Some kickass quotes for March

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

-- Isaac Asimov

In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.

-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post

"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions."

-- Steven Pinker

"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."

-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emotions are the lubricants of reason.

-- Nicholas Nassim Taleb

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

-- Nietzsche

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere."

-- Isaac Asimov

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

-- Leonardo da Vinci

"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."

-- Seth Godin

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.

-- Amos Bronson Alcott

“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.”

-- Edward Young

You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.

-– xkcd

The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority - a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.

-- Seth Godin

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein