Theodore Carrigan-Broda > Theodore's Quotes

“I would rather have a short life with width rather than a narrow one with length.”
― Avicenna

“The truth springs from arguments amongst friends.”
― David Hume

“Modesty is a virtue, yet one gets further without it.”
― Hugo de Vries

“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!”
― Alexander Pope

“The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
― Louis Pasteur

“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“Progress in science is guided by a sense of curiosity, or the desire to discover what is currently unknown. On the other hand, progress in technology is guided by a sense of public duty, or the desire to be useful to people.”
― Koichi Tanaka

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
― James Stockdale

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

“Life is one long struggle in the dark.”
― Titus Lucretius Carus

“Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“There are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer”
― Ansel Adams

“Life is a chemical incident.”
― Paul Ehrlich

“Laws are like spiders’ webs; the big flies get through, while the little ones are caught.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Works of Honore de Balzac

“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”
― David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

“Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”
― Max Weber

“God give me strength not to trust in God.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

“As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore”
― Nathan D. Baxter

“It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search.”
― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays

“For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor. I use the word 'hope' in a crude and prosaic sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion.

But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“A tacit promise is, where the will is signified by other more diffuse signs than those of speech; but a will there must certainly be in the case, and that can never escape the person’s notice who exerted it, however silent or tacit. But were you to ask the far greatest part of the nation, whether they had ever consented to the authority of their rulers, or promised to obey them, they would be inclined to think very strangely of you: and would certainly reply, that the affair depended not on their consent, but that they were born to such an obedience.”
― David Hume, Of the Original Contract

“Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.”
― Titus Lucretius Carus

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
― Herbert Stein, What I Think: Essays on Economics, Politics, and Life

“Poverty has no causes,” wrote the economist Peter Bauer. “Wealth has causes.”
― Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

“Grub first, then ethics.”
― Bertolt Brecht