capable of conceiving at the same time the distinction and the union between body and soul, because for this it is necessary to conceive them as a single thing and at the same time to conceive them as two things; and this is absurd. Everyone feels that he is a single person with both body and thought so related by nature that the thought can move the body and feel the things which happen to it.
Descartes, René	It is quite evident that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles equal two right angles can be separated from the idea of a triangle, or than the idea of a mountain can be separated from the idea of a valley. Hence it is just as much of a contradiction to think of God (that is, a supremely perfect being) lacking existence (that is, lacking a perfection), as it is to think of a mountain without a valley.
Descartes, René	Make a simple set of rules and follow them.	2003-03-08S
Descartes, René	Nature likewise teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight when any part of his vessel is damaged; and when my body has need of food or drink, I should have a clear knowledge of this, and not be made aware of it by the confused sensations of hunger and thirst: for, in truth, all these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, etc., are nothing more than certain confused modes of thinking, arising from the union and apparent fusion of mind and body.
Descartes, René	Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this I—that is, the soul by which I am what I am—is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist.
Descartes, René	No beauty is comparable to the beauty of truth.	2003-06-20F
Descartes, René	Now it is manifest by the natural light that there must be at least as much reality in the efficient and total cause as in the effect of that cause. For where, I ask, could the effect get its reality from, if not from the cause? And how could the cause give it to the effect unless it possessed it?
Descartes, René	On the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
Descartes, René	Since I sometimes believe that others go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, how do I know that God has not brought it about that I go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square?
Descartes, René	So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has now altered—yet the wax remains. But what is this wax which is perceived by the mind alone? It is of course the same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start. And yet, and here is the point, the perception I have of it is a case not of vision or touch or imagination nor has it ever been, despite previous appearances—but of purely mental scrutiny.
Descartes, René	Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
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
Descartes, René	The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or colored, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.
Descartes, René	There are two facts about the human soul on which depend all things we know of its nature. The first is that it thinks; the second is that it is united to the body and can act and be acted upon along with it. About the second I have said hardly anything.	2002-12-16M
Descartes, René	There is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible. For when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any parts within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete. By contrast, there is no corporeal or extended thing that I can think of which in my thought I cannot easily divide into parts; and this very fact makes me understand that it is divisible.
Descartes, René	This will not seem at all strange to those who know how many kinds of automatons, or moving machines, the skill of man can construct with the use of very few parts, in comparison with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins and all the other parts that are in the body of any animal. For they will regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any such machine.
Descartes, René	Those long chains composed of very simple and easy reasonings, which geometers customarily use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations, had given me occasion to suppose that all the things which come within the scope of human knowledge are interconnected in the same way.
Descartes, René	Thought. I use this term to include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it. Thus all the operations of the will, the intellect, the imagination and the senses are thoughts.
Descartes, René	Thought: this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist. At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason—words whose meaning I have been ignorant of until now. But for all that I am a thing which is real and which truly exists. But what kind of thing? As I have just said—a thinking thing.
Descartes, René	What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.	2002-12-16M
Descartes, René	When I said that we can know nothing for certain until we are aware that God exists, I expressly declared that I was speaking only of knowledge of those conclusions which can be recalled when we are no longer attending to the arguments by means of which we deduced them.
Descartes, René	When we become aware that we are thinking things, this is a primary notion which is not derived by means of any syllogism. When someone says I think, therefore I exist, he does not deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of the mind.
Descartes, René	When we know how much the beasts differ from us, we understand much better the arguments which prove that our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and consequently that it is not bound to die with it. And since we cannot see any other causes which destroy the soul, we are naturally led to conclude that it is immortal.
Descartes, René	Whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations, bodily organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act. This shows not merely that the beasts have less reason than men, but that they have no reason at all.
Devil, The	Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.	2002-12-24T
Dirac, Paul	It is more important to have beautiful theories and equations than to have them fit the data.	2004-12-21T
Dirac, Paul	Quantum theory explains most of physics and all of chemistry.	2003-07-1T
Dossey, Larry	Recovering the nonlocal nature of the mind is essentially recovering the soul.
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
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	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
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
Dyson, Freeman	An electron is an active agent making conscious choices.	2002-11-20W
Ecclesiastes 8:9	Where the word of a King is—there is power.	2003-01-17F
Einstein, Albert	An empty stomach tends not to be a very good political advisor.
Einstein, Albert	Commonsense is nothing more than the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.	2002-07-05F
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	Does the moon really exist when no one is looking at it?	2003-01-07T
Einstein, Albert	Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.	2002-12-23M
Einstein, Albert	God is the sum total of the laws of nature.	2002-06-28F
Einstein, Albert	Great spirits are always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.	2003-01-11S
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	I should not want to be forced into abandoning strict causality without fending it more strongly than I have so far. I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.
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	In so far as the statements of geometry speak about reality, they are not certain, and in so far as they are certain, they do not speak about reality.
Einstein, Albert	In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Einstein, Albert	It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life, perpetuating itself through all eternity; to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the Universe; and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.
