Successful vaudeville demands hard boundaries between performer and audience; it requires an indifference to what the paying customer wants that coexists with the confidence of knowing exactly what to give them.
~ Andi Zeisler via The New York Times
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The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
~ Mark Twain
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The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.
~ Daniel Kahneman
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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
~ Mark Twain
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If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
~ Hannah Arendt
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The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.
~ Blaise Pascal
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Empires are synonymous with centralized — if occasionally schismatized — hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through — usually — a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser — as a rule nominally independent — power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.
~ Iain Banks
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Like sailors in a storm, expecting every instant to go to the bottom, the believers suddenly became religious, prayed violently, and flattered themselves that they repented them of their evil courses. But a plain tale soon put them down, and quenched their religion entirely.
~ Charles MacKay
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The act of defining a problem does not always result ina cogent definition of the challenge to be solved.
~ Dmitri J. O’Bannon
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