Maggie's Cookie Jar

On this page I'm keeping collection of quotes and other short items here that I have found to be thought-provoking, funny, or otherwise interesting. As yet, they are not sorted into categories, so things do jump around a bit. Gradually, by reading them, you can beging to build a mosaic of the issues that are important to me...and thus, an image of me.

“There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.” —Bayle
“I have lifted this speech from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. If more people would acknowledge that they got their pearls of wisdom from that book instead of the original, it might clear the air.” —Kurt Vonnegut
“Without deviation, progress is not possible.”— Frank Zappa

Virgina Satir's Five Freedoms

(Thanks to Jerry Weinberg for pointing this out to us all...)
“What sets us [humans] apart is an itch, a permanent, hard-wired, unscratchable irritation with the general state of things. We are alone among species in being so dissatisfied with the universe nature gave us that we have created tools to fix it.” — John Perry Barlow
“To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge ” — Grace Hopper
“How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.” — William Shakespeare: Hamlet (line 1108)
“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer, but wish we didn't. ” —Erica Jong
“The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. ” —A.N.Whitehead
“In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated. ” —A.N.Whitehead
“ Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite. ...If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there--the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field--is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.” —Richard Dawkins
“Sometimes giving names to things can help us to focus on some mystery. It's harmful, though, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close. ” —Marvin Minsky
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” — Gibbon
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” —Socrates
“...the Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place since the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope... ” —R. W. Funk, R. W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar in intro toThe Five Gospels
“As for the Christian theology, can you imagine anything more appallingly idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of deity is it that would be capable of creating angels and men to sing his praises day and night to all eternity? It is, of course - the figure of an Oriental despot, with his inane and barbaric vanity.” — A. N. Whitehead
“I state right from the outset 'Be not afraid!'. This is the same exhortation the resounded at the beginning of my ministry in the See of Saint Peter... Of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.” — Pope John Paul II
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.” — Mark Twain
“The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow” — Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocktery 
        “Remember what they taught you,
        How much of it was fear
        Refuse to hand it down
        The legacy stops here.”
— Melissa Etheridge, Silent Legacy
“Vivir en miedo es virir a media.(A life lived in fear is a life half-lived)” — Strictly Ballroom
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Gandhi
“A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.” — Quado in Total Recall
“...no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.” — Alice Walker
“When I dare to be powerful to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” — Audre Lorde, New York State Poet Laureate
“You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.” — Beverly Sills
“When I was 21, I was very self-assured when it came to programming and not very self-assured when it came to anything else. But I knew I was the best programmer in the world. So I just decided 'Hey, why couldn't I do this myself?' And so I did. And lot of people have told me that you need to be good, but you also need to be bad enough because if you know beforehand how much work it would have been to do, nobody sane would have even started it.” — Linus Torvalds, originator of the Linux operating system 
        You know you've achieved perfection in design
        Not when you have nothing more to add
        But when you have nothing more to take away
—Antoine de Saint Exupery
“Je n'ai pas cu le temps de faire plus cort.” — Blaise Pascal
“You know, I never know exactly what I do. I mean, every now and then, of course, I produce something, so I can say, 'I did that,' but most of the time I can't remember anything except sort of looking off into space.” — Dr. Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public-key cryptography
“The illiteracy of mathematicians is taken for granted. There still persists a myth that mathematics somehow involves numbers. Many fondly believe that university students spend their time long dividing by 173 and learning their 39 times table; in fact, the reverse is true. Mathematicians are renowned for their inability to add up or take away, in much the same way as geographers are always getting lost, and economists are always borrowing money off you.” — R. Ainsley
“When you have a computer, and good Web access, who needs television?” — Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World-Wide Web and Director of the World-Wide-Web Consortium
“Encryption is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government. It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.” — Esther Dyson
“World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation.” — Marshall McLuhan
“Paradoxically, it is smart to realize one is confused, as opposed to being confused without knowing it. For that stimulates us to apply our intellect to altering or repairing the defective process. Yet we dislike and disparage the sense of confusion, not appreciating the quality of this recognition.” — Marvin Minsky
“If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there is no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, There's a chance you may contribute to the making of a better world. The choice is yours.” — Noam Chomsky
