A few good quotes

I was trying to find the title of the Sheckley story whose punchline is approximately "There's always another fool who wants a marble palace". It didn't turn up, but I found this:

Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin - and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone.
—The Aaron, in Of Men and Monsters, Chapter 24 by William Tenn

The aspect of having “worked out for the best” is the inescapable consequence of the viewpoint of the people who descended from the victors.
—Poul Anderson

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.
—from the Journal of David Bannerman in Angel’s Egg in the anthology Good Neighbors and Other Strangers by Edgar Pangborn

1. Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have a single answer.
2. The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it. It probably isn’t right.
3. Check the answer you have worked out once more - before you tell it to anybody.
—from the article Right Answers: A Short Guide for Obtaining Them by Edmund C. Berkeley in Computers and Automation, September, 1969

Nations are like people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are — and that’s against nature.
—Mark Braggs, in Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

At some time in the life of every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out.
—The Managerialization of Higher Education, from Educational Record, Summer, 1970 by Richard H. Brien

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right with nobody listening.
—Florence Capp, from the Andy Capp comic strip

No human condition endures forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such condition, the greater its susceptibility to change.
—O. C. Charle, Claghorn of the Overwheles, Castle Hagedorn, in the Last Castle by Jack Vance

The defense of civil liberties, by definition, involves the defense of persons who are most despised by the public.
—Aryeh Neier, American Civil Liberties Union

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.
—Duncan Idaho, in the Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

1. Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
2. Democracy is not a form of government. It is a state of mind. People cannot arbitrarily be placed in a state of mind.
3. One measure of the urgency of revolution is the freedom the people have, compared with the freedom they want.
4. Fundamental to any democracy is the people’s right to be wrong. No democracy has ever survived the abolishment of this principle.
—from IPR Manual 1048-K in The World Menders by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. [1971-- somehow seems relevant to recent events)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a wellarmed lamb contesting the vote.
—Author Unknown

One of the primary activities of the engineer is directing the inevitable degradation of energy so that in the process some useful result is obtained.
—Circuits, Devices, and Systems: A First Course in Electrical Engineering by Ralph J. Smith

God is subtle, but he is not malicious.
—Albert Einstein [This implies that Einstein didn't believe in Murphy's Law.]

All freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”
—Evelyn Cyril (Oscar) Gordon, in Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein [It's time to reread the book-- I don't think I'd ever noticed that line.]

It is not a foregone conclusion . . . that the problem [of understanding the origin of the solar system] has a scientific solution. For instance, an enclosure in which the air has been stirred gives, after some delay, no clue on the nature or the time of the stirring. All memory of the event within the system has been lost.
—Gerard P. Kuiper, astronomer, University of Arizona

You think people are silly to believe in ghosts? You should hear some of the silly things ghosts believe in! —in Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty

Matrimony has two basic flaws: husbands and wives. Every male has an innate talent for being a deplorable husband. Females match this with a truly astonishing aptitude for being wretched wives. What the human race needs is a third sex, neuter, with a boundless domestic capacity. Then either of the present sexes could marry it and be happy.
—Jan Darzek, in Watchers of the Dark, chapter 1 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

I only have two things to do today, but one of them is to get through the day.
—Kathy McMillan, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, California Monday, July 28, 1986, 7:55 AM

We know nothing of cause except as an antecedent-nothing of effect except as a consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never occurs without another, which is dissimilar: the first in point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One who had many times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen rabbits and dogs otherwise, would think the rabbit the cause of the dog. —Quoted by Moxon, attributed to Mill in Moxon’s Master by Ambrose Bierce in The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction

Come on! You know better! Does the contract have to say “think”?
—Linda Ray speaking on the telephone to a subcontractor General Electric Company, San Jose, California April 15, 1981

In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer.
—Answerer, in Ask a Foolish Question in the anthology Citizen in Space by Robert Sheckley

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like a giving hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem.
The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. —Jim Wiseman, General Electric Company, August, 1974

A few good quotes

I was trying to find the title of the Sheckley story whose punchline is approximately "There's always another fool who wants a marble palace". It didn't turn up, but I found this:

Man shares certain significant characteristics with the rat and cockroach: He will eat almost anything. He is fiercely adaptable to a wide variety of conditions. He can survive as an individual but is at his best in swarms. He prefers to live, whenever possible, on what other creatures store or biologically manufacture. The conclusion is inescapable that he was designed by nature as a most superior sort of vermin - and that only the absence, in his early environment, of a sufficiently wealthy host prevented him from assuming the role of eternal guest and forced him to live hungrily, and more than a little irritably, by his own wits alone.
—The Aaron, in Of Men and Monsters, Chapter 24 by William Tenn

The aspect of having “worked out for the best” is the inescapable consequence of the viewpoint of the people who descended from the victors.
—Poul Anderson

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.
—from the Journal of David Bannerman in Angel’s Egg in the anthology Good Neighbors and Other Strangers by Edgar Pangborn

1. Most problems have either many answers or no answer. Only a few problems have a single answer.
2. The moment you have worked out an answer, start checking it. It probably isn’t right.
3. Check the answer you have worked out once more - before you tell it to anybody.
—from the article Right Answers: A Short Guide for Obtaining Them by Edmund C. Berkeley in Computers and Automation, September, 1969

Nations are like people. When they grow old and rich and fat they get conservative. They exhaust their energy trying to keep things the way they are — and that’s against nature.
—Mark Braggs, in Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