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
Einstein, Albert	No problem was ever solved by the same mind that created it.	2005-02-05S
Einstein, Albert	No problem was ever solved by the same mind that created it.	2003-01-08W ie. Chrétien—Kyoto
Einstein, Albert	One may well say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
Einstein, Albert	Only daring speculation can lead us further—and not simply the accumulation of facts.	2003-01-07T
Einstein, Albert	Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me at it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the old one. I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing dice.
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
Einstein, Albert	Restricting a body of knowledge to a small group deadens the philosophical spirit of a people and leads to spiritual poverty.
Einstein, Albert	Restricting knowledge to a small group of people leads to spiritual poverty.
Einstein, Albert	Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Einstein, Albert	Space and time are forms of intuition that can be no more divorced from consciousness than our concepts of color, shape and size.
Einstein, Albert	The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest mainspring of scientific research.	2003-03-16N
Einstein, Albert	The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.
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 important thing is to not stop questioning.
Einstein, Albert	The lack of definiteness which, from the point of view of empirical importance adheres to the notion of time in classical mechanics, was veiled by the axiomatic representations of space and time as things given independent of the senses. Such use of notions—independent of the empirical basis to which they owe their existence—does not necessarily damage science. One may, however, easily be led into the error of believing that these notions, whose origin is forgotten, are necessary and unalterable accompaniments of our thinking, and this error may constitute a serious danger to the progress of science.
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
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
Einstein, Albert	The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.	2002-12-26R
Einstein, Albert	There is no more commonplace statement to make than the world in which we live is a four-dimensional spacetime continuum.
Einstein, Albert	This is so simple that God could not have passed it up.	2003-03-09N
Einstein, Albert	When the solution is simple, God has answered.	2002-12-23M The Theory of One
Einstein, Albert	Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing—we can then say that we have entered the realm of art and science.
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
Eliot, T.S.	No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them.
Eliot, TS	Humankind cannot bear very much reality—and it is doubtful whether they can even bear the reality of being told so.
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
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Hitch your wagon to a star.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Intellect annuls fate. So long as a man thinks he is free.	2002-12-25W
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, Always do what you are afraid to do.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Men are what their mothers made them.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	People only see what they are prepared to see.	2002-06-28F
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues, the better we like him.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.
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
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
Ford, Henry	Never ask of another person what you have not already done yourself.	2002-07-03W
Freeloader, Freddie	If you hear hoofbeats, don’t think zebras.	2003-01-13M
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
Frost, Robert	We dance around in a ring and suppose while the secret sits in the middle and knows.	2003-05-18N
Galileo	Color, taste, smell and sound can no more be ascribed to the external objects than can the tickling or the pain caused sometimes by touching such objects.
Galileo	Dumb idiots.
Galileo	Sense qualities like color, taste, smell and sound can be no more ascribed to the external objects than the tickling or pain caused by touching such objects.
Gamow, George	In characterizing Planck’s constant—it is as if we are able to drink a pint of beer or no beer at all. Nature strictly prohibits us from drinking any quantity in between.	2002-07-04R
Gardiner, Martin	If the reader wonders why my book does not include a chapter on the philosophical consequences of relativity, it is because I am firmly persuaded that in the ordinary sense of the word philosophical—relativity has no consequences. As far as the great traditional topics of philosophy are concerned—God, immortality, free will, good and evil, and so on—relativity has absolutely nothing whatsoever to say.	2002-07-05F
Garner, Jennifer	I want to be the perfect agent. I am the perfect agent. I am the perfect actor.	2002-12-11W
Gell-Man, Murray	If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs.	2002-07-03W
God	Thou shall have no other god before me.	2003-03-04T
God	Thou shall have no other god before me.	2002-12-24T
God	You have failed me.	2002-12-29N
Goethe, Johann (the last words)	More light.
Goethe, Johann —the last words	More light.	2003-03-04T
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
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
Griswold, Whitney	In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Grof, Stanislav	We are approaching the time of a major paradigm shift.	2002-12-07S
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
Guiterman, Michael	He who learns by finding out has sevenfold the knowledge of he who learns by being told.	2003-08-08F
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
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
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
Harry, Debbie	Die young stay pretty.	2002-12-03T
Harry, Debbie	I’m not living in the real world no more.	2002-11-26T
Hawking, Stephen	Every time someone mentions Schrödinger's Cat, I go for my gun.
Hawking, Stephen	I want to know what happened between 10^-43 and 10^-33 seconds after the big bang. It is there where all the ultimate questions about the universe, including life itself, are answered.
Hawking, Stephen	Nobody wants to believe that the truth is as simple as it is.	2003-03-09N
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
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
Hawkins, Stephen	Every time someone mentions Schrödinger’s cat, I go for my gun.	2002-11-26T
Hegel, G.W.	History teaches us that we have never learned anything from history.	2002-12-24T
Hegel, GW	The finite has no genuine Being.	2003-05-10S
Hegel, GW	There soon creeps in the misconception of already knowing before you actually know.	2003-05-12M
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
Heisenberg, Werner	Einstein once maintained against me that theory first decides what can be observed.	2003-05-22R
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
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
Heisenberg, Werner	Just as in relativity the old concept of simultaneity had to be abandon, so too in quantum theory the notion of electron pathways had to be given up.
