"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever." - Albert Einstein

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
- Aleister Crowley

"Sometimes the path you are on is not as important as the direction you are heading. For, no matter if you take the Holland Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge you get to New Jersey, so long as you are heading west. The procedure involved in your path to Nirvana may meander, but a road worth traveling will have its twists and turns." (Kevin

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." (AA Milne)

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." - Mark Twain

Let the whole world crumble, so long as I can read another page. And then another after that. And then a hundred more.

--Michael Dirda, Readings

"Professor Plum, you were once a professor of psychiatry specializing in helping paranoid and homicidal lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur."
"Yes, but now I work for the United Nations."
"Then your work has not changed."

Whiners ( Read more... )

"Fairy Tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten."

- G.K. Chesterton.

"Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He's already made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things* and now he's trying to figure out whether it is like Turing's bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away ( Read more... )