“Having been brought up in a serf-owner's family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with a great deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. But when, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when each mistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting on the principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The former works admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim can be achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.” — Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist'
“State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption... It is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that 'virtue'... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice. Powerlessness is thus not necessarily objective powerlessness; the fears of the powerful dare not speak their name precisely because, as fears of the powerful, they must seem groundless...The liberal consensus on freedom of expression that might once have been said to reign among Western intellectuals, and that indeed did much to define them as a community, has ceased to obtain. In the United States, for instance, institutions of learning have approved bans on certain categories of speech, while agitation against pornography is not limited to the Right.” — J. M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship
“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein
“Concepts that have proved useful in the constitution of an order of things readily win such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and take them to be changeless data.” — Albert Einstein
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” — Albert Einstein
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe” — Albert Einstein
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” — Albert Einstein
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” — Albert Einstein
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” — Albert Einstein
“Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.” — Albert Einstein
“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” — Albert Einstein
“You give to the world your greatest gift when you're being yourself.” — Deepak Chopra
“Desire is what leads you through life until the time comes when you desire a higher life. So do not be ashamed that you want so much, yet at the same time do not fool yourself into thinking  that what you want today will be enough tomorrow.” — Deepak Chopra
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!'  but 'That's funny...'  ” —  Isaac Asimov
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
“What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. Our species has evolved may effective although imperfect methods, and each of us individually develops more on our own. Eventually, very few of our actions and decisions come to depend on any single mechanism. Instead, they emerge from conflicts and negotiations among societies of processes that constantly challenge one another.” — Marvin Minsky , from The Society of Mind
“No one knows where the borderline between intelligent and non-intelligent behavior lies; in fact, to suggest that a sharp borderline exists is silly. But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly: — Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
“Programming has led to new and powerful ideas about representing knowledge. Even after one elementary programming course, people often use the metaphors of programming ands computing to describe their own thinking...it is wrong to think of this language as merely eccentric and cute. The language of computation is in part the language of process and in part the language of data structures. Its terms and metaphors therefore offer an important contribution to the vocabulary for thinking about thought.” — Patrick Winston in the first edition of Artificial Intelligence
“To teach a new concept, it is important that both the teacher and the student can describe things properly in the domain where the concept exists. To teach a new concept, it is important that the teacher use near-misses as well as examples.” — Patrick Winston in the first edition of Artificial Intelligence
“The first programming system to operate in the sense of a modern compiler was developed by J.H. Laning and N.Zieler for the Whirlwind computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1950's...it was, in John Backus' words 'an elegant concept elegantly realized'...he also remarked that it was all but ignored because it threatened what he called the 'priesthood' of programmers, who took perverse pride in their ability to work in machine code using techniques and tricks few others could fathom, an attitude that would persist well into the era of personal computers. Donald Knuth...saw another reason in the allegation that the Laning and Zierler system was slower than a factor of ten than other coding systems for Whirlwind....Closing that gap between automatic compilers and hand coding would be necessary to win acceptance for compiler systems and break the priesthood of the programmers.” — Paul Cerruzzi in A History of Modern Computing
“In the world of the future, programs will be increasingly be written by communities The single best measure of whether a programming language is worth using is: how well does it support communities. The social aspects of the language dominate the technological aspects of the language. ” —William Grosso
“ We hold village meetings to boast of our skills and curse the devil-spawned end-users... Sometimes we juggle... At the last minute we slam out some code and go roller skating. &rdquo: —Elbonian programmers (by Scott Adams)
“I do strongly think that people, when they start throwing computers at something, they think that it's a whole new ballgame, so why should they study the past. I think that is a terrible mistake.” —Donald Knuth 
“If you do not know how to ask the right question, you
        discover nothing.
        You should not ask questions without knowledge.
        Without theory there are no questions.
        You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.

