Longevity advice

from Dr. Marle Charlotte De Goliere Devenport, 109 years old as of November 27, 1933.

"Never get angry; learn self control; develop agility; be quick and lithe, not musclebound; avoid excesses in all things; don't put anything on your face that you wouldn't put in your stomach; don't let your mind die."

Google News, Courtesy of Metafilter

Quotes by John Tukey

This is my new personal motto.

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
- John W. Tukey. Exploratory Data Analysis. 1977.

Hat tip to Flowing Data

And another great one to remember

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
- John Tukey

Hat tip to Flowing Data

Quotes on Religion

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
- Victor Stenger

A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion
- Joseph Campbell

Quotes on Competence

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.
- Kurt Vonnegut

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude - a gray spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

I'm a huge fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's writing - the Vorkosigan Saga in particular.


The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
- Lois McMaster Bujold


And a potential inspiration for this quote

Everyone can be super! And when everyone's super-- [chuckles evilly] -- no one will be.
- Syndrome, in The Incredibles

is quite possibly

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.
- Kurt Vonnegut

A cynical view of life

Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
- Ellen Goodman

Quote from Seth Godin

Link to his brief blog article

Success is now the domain of people who lead. That doesn’t mean they’re in charge, it doesn’t mean they are the CEO, it merely means that for a group, even a small group, they show the way, they spread ideas, they make change. Those people are the only successful people we’ve got.

Excellent quotes

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
- Sir Richard Steele

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson

The modern form of Samuel Johnson's quote is "The Waiter Rule"

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with. Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

Nearly all men can stand adversity - but give him power, and the extent of his character will be revealed.
- Anonymous

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
- Carl Jung

“Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
- Lao Tzu

From a post titled "The Lazy Manifesto" at ZenHabits.net

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
- PJ Plauger

"Wisdom begins in wonder."
- Socrates

Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
- John Ruskin

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
- Robert Frost

From a post about Socratic living at Zenhabits.net

The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.
- Joseph Campbell

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
- Joseph Campbell

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

- Aristotle

If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.

- Paul Arden

The truth is, creativity isn’t about wild talent as much as it’s about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.
- Robert Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford Engineering School.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
- John Tukey

In honor of George Carlin

That's all your house is — it's a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. Now sometimes — sometimes you gotta move. You gotta get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff. You've gotta move all your stuff, and maybe put some of your stuff in storage. Imagine that — there's a whole industry based on keeping on eye on your stuff.

Something is wrong here: War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the resume of a supreme being. This is the kinda (expletive) you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude.

Surprising quote from Einstein

In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind that was sold at auction for $404,000.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilized interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.

Link to article at Slate.com

Quotes from Orson Scott Card's Ender series

"So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down…A real god doesn't care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them."
- Xenocide

So he believed. Believed, but the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything, to have that seed growing. It made [him] listen more
carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
- Ender's Game

He was commander every moment they were together. He never had to remind them of it; he simply was.
- Ender's Game

You can't rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.
- Ender's Shadow

For we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor creatures could ever have conceived of in their nightmares. They had no way of knowing the story of blind Samson, who pulled down the temple on his own head to slay his enemies.
- Ender's Shadow

Quotes from the Dune series by Frank Herbert

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

• Paul Atreides to the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

"What is the meaning of life?" People spend a lot of time and energy trying to answer that question. However, as Paul says, perhaps we're asking the wrong question. The outlook promulgated by the quote is similar to the Buddhist outlook, which emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment. Apparently, Eckhart Tolle's book "The Power of Now" promotes a similar worldview.

Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

• from The Humanity of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

I think a large part of the willingness to learn is the willingness to examine yourself - to evaluate one's own abilities, see where they can be improved, and take every available opportunity to do so. Perhaps those who do not believe they can learn are unwilling to truly see themselves and judge their strengths and weaknesses.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" — which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

• from The Wisdom of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

• Law and Governance The Spacing Guild Manual

The same could be said of any organization - but the one that is most relevant to me is business. The corollary to the above statement could be that the next most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing the people to carry out the wishes of the leaders.

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices ... [that] usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems ... A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors ... [Good administrators] depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections ... One of the hardest things to find is people who actually make decisions.

• God Emperor of Dune

There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening — first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day the man leaped to his feet with a light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: "It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!"

• Stories of the Hidden Wisdom from the Oral History of Rakis, Heretics of Dune

There is a great deal of emphasis on causality - if we see the effect B, what was the cause A that led to B? However, as the quote says, many causal relationships can be much better understood from a holistic sense as being part of the same event.

Skepticism, from Ender and Bean

Although Orson Scott Card's novels have raised some controversy, they contain some passages that have stuck with me and affected my own thinking.

Believed, but the seed of doubt was there, and it stayed, and every now and then sent out a little root. It changed everything to have that seed growing. It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.
- Ender's Game, p. 111

The criminal misuse of time was pointing out the mistakes. Catching them - noticing them - that was essential. If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.
- Ender's Shadow, p. 87-88

Both quotes deal with the idea of critical thinking - examining information for its value before incorporating it into your own corpus of knowledge. I fear that critical thinking is increasingly devalued in our current society, and even those who wish to understand issues and ideas more deeply are overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to us nowadays through television, radio, books, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and (lest we forget) the people we talk to.