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| Quotations from past/current e-mail signature files"Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." -- Vint Cerf "Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination" -- Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese" "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who
have not got it." -- George Bernard Shaw "I have been practicing believing impossible things! And it is amazing what has been happening! I am feeling so free, so alive!" -- e-mail from friend "You can create a theory and gather all the the quotations in support of it in just minutes!" -- promo blurb for qualitative software program "We shall go on to the end... We shall fight on the beaches... We shall fight
in the fields, and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never
surrender, until every mail questionnaire is returned." --Winston Churchill,
1940 "Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be." --Kurt Vonnegut "A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire "Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." -- Oscar Wilde "Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly." -- Arnold Edinborough "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." -- Woody Allen "There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits." -- Louis Menand (New Yorker, 11/25/02, p. 96) "There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't." -- source unknown "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." -- Eric Hoffer "I won't be your Yoko Ono." -- Dar Williams "The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly." -- Nietzsche "Indeed, I like sociology so real I can taste it." Christena Nippert-Eng, Home and Work "The confrontation between sociology and biology is not a happy one." -- Theodore Kemper, Social Structure and Testosterone "It could be that your purpose in life is only to serve as a warning to others." -- author unknown "To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend." --Jacques Derrida "I get knocked down, but I get up again." --Chumbawamba "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." -- Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." -- Rudyard Kipling "Plausibility is the opiate of the intellectual." --Miles and Huberman, Qualitative Data Analysis, p. 264 "Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers" -- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild "Organization is for people who are too lazy to look for things" -- Refrigerator magnet "The responsibility of the intellectual is to tell the truth and expose lies." -- Noam Chomsky "There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of
things."--Machiavelli The Prince "All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals." -- Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes in the signature file queue(Although I keep my general collection of quotations on my local hard drive, I'm using the space below to store some quotes that I run across that strike me as contenders for future signature files.) "Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science." -- W.H. Auden, Under Which Lyre, 1946 "Party till people avoid you." -- Birthday card "Great thinkers often learn, to their surprise, that new ideas are less
than welcome." -- Gerd Gigerenzer, Adaptive Thinking, p. 46 "If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living "I always wanted to be the belle of the ball, but, jeepers, is this ever the wrong ball." -- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible "It is necessary to be somewhat underemployed if you want to do something
significant." -- James Watson, The Double Helix "I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood." -- Oscar Wilde "Not only would I never want to belong to any club that would have me for a member--if elected I would wear street shoes onto the squash court and set fire to the ballroom curtains." -- Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (p. 128) "So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other." -- Sigmund Freud "Time? What time? Your problem isn't managing time. Learn to manage your
emotions and you will be a success." -- Gerald Marwell "Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician" -- Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 86 "First and most important of these traits is that cranks work in almost total isolation from their colleagues." -- Martin Gardner, In the Name of Science "It is one of my premises that most people operate as though reality does exist. It is only academics who make a living arguing the opposite." -- Ann Oakley, Experiments in Knowing, p. 20 "Sometimes authors are so intrigued by tests of significance that they fail even to state the actual amount of the effect, much less to appraise its practical importance." --Wallis and Roberts, 1956 "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education" -- Albert Einstein "You are not obliged to succeed, but you are obliged to try" -- Author unknown "Anyone familiar with academia knows that it breeds ideological cults that are prone to dogma and resistant to criticism." -- Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 341 "Being small is hard and no one ever shows you how." -- Jeffrey Lewis, "Back When I Was 4" "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on
my shoulders" -- Hal Abelson "Life is short. Why miss a single channel?" -- DirecTV slogan "Here was a first principle not formally recognized by scientific methodologists: When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it." -- B. F. Skinner "Past may be prologue, but which past?" -- Henry Hu "It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning." --Rainer Rillke "Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, becomes polite." -- Jean Kerr "[Statistics] have already overrun every branch of science with a rapidity of conquest rivaled only by Attila, Mohammed, and the Colorado beetle." -- Maurice Kendall, 1942 "Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain, and many do." -- Benjamin Franklin "Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it." -- Jean Cocteau Law of the Instrument: "Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." -- Abraham Kaplan "I'm crazy, but I get the job done." -- Ben Folds Five, "Philosophy" "To be conscious is not to be in time." -- T. S. Eliot,
"Burnt Norton" "Correlation is an instrument of the devil." -- Ernest Hilgard, 1955 "I seek to bring forth what you almost already know." --Aristotle "We must never fall prey to the fallacy of talking about theory without making distinctions." -- Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening, p. 183 "Make it less intellectual, more sociological." -- [source suppressed] "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing we are looking at." -- Robert Morris "To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years--to
face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the
indifference because any one would." -- Gerald Stanley Lee, 1896, The
Shadow Christ "Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true." --Niels Bohr "The universe thus consists of the continued vanishing of all sets of possibilities but one." --David Cottingham "Brother, can you spare a paradigm?" --Anonymous graffito "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it." --Bertrand Russell "Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense." --Leo Rosten "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." --James Joyce "A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth." --Christopher Morley "Science is magic that works." --Kurt Vonnegut "I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realised that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" -- Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes) 2/11/93 "One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude." -- Goethe "Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic." --Pierre Boutroux "I am a sociologist, God help me." -- John O'Neill "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." -- Henry David Thoreau "Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid." -- Jules Feiffer "Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves." -- Rudyard Kipling "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." -- Albert Einstein "Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago." --Bernard Berenson "The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad" -- Salvadore Dali "The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed." -- Sean O'Casey "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong -- but that's the way to bet." -- Damon Runyon "Entropy isn't what it used to be." --Source unknown "Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope." --Carrie P. Snow "The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard to another." --J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England" 1945 "Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence." --Henrik Tikkanen "It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me." --Ashleigh Brilliant "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." --Oscar Wilde "You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick." --Sigmund Freud "My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music." --Vladimir Nabokov "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." --Albert Einstein "If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." --Emerson Pugh "In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular." --Kathy Norris "Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian." --Lee Simonson "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." --Oscar Wilde "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." --Niels Bohr "In our play we reveal what kind of people we are." --Ovid, The Art of Love "Man is the only animal for whom his existence is a problem which he has to solve." --Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, 1947. "On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points." --Virginia Woolf, The Waves "Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?" --bumper sticker "Not only is there an art in knowing a thing, but also an art in teaching it." --Cicero "I don't want the world. I just want your half." --They Might Be Giants, "Ana Ng" "The problem of eliminating false sentences by research, the traditional
problem of epistemology, is not as problematic as the problem of having
sentences interesting enough to be worth accepting or rejecting." --
Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History, p. 115 |
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