May '09 Rationality Quotes

New post asking for quotes over at LessWrong. As usually I trawled it for a few highlights. My, I am quoting an awful lot lately, aren't I?

"And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means."
-- H Beam Piper, "Space Viking"

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
-- Peter Drucker

"From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense."
--John Quiggin

"The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed"
-- C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible."
-- T. E. Lawrence

"If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well."
--Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it."
-G. K. Chesterton

"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different."
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own."
-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"

"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"

"...any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch...Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. Furthermore, unless some kind of relief is available, we can expect confusion to increase until disorder approaches chaos— death.

Fortunately, there is a way out."
-- John Boyd, Destruction and Creation

"You are a woman: you must never speak what you think; your words must contradict your thoughts, but your actions may contradict your words."
-- William Congreve