It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. - Aristotle (& inscription in Paul Malvino's great book, Transistor Approximations)

Profanity is a sign of a weak mind seeking to express itself strongly - Iras Cible

The best is the enemy of the good.--Voltaire (1694-1778)

If honesty is the best policy, it is as well to remember that dishonesty must be the next best policy.

A person who wishes to deal with honest men had best give up dealing.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive - Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke (1729- 1797),

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. - John Bradshaw (1602-59), lawyer, regicide.

When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew and therefore I did not speak out for them. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic and therefore I did not speak out for them. And when Hitler attacked the unions, I was not a member and therefore I did not speak out for them. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church - and there was nobody left to speak out for me. - Martin Niemoller (1892-1984)

It's unwise to pay too much, but, it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing what it was bought to do. John Ruskin (1819 - 1900

A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing - Oscar Wilde

There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper and people who consider price alone are this man's legitimate prey. John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)

Reading is the secret vice of the empty headed

Beware of a man of one book - English Proverb

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless - Chinese proverb

One picture is worth a thousand words - Frederick R. Barnard, 1927

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word - Andrew Jackson

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention - Herbert Simon 1998

I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter - Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)

If I am to speak for ten minutes, I need a week for preparation;   if fifteen minutes, three days;   if half an hour, two days;   if an hour, I am ready now - Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)

Its nice to be important, but its more important to be nice

There's no messing
with Doris Lessing
Ask her if one and one is two
And she'll ask " What's it got to do with you ?"
- Craig Brown, Aldeburgh BFe2003

The graveyards are full of people who thought they were indispensable

Do your best and never mind the twittering of sparrows - Dangerous Davies, Leslie Thomas

Being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose-a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. - Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men - Douglas Bader

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;  the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. - Tom Robbins

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it....This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience - George Santayana (1863-1952)

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident - Schopenhauer

Health and safety legislation is counter-Darwininan - fil Shaw 2002

What cannot be cured must be endured - H. Edgar 1992

Never hire people with a First; very bright, but they'll get lost on the way to the airport - J. Kenyon 1993-2007

Ask the experienced rather than the learned - Arab proverb

Stretch, don't cruise - John Ridgeway's daughter

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still. - Chinese Proverb

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 their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible - T. E Lawrence

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence - Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.)

Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them

Silence is argument carried out by other means - Che Guevara

Men of few words are the best men - Henry the Fifth WS

He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful - Sydney Smith

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt - George Eliot, Abraham Lincoln also Confucius, take your pick

As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave - Solomon Ibn Gabirol c 1021-1058 Jewish Spanish philosopher

You are the master of the unspoken word, the spoken word is your master - Ann Winser

I think it would be a good idea - Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

Love me or hate me, but spare me your indifference - Libbie Fudim

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves - Carl Gustav Jung

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem - John Galsworthy

Deceive the rich and powerful if you will, but don't insult them - Japanese Proverb

Once you label me, you negate me - Soren Kierkegaard

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation - Henry David Thoreau,

There comes a time in a man's life when the only things thought worth acquiring are knowledge and virtue - Primo Levi 1919 - 1987

Never complain and never explain - Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

Never apologise, complain or explain

Qui s'excuse, s'accuse - Gabriel Meurier, Trésor des Sentences (1530 - 1601)

Qui s'explique s'excuse, et qui s'excuse, s'accuse - LE TOURBILLON DE LA NET-ÉCONOMIE

Explanations exist; they have existed for all times, for there is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong - H. L. Mencken, 1917

It's always easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission - Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992)

Doctors are the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too - Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904)

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing - Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

Doctors pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into patients of whom they know nothing - Moliere (1622 - 1673)

FORGETFULNESS, n. A gift of God bestowed upon doctors in compensation for their destitution of conscience - Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Doctors and nurses are people who give you medicine until you die. - Deborah Martin

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics - Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945

He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial - Henry James (1843–1916)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois - Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)

The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night. - Bismarck (1815-1898)

Most people are stupid, most authority is malignant, God does not exist and everything is wrong - Ted Nelson 1960

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a pedlar in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances - Albert Einstein 1954

To loose one is an accident, to loose two smacks of carelessness - Imp of Bng Ernest or Vict?

Once is accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action - Al Capone

S ... - Marconi - Lands End to Newfoundland

What hath God wrought - Samuel F.B. Morse in the first telegraph message, from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.

Some people who think they are thinking are merely rearranging their prejudices - William James

That so many dare not be eccentrics marks the danger of our times

I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand

Friends are God's apology for giving us relatives.

I have lost many friends simply by not troubling to cross the street

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

Stultas autem quaestiones et genealogias et contentiones et pugnas legis devita sunt enim inutiles et vanae (Titus 3 9)

Legislation is so much cheaper than actually addressing problems. The Natural Philosopher 24/01/07

I doubt any malign intention on their part. Total inefficiency is much more likely. Alan Plater (in The Beiderbecke Affair): -

Local Government is the last refuge of the timid and poor in spirit.

Whatever it is that makes a person charming, it needs to remain a mystery ... once the charmer is aware of a mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation. Rex Harrison (1908 - 1990) English actor

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question." (Albert Camus, The Fall)

A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar. Anita Brookner (1928 - ) English art historian, writer

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
Tell a Friend-Cyril Connolly,

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. Oscar Wilde (1856 - 1900) Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves. Henri Frederic Amiel (1821 - 1881) Swiss writer

"Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

EPITAPH TO A DOG
Near this spot Are deposited the Remains
Of one Who Possessed Beauty
Without Vanity,Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.
This Praise, which would be unmeaning
flattery If inscribed over Human Ashes,
Is but a just tribute to the
Memory of "Boatswain," a Dog
Who was born at Newfoundland,
May, 1803,
And died at Newstead Abbey
Nov. 18, 1808.
Lord Byron

Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes.' They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'

Lying increases the creative faculties, expands the ego, and lessens the frictions of social contacts.

No good deed goes unpunished. Clare Booth Luce (1903 - 1987) US diplomat, dramatist, journalist, & politician

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses - Albert Einstein

The Bible [is] a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. - Albert Einstein

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survived, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away -
Ozymandias, P.B. Shelley

All that glisters is not gold
Nor all those who wander are lost
The old that are young do not wither
Deep roots are not reached by the frost -
Hobbit doggerel scratched on a stone half way across the Sahara and on the trig mark on top of Table Mountain 1974 - the unknown writer must have made it all the way

Life is mainly froth and bubble
Two things stand like stone
Kindness in anothers trouble
Courage in your own
- Lindsay Gordon