From Pine View Farm

QOTD category archive

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Michael Pollan:

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

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John Nettles, in voice of DCI Tom Barnaby to his wife as he reads a newspaper story:

What’s the world coming to, Joyce. Half a paragraph on the crime and a whole page on something that doesn’t exist.

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Pauline Kael:

Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

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Rebecca West:

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

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Angela Davis:

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities has literally become big business.

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St. Jerome:

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

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Calgacus:

They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

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Dean Acheson:

How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.

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Baltasar Gracián:

Not believing others implies that you yourself are deceitful. The liar suffers twice: he neither believes nor is believed.

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John Nettles, in the voice of DCI Tom Barnaby:

Now that answers about a dozen questions. If only I knew what they were.

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Rudiger Dornbusch:

The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.

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Sir Walter Raleigh:

A wise man ought not to desire to inhabit that country where men have more authority than laws.

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Galen:

The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!

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Simone Weil:

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

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Andre Gide:

The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.

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Diogenes Laërtius:

The market is a place set apart where men may deceive each other.

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Demosthenes:

The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different.

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Marilyn Frye:

Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests.

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William Pitt the Younger:

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.

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Edward R. Murrow:

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.

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