very secret quote stash. don't panic. quotes may cause existential amusement.

"bera little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion"

"…just as Columbus did, before his wonderful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, when he gave the reasons for his confidence that he could find new lands and continents beyond those known already; reasons which, although rejected at first, were later proved by experiment, and became the causes and starting points of great things"

"If the truth shall kill them, let them die"

"To be is to do"

"I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith"

"Ford was the kind of guy that when something was in the way, he found a way around it, he just got it done. He was really focused on what the customer needed, even when the customer didn’t know what they needed"

"Failure can be the information you need to get where you're going"

"We aim to invest in category-defining companies with a singular conviction"

"We're looking for remarkable intellect, extreme focus, an obsession with the customer, unreasonable determination, especially in the face of adversity, clear and credible ambition, and usually a bit of divergence—people who don't feel the need to be liked by everybody"

"My unmatched perspicacity, coupled with sheer indefatigability makes me a FEARED OPPONENT IN ANY REALM OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR"

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"At a hundred and thirty pounds, Altman is poised as a clothespin, fierce as a horned owl. Even in a Valley that worships productivity, he is an outlier, plowing through e-mails and meetings as if strapped to a time bomb, his unblinking stare speeding up colleagues until they sound like chipmunks."

"Man has a large capacity for effort. In fact it is so much greater than we think it is that few ever reach this capacity. We should value the faculty of knowing what we ought to do and having the will to do it. Knowing is easy; it is the doing that is difficult. The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know. The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. I believe that it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him ... we must live for the future, not for our own comfort or success."

"It's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity"

"Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy"

"One of the strategies of dissidence in the last years of Socialism was therefore precisely to take the ruling ideology more seriously/literally than it took itself by way of ignoring its virtual unwritten shadow."

"always drink upstream from the herd"

"Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed."

"If Men were angels, no government would be necessary."

"Incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage"

"One of the schools of Tlon goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory"

"It seems that Spartan men ate nearly six times as much as their wives"

"It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him"

"Leisure is essential to wisdom"

"Inextinguishable laughter among the blessed gods"

"Justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger"

"And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?"

"there is no teaching only recollection"

"[Alexander the Great] unified the vices of a Highland chieftain to the frenzy of an Oriental despot"

"Bare matter is conceived as a potentiality of form"

"When [the magnanimous man] is in danger he is unsparing of his life, knowing that there are conditions on which life is not worth living"

"[The proud man is] open in his hate and in his love, for to conceal one's feelings, i.e. to care less for truth than for what people think, is a coward's part"

"[On the morality of lenders charging interest] At every stage, there has been a wealth of theoretical argument to support the economically convenient opinion"

"Plato's communism annoys Aristotle"

"I do not agree with Plato, but if anything could make me do so, it would be Aristotle's arguments against him"

"The purpose of education is 'virtue' not usefulness"

"Idleness is to the human mind like rust to iron"

"For the Munduruku, the whole idea of counting children was ludicrous. The whole idea, in fact, of counting anything was ludicrous."

"In Lincolnshire during medieval times, a pimp plus a dik got you a bumfit."

"[On base-2] Alas! What was once hailed as a monument to monotheism ended in the bowels of a robot"

"Far over the misty mountains cold / To dungeons deep and caverns old / We must away ere break of day, / To find our long-forgotten gold."

"The invention of probability was the root cause of the decline, over the last few centuries, of superstition and religion."

"If society was like a machine that produced a regular number of murderers, didn’t this indicate that murder was the fault of society and not the individual?"

"[In the 1880s] a 60-year-old man with a bald pate and fine Victorian whiskers could frequently be seen on the streets of Britain gawping at women and rummaging around in his pocket. This was Francis Galton, the eminent scientist, conducting fieldwork."

"The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is [the Bell Curve's] sway. It is the supreme law of unreason."

"When a tribal chief later presented [Francis Galton] with a young woman smeared in butter and red ochre in preparation for sex—Galton declined the offer, concerned she would smudge his white linen suit."

"There were many paths that led up into those mountains and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and led nowhere or to bad ends; and dangers."

"This thing all things devours: / Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; / Gnaws iron, bites steel; / Grinds hard stones to meal; / Slays king, ruins town, / And beats high mountain down... Time! Time!"

"DON'T LEAVE THE PATH!"

"Surely you don't disbelieve in prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?"

"[Christianity and Islam] owe their very existence to the Maccabees"

"Saint Jerome was a man of many quarrels."

"A free curiosity has more power to make us learn things than a terrifying obligation"

"It is not we ourselves that sin, but that some other nature sins in us"

"God is eternal, in the sense of being timeless; in God there is no before and after, but only an eternal present."

"Neither past nor future, but only the present, really is"

"Do you know that you think? I do."

"The most effective men of action are often intellectually second-rate."