djh1997

Quotes

From my own brain

Always salt🜔 your hash#.

Terry Pratchett

Thunder on my right hand. Lightning in my left hand. Fire behind me. Frost in front of me.

Give a man fire and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

All fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.

The role of listeners has never been fully appreciated. However, it is well known that most people don’t listen. They use the time when someone else is speaking to think of what they’re going to say next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

It is a well-known fact that when one is about to die the senses immediately become excruciatingly sharp and it has always been believed that this is to enable their owner to detect any possible exit from his predicament other than the obvious one. This is not true. The phenomenon is a classical example of displacement activity. The senses are desperately concentrating on anything apart from the immediate problem in the hope that it will go away.

Gods like a joke as much as anyone else.

This is where the gods play games with the lives of men, on a board which is at one and the same time a simple playing area and the whole world. And Fate always wins. Most of the gods throw dice but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out until too late that he’s been using two queens all along.

“Carrot, I think you’ve got something wrong with your head,” said Angua. “What?” “I think you may have got it stuck up your bum.”

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously.

‘Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?’ Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest. Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history ,ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just ,well, things happening one after another.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.

There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.

Other

Sometimes in life, even though it’s not your fault, it’s still your problem. (Marco Arment)

You touch it, you own it (unknown but common place philosophy at work around issues/documents)

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.” ~ Aaron Swartz

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks… With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?” ~ Aaron Swartz

“A piece of knowledge, unlike a piece of physical property, can be shared by large groups of people without making anybody poorer.” ~ Aaron Swartz

It is acceptable to exceed your authority if correcting you will embarrass your superiors. (DR Stephen South Wolff)

lots more wisdom from Merlin Mann

Too much live to live, too few shits to give. ~ Cooper Alan

‘Could I have foreseen the work I have to go through I would never have entered upon it, but I never flinch, and do it we will. ~ Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The earth [is] alive in all of these ways simultaneously. Like alive with the the geology of the aurora because the aurora is like more or less a geological phenomenon. And then alive with like the water cycle of thunderstorms. And then alive with the green on the continents. And then alive with the the city lights on the coasts of these continents. And then alive with the satellites twinkling and threading through space on the outside. ~ Hank Green about talking about