Adages
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Quote of the day – no, the month
From Tim Ferriss’ newsletter
“I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’”
— From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander -
Quote of the moment – big data edition
From HP Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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Quote of the day – yet another Williamson
From this blog post
What do the progressives want the authorities to do? Build a prison cell inside his prison cell and another one inside of that to create a turducken of felonious intent?
Turducken of felonious intent is one of the greatest word sequences ever.
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Great tough guy line – Finnish version
From this video by Indy Neidel – here is a saying started by the Finns in the Finnish – Soviet War of 1939
They are so many, and our county so small
Where shall we find room to bury them all?
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Greatest danger sign this year
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Tyler Cowen channels me on Tom Lehrer
I’m just coming off of my latest obsession – and here is Tyler Cowen’s post on the topic.
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Quote from Tom Lehrer
(Discussing his sort of retirement from music, written from memory)
I’ve always lived by the principle that if you’ve seen Cincinnati you don’t need to see Cleveland
Meaning that if something is no longer fun, then stop.
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Quote of the day – yet another Eric Hoffer
There are crumbs of everything inside us – all you have to do is be antiquated with yourself and you will know the whole world.
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Morning Williamson on Puritanism
That was the basic cultural theory of America: that our Anglo-Protestant forebears were so deep-dipped in the Protestant work ethic — and so constantly mindful that they might be called before their Maker at any moment to make an accounting of their lives — that they didn’t need a king bossing them around. They bossed themselves around, like enlightened people do — that’s classical liberalism in a nutshell.
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Quote of the day – Thursday edition
From the Great War on YouTube
Peace is within sight, but not within reach