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
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
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
Hemingway, Ernest	I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
Heraclitus	Character is destiny.
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
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
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
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
Hoffmann, Banesh	Great science transcends logic.	2003-03-04T
Hoffmann, Banesh	Great science transcends logic.	2002-12-07S
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Holmes, Oliver Wendell	Every opinion tends to become a law.	2003-07-07M
Holmes, Oliver Wendell	Whenever I want to understand what is really happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow—I look back.
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
Horowitz, Vladimir	Mozart is too simple for beginners and too difficult for experts.	2003-03-18T
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
Hubben, William	Modern man wants neither God nor Christ—for what he desires is simply the authority of the Church. He wants the physical security of bread, the spiritual security of dogma, and the so-called proof of the existence of miracles. To follow God irrespective of the consequences presents too great a risk. The Church offers up a lighter burden. It serves, selects and explains the truth, forgives sins and bestows upon man the happiness of children. Yet the price is high. Man must surrender his freedom of thought and, indeed, he willingly does so. He no longer serves God as God demands of him, but only as the Church tells him so. God’s mysteries and miracles are henceforth monopolized and administered by the Church.	2002-12-07S
Hubben, William	To be fully human means to perpetually face new moral choices.	2002-11-20W
Hugo, Victor	To name Voltaire is to characterize the entire eighteenth century.	2003-05-12M
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
—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
Jaeger, Werner	Once a human potentiality is realized, it exists.	2003-06-23M
James, William	Belief in the thing creates the thing.	2002-09-16M
James, William	The whole drift of my education goes to persuading me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.
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
James, William	Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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
Jeans, Sir James	God is a mathematician.	2002-11-29F
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
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 a fear, an anxiety, or an uncertainty takes up.
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
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	I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
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
Jefferson, Thomas	I swear my hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.	2003-02-14F
Jefferson, Thomas	I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Jefferson, Thomas	Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
Jefferson, Thomas	On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock.	2003-03-20R
Johnson, Lyndon	At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems—the answer for all the problems of the world comes to a single word. That word is education.
Jones, Franklin	Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next.
Jones, Franklin	You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
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
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
Kafka, Franz	You are free and that is why you are lost.	2002-07-10W
Kaku, Michio	During the period from 2020 to 2050 we are likely to enter the fourth phase of computing, when intelligent automatons begin to walk the earth, and populate the internet. Beyond 2050 we are likely to enter the fifth phase of computing, with the beginnings of robots with consciousness and self-awareness.	2002-06-27R
Kaku, Michio	Einstein always began with the simplest possible ideas, and then put them into their proper context. But Einstein failed in his attempt to create a unified field theory because he abandoned this simple conceptual approach and instead resorted to the safety of obscure mathematics.	2002-07-10W
Kaku, Michio	In many ways the destinies of Einstein and Heisenberg were strangely interwoven, although the theories they created, relativity and quantum theory, are universes apart. Both were revolutionary iconoclasts who challenged the established wisdom of their predecessors.	2002-07-10W
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
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
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.	2002-06-27R
Kant, Immanuel	Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe—the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.
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
Keats, John	I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
Keats, John	Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.	2002-11-29F
Keller, Helen	Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.
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
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald	A man does what he must in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles, dangers and pressures. This is the basis of morality.
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald	Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald	I call for a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. I recognize the difficulties of this goal—for all this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.	2002-07-10W
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald	The best time to repair a roof is when the sun is shining.	2004-11-28N
Kennedy, Robert	Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Kennedy, Robert	Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.	2003-03-28F
Kennedy, Robert	Some people see things as they are and say why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
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
Kidman, Nicole	All I want is a straight fucking answer.	2003-01-07T
Kierkegaard, Søren	Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.	2003-05-26M
Kierkegaard, Søren	The existentialist is first and foremost an individual who is in an infinite relationship with himself and his destiny.	2004-11-28N
King James VI	God gives not Kings the style of Gods in vain, For on his throne his Scepter do they sway—and as their subjects ought them to obey, Kings should fear and serve their god again. If then ye would enjoy a happier reign, observe the statutes of your Heavenly King; and from his law, make all your Laws to spring—Since his Lieutenant hear ye should remain, reward the just, be steadfast, true and plain—repress the proud, maintaining ay the right, walk always so, as ever in his sight who guards the godly, plaguing the profane, and so ye shall in princely virtues shine. Resembling right your mighty King Divine.
King, Martin Luther Jr	Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.	2003-07-14M Calgary Police
King, Martin Luther Jr.	Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his body, to risk his well-being, to risk his life, in a great cause.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	The old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	The time is always right to do the right thing.
King, Martin Luther Jr.	We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
Kipling, Rudyard	If any question why we died tell them because our fathers lied.	2003-07-14M
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
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
Laertius, Diogerles	When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered—As much as the living are to the dead.
Lao-tse	He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.	2005-09-28W
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
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
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
Lee, Robert E.	The education of a man is never completed until he dies.	2005-09-28W
Leibnitz, Gottfried	I am able to prove that not only light, color, heat, and the like, but motion, shape, and extension too are mere apparent qualities.