At some time in the life of every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out.
—The Managerialization of Higher Education, from Educational Record, Summer, 1970 by Richard H. Brien

The only thing worse than being wrong is being right with nobody listening.
—Florence Capp, from the Andy Capp comic strip

No human condition endures forever, with the corollary that the more complicated such condition, the greater its susceptibility to change.
—O. C. Charle, Claghorn of the Overwheles, Castle Hagedorn, in the Last Castle by Jack Vance

The defense of civil liberties, by definition, involves the defense of persons who are most despised by the public.
—Aryeh Neier, American Civil Liberties Union

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.
—Duncan Idaho, in the Children of Dune by Frank Herbert

1. Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
2. Democracy is not a form of government. It is a state of mind. People cannot arbitrarily be placed in a state of mind.
3. One measure of the urgency of revolution is the freedom the people have, compared with the freedom they want.
4. Fundamental to any democracy is the people’s right to be wrong. No democracy has ever survived the abolishment of this principle.
—from IPR Manual 1048-K in The World Menders by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. [1971-- somehow seems relevant to recent events)

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a wellarmed lamb contesting the vote.
—Author Unknown

One of the primary activities of the engineer is directing the inevitable degradation of energy so that in the process some useful result is obtained.
—Circuits, Devices, and Systems: A First Course in Electrical Engineering by Ralph J. Smith

God is subtle, but he is not malicious.
—Albert Einstein [This implies that Einstein didn't believe in Murphy's Law.]

All freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”
—Evelyn Cyril (Oscar) Gordon, in Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein [It's time to reread the book-- I don't think I'd ever noticed that line.]

It is not a foregone conclusion . . . that the problem [of understanding the origin of the solar system] has a scientific solution. For instance, an enclosure in which the air has been stirred gives, after some delay, no clue on the nature or the time of the stirring. All memory of the event within the system has been lost.
—Gerard P. Kuiper, astronomer, University of Arizona

You think people are silly to believe in ghosts? You should hear some of the silly things ghosts believe in! —in Fourth Mansions by R. A. Lafferty

Matrimony has two basic flaws: husbands and wives. Every male has an innate talent for being a deplorable husband. Females match this with a truly astonishing aptitude for being wretched wives. What the human race needs is a third sex, neuter, with a boundless domestic capacity. Then either of the present sexes could marry it and be happy.
—Jan Darzek, in Watchers of the Dark, chapter 1 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

I only have two things to do today, but one of them is to get through the day.
—Kathy McMillan, Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, California Monday, July 28, 1986, 7:55 AM

We know nothing of cause except as an antecedent-nothing of effect except as a consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never occurs without another, which is dissimilar: the first in point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One who had many times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen rabbits and dogs otherwise, would think the rabbit the cause of the dog. —Quoted by Moxon, attributed to Mill in Moxon’s Master by Ambrose Bierce in The Pocket Book of Science-Fiction

Come on! You know better! Does the contract have to say “think”?
—Linda Ray speaking on the telephone to a subcontractor General Electric Company, San Jose, California April 15, 1981

In order to ask a question you must already know most of the answer.
—Answerer, in Ask a Foolish Question in the anthology Citizen in Space by Robert Sheckley

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like a giving hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem.
The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. —Jim Wiseman, General Electric Company, August, 1974

GNP as blur and fog

Does GNP measure growth and welfare? by Oskar Morgenstern:

The principal calculations to which GNP figures are subjected are rates of change, presumably rates of growth, because that is with what the world has been made aware. Governments everywhere look hypnotized at these calculations and are judged by the number generated even for the short intervals of a quarter year -- incidentally so brief a period that one must be astonished that (even given modern means of communications) all the hundreds of thousands of underlying figures could be collected: all this without any error whatsoever! Or, if -- heaven forbid -- there are errors that the very kindly distribute themselves in such manner that they all cancel out?

Two quotes from the essay:

St. Augustine: "For so it is, oh my Lord God, I measure it, but what it is I measure, I do not know".

Gauss: "The lack of mathematical insight shows up in nothing so surprisingly as in unbounded precision in numerical computations."

Does anyone have a context for the Augustine quote?

I don't think things are much better for the GDP. The record keeping is probably improved (but is the illegal economy larger?), but the theoretical problems haven't changed.

Link thanks to Vladimir M.

GNP as blur and fog

Does GNP measure growth and welfare? by Oskar Morgenstern:

The principal calculations to which GNP figures are subjected are rates of change, presumably rates of growth, because that is with what the world has been made aware. Governments everywhere look hypnotized at these calculations and are judged by the number generated even for the short intervals of a quarter year -- incidentally so brief a period that one must be astonished that (even given modern means of communications) all the hundreds of thousands of underlying figures could be collected: all this without any error whatsoever! Or, if -- heaven forbid -- there are errors that the very kindly distribute themselves in such manner that they all cancel out?

Two quotes from the essay:

St. Augustine: "For so it is, oh my Lord God, I measure it, but what it is I measure, I do not know".

Gauss: "The lack of mathematical insight shows up in nothing so surprisingly as in unbounded precision in numerical computations."

Does anyone have a context for the Augustine quote?

I don't think things are much better for the GDP. The record keeping is probably improved (but is the illegal economy larger?), but the theoretical problems haven't changed.

Link thanks to Vladimir M.