        Information is not knowledge. Lets not confuse the two.
        There is no knowledge without theory.
        Experience teaches nothing without theory.
        There is no observation without theory.
        Every theory is correct in its own world, but the problem is
        that the theory may not make contact with this world.
        Anybody can predict anything. A rational prediction has an
        explanation based on theory.
        You do not install knowledge.
        Without theory we can only copy.
        A leader must have knowledge. A leader must be able to
        teach.
        Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior
        requires only reflex action.
        There is no such thing as a fact.
        We should be guided by theory, not by numbers.
        An integral part of the theory of profound knowledge is the
        operation of a system.
        A rule should suit the purpose.&rdquo
; —W. Edwards Deming, as quoted by Ron McCoy in The Best of Deming
“If, in a calculus intending several indications, they are anywhere confused, then they are everywhere confused, and if they are confused they are not distinguished, and if they are not distinguished, then they cannot be indicated, and the calculus thereby makes no indication.” —G. Spencer Brown in Laws of Form
“Then there are feminist theorists such as Judith Butler who argue that there is no gender at all. 'Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original,' Butler wrote. It is something performed, artificial, a 'phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity.' All gendering, consequently, is drag, 'a kind of impersonation and approximation.' ” —Forever Barbie by M.G.Lord
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart about, and don't let anyone tell you any different.” —Kurt Vonnegut
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. ” —Kurt Vonnegut
“I was never more certain of how far away I was from my goal than when I was standing right beside it.” —Vincent in GATTACA, by Andrew Niccol
“We fear our highest possibility (as well as our lowest one). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments. ” —Abraham Maslow
“Always with the negative waves, Morarity, always with the negative waves. Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?...I don't need you. Sixty feet of bridge I can get almost anywhere. Schmuck! ” —Oddball from "Kelly's Heroes"

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

“ We ask ourselves: 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God! Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

“We are meant to shine, as children do. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

“As we're liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

—Marianne Williamson in A Return to Love.
“Beware of the man who has spent many years learning and is still ignorant. He is filled with resentment for the rest of us who have come to our ignorance the easy way. ” —Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
“The basic interpersonal issue is: how much space-time will you share with another? Your office? Home? Bedroom? Body? What kind of time will you share? Day or night? By appointment only?...Your space-time is the most valuable and potent instrument you have. If you unnderstand this simple principle, you have attained a liberating direction of your life. ” —Dr Timothy Leary
“In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selections amongst them for the purposes of a calculating engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation...

“Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage's Analytical Engine] is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols; and it fact it might bring out its results in algebraical notation, were provisions made accordingly. ” —Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace, 1844.

“Space is not a passive vacuum, but has properties that impose powerful constraints on any structure that inhabits it.” — Arthur Loeb
“In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” —John von Neumann
“This principle is so perfectly general that no particular application of it is possible” —George Polya
“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion...” —Frank Herbert.- Mentat mantra from Dune “It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion, it is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire trembling, the trembling becomes a warning. it is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion” —programmer's verion
“God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.” — Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions
“If triangles had a God, He'd have three sides.” — Old Yiddish proverb
“It's a bit like going to another country, to become a naturalised citizen. You don't know how you will blend in but you must plan to provide yourself with all the accouterments from the land you are coming from, or else you will end up in a defective state...Rather than being an immigrant, one is returning home like a Jew...You can divide up transsexuals into the immigrants who see the new world ahead rather like El Dorado, the refugees who get bundled into that new state without good preparations, and the defectors who have tried very hard to be good citizens, even pretend that they are, but deep inside they are yearning and waiting for a bolt-hole opportunity.” — Anonymous transsexual woman, cited in Tully, Accounting for Transsexuality and Transhomosexuality
“Responsibility means not blaming anyone or anything for your situation, including yourself.” — Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws Of Success 
            Dance like no one is watching
            Love like you'll never be hurt
            Sing like no one is listening
            Live like it's heaven on earth.
—William Purkey
“To change how we see things takes falling in love. Then the same becomes altogether different. Like love, a shift of sight can be redemptive--not in the religious sense of saving a soul for heaven, but in a more pragmatic sense. As at a redemption center, you get something back for what you had misperceived as merely worthless. The noisome symptoms of every day can be revalued, and their usefulness reclaimed.” — James Hillman, The Soul's Code
“Suppose that we have two unlikes that attract each other, a plus and a minus, and that they stick very close together. Suppose that we have another charge some distance away. Would it feel any attraction? It would feel practically none, because if the first two are equal in size, the attraction for the one and the repulsion for the other balance out. Therefore there is very little force at any appreciable distance. On the other hand, if we getvery closewith the extra charge,attraction arises, because the repulsion of likes and the attraction of unlikes will tend to bring unlikes closer together and push likes farther apart. Then the repulsion will belessthan the attraction. This is the reason why the atoms, which are constituted out of plus and minus electric charges, feel very little force when they are separated by appreciable distance...When they come close together, they can 'see inside' each other and rearrange their charges, with the result that they have a very strong interaction...Since this force is so enormous, all the plusses and all the minuses will normally come together in as intimate a combination as they can. All things, even ourselves, are made of fine-grained, enormously strongly interacting plus and minus parts, all neatly balanced out... ” — Richard P. Feynmann , in The Feynmann Lectures on Physics
“Once the wheel of love is set in motion there are no absolute rules.” — Kama Sutra
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. 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 at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Feminists against pornography (as distinct from the other anti-pornography camps) hold that our entire culture is pornographic. In a pornographic world, all our sexual constructions are obscene; sexual materials are necessarily oppressive, limited by the constraints of the culture. Even the act of viewing becomes a male actan act of subordinating the person viewed. Under this construct, I'm a damaged woman, a heretic.

