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"Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today."
MICHAEL A. KELLER, Stanford University's head librarian, 14 December 2004 (New York Times)
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
Gandhi
There is nothing so moving--not even acts of love or hate--as the discovery that one is not alone.
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, Atheneum, New York, 1966.
The Komodo lizards are also big. Very big. There's one on Komodo at the moment which is over twelve feet long and stands about a yard high, which you can't help but feel is entirely the wrong size for a lizard to be, particularly if it's a man-eater and you're about to go and share an island with it.
Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Is our algebra the measure
Of that inexhaustible treasure
That affords the purest pleasure,
Ever found when it is sought?
Let us rather, realising
The conclusions thence arising
Nature more than symbols prizing,
Learn to worship as we ought.
~from James Clerk Maxwell, "A vision of a Wrangler, of a University, of Pedantry and of
Philosophy"
"...I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder
I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
"
~George Bernard Shaw
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound
they make as they fly by."
~Douglas Adams
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas.
"The mathematicians and physics men
Have their mythology; they work alongside truth,
Never touching it; their equations are false
But the things work."
~Robinson Jeffers (1963)
"Philosophers who work in a vacuum, isolated from the problems that distress
practicing scientists, risk forfeiting the chance to say anything meaningful about the
nature of scientific knowledge."
~Merrilee Salmon, 1982
"To put it rather bluntly, we need to break out of the intellectual smugness
and provincialism of the typically modern man, the individual who has
become thoroughly persuaded that our civilization represents the apex of a
presumed `human evolution,' and that mankind had been groping in darkness
until Newton and his scientific successors arrived upon the scene to bring light
into the world."
~Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, Ch.VII, p.135.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breadth
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-Matthew Arnold. "Dover Beach"
"Members of the university community carry a heavy measure of responsibility for
the privilige accorded them; that responsibility is to pledge themselves to the science
of man if knowledge is to be transformed into wisdom."
~Eisenberg 12 October, 1995
"eloquence ought to be banish'd out of all civil Societies as a thing fatal to
Peace and good Manners..."
~Sprat 1667
"...only those who study but do not share a specific social understanding think of it
as a system of rules."
~Dreyfus 1991, referring to Bourdieu
"Just when scientists get really good at doing what they are doing,
they die."
~Hull, in Plotkin 1988
"Truth, says the cultural relativist, is culture-bound. But if it were, then he, within
his own culture, ought to see his own culture-bound truth as absolute. He cannot
proclaim cultural relativism without rising above it, and he cannot rise above it
without giving it up."
~Quine, in Newton-Smith 1983
"There was a young man who said, God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad.
Dear Sir: your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God."
~Ronald Knox, limerick about Berkeley's idealism. In Oldroyd, 1986.
"This is the world we live in
and these are the hands we're given."
~ Phil Collins
"I also began suspecting that what counts in a public debate are not
arguments but certain ways of presenting one's case. To test the suspicion I
intervened in the debates defending absurd views with great assurance. I was
consumed by fear -- after all, I was just a student surrounded by bigshots --
but having once attended an acting school I proved the case to my own
satisfaction."
~ Paul K. Feyerabend, 1963, in Oldroyd, 1986
"Human beings were not created for the convenience of experimental
psychologists."
~George Miller, in Barsalou
"I can not dispense with a little diagnostic; well, yes, there are
indications of a
serious crisis [in physics], as if we might expect an approaching
transformation."
~Poincaré, 1905
"if a principle ceases to be fecund, experiment without contradicting it directly will
nevertheless have condemned it."
[Lakatos eat your heart out!] ~Poincaré, 1905
"The children thought they were playing a game. They didn't realize
that they
were rewiring their brains."
~Merzenich in the Chicago Tribune, 1/5/96
"Basically the brain is a boxing glove."
"We don't need to know a lot about the brain."
~Jim Townsend, Q550, 1/16/96
"Most important, however, is the role that modeling plays in the discovery
process. At times the insights provided by aa model may seem, in hindsight,
to be obvious or not to have required the effort involved in constructing a
computer simulation. On other occasions, one may be concerned with the
possible circularity of a theory based on a model that has presumably been
designed with a theory in mind. Usually, however, such perceptions fail to
recognize that the insight and the emerging theory came from the process of
developing the model itself."
~J.D. Cohen, 1992 #274, p.69.
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
~William Wordsworth
