• Crispin’s Razor

    In any argument every time the word “clearly” is used apply the following definition.

    Clearly: (adverb) an incantation uttered in the hope that a reader or listener will not notice that, whilst the truth of the statement that follows it is essential to case being posited, there is in fact no evidence for the truth of that statement nor does it follow logically from any premise already established. Synonyms “undoubtedly”, “naturally”.

  • Misunderstanding

    “Your adorable” she texted
    “No YOU’RE adorable” I texted back
    and now she thinks I like her and all I was doing was correcting her English.

  • Steve Jobs (in 1983)

    [Apple’s] strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes … and we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.

  • Milton Friedman

    One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

  • H L Mencken

    An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

  • Einstein and Chaplin (possibly)

    Einstein: What I most admire about your art, is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you.

    Chaplin: It is true but your glory is even greater: The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.

  • Sterling Hayden

    To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea — “cruising,” it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

  • Paul Krugman (in 1998)

    The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.

  • Francis Bacon

    Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

  • C S Lewis

    The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.

  • Tim Harford

    As human freedoms go, the freedom to take your custom elsewhere is not a grand or noble one – but neither is it one that we should abandon without a fight.