“Always, the censors are concerned with how men act, and how women are portrayed. Women cannot make free sexual choices in that world; they are too oppressed to know that only oppression would lead them to sell sex. And I, watching, am either too oppressed to know the harm that my watching has done to my sisters, oror else I have become the Man. And it is the Man in me who watches and is aroused. (Shame.) What a mysogynistic worldview this is, this claim that women who make such choices cannot be making free choices at allare not free to make a choice. Feminists against pornography have done a sad and awful thing: They have made women into objects.” — Sallie Tisdale in Harper's Magazine: Talk Dirty to Me A woman's taste for pornography

From Dafydd Johnston's Canu Maswedd yr Oesoedd Canol (Medieval Welsh Erotic Poetry)
Mab wedi Ymwisgo mewn Dillad Merch (A Boy Dressed in Girl's Clothes)
written by the sixteenth-century poet Huw Arwystli

            The soft-spoken girl with pretty eyes,
            with a hat and two balls and a mantle,
            clad the same as her fine-haired mother
            and her touch like that of her father
            lusty widow, she would renounce indeed
            a man forever for one little lace.
            My lovely pale maid has two feet
            and a sturdy face and three thighs.
            The maiden put on, radiant form,
            a mantle dress under a sunshade.
            They said that in manner and appearances
            she was the Isolde of Oswestry town yonder.
            We can put her there
            as one of the maidens amongst wine and mead.
            The slender shapely gentle maid prefers
            intimacy with her girlfriend than her boyfriend.
            The authority of her chastity:
            she'd rather have the love of a girl than a boy.
            Incomparably more would she love
            her niece, by half, than her nephew.
            And for a boy who really desires a girl
            it's no use chatting up this one.
            And she's suitable as a handmaiden
            to a duchess in case of jealousy.
            No sinful man was ever up
            between her two feet.
            Although there was no man who would boast,
            there was a yard of tail.
            The lovely outward attire is a woman's part,
            the other part is a man's part.
            She's better suited to be on top of a playful girl,
            one with a big arse, than under a boy.
            Her weapons fit well,
            so may they fall, under many a smock.
            Although the display of the brow has been adorned
            with a brooch, fine-textured diadem,
            there is above the ankle, instead of the others,
            a big thick strong chisel and two balls.
            The upper part is a girl, says a suitor,
            the remaining part, nevertheless, is a man.
            You attired to stimulate desire
            one with a boy's tail instead of a girl's.
            You made in an amorous transaction
            one with two balls, most beautifully.
            If you would make yonder a quiet girl,
            let her lie beside your wife for a night