There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.
Apr 302013
Apr 142013
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Apr 132013
- All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level. -Stephen Schneider
- Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. -Dandemis
- Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. -Francis Bacon
- Never fall in love with your hypothesis. -Peter Medawar
- It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. -Arthur Conan Doyle
- A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong. -Francis Crick
- The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting. -Richard Feynman
- To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. -Charles Darwin
- It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. -Mark Twain
- Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. -Thomas Jefferson
- All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. -Arthur Schopenhauer
Peter Surrock, AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question
Apr 112013
Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.
Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.
Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Apr 072013
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.