Quotations and Aphorisms

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

Gretel Ehrlich, novelist, poet, and essayist (b. 1946)

and again, thanks to Anu Garg and A-Word-A-Day

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it."

- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), From Why I am not a Christian, 3/6/1927

"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand."

- Kurt Vonnegut, US novelist (1922 - 2007)

 Heuristics and biases are widespread in human reasoning. Familiarity with heuristics and biases can enable us to detect a wide variety of logical flaws that might otherwise evade our inspection. But, as with any ability to detect flaws in reasoning, this inspection must be applied evenhandedly: both to our own ideas and the ideas of others; to ideas which discomfort us and to ideas which comfort us.  Awareness of human fallibility is a dangerous knowledge, if you remind yourself of the fallibility of those who disagree with you. If I am selective about which arguments I inspect for errors, or even how hard I inspect for errors, then every new rule of rationality I learn, every new logical flaw I know how to detect, makes me that much stupider. Intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself.

- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, from "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks"

"Once we see clearly how highly we value beauty, health, honor and pride, surely nothing can prevent us from paying a corresponding regard to them. It may seem painful to any sensitive spirit to have to balance spiritual goods against material. But that is not the fault of monetary calculation; it lies in the very nature of things themselves. Even where judgments of value can be established directly without computation in value or in money, the necessity of choosing between material and spiritual satisfaction cannot be evaded. "

- Mises, 1920, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth