My Favorite Quotations

"I don't need time.  What I need is a deadline.

-- Duke Ellington

"Our life is frittered away by detail . . . simplify, simplify!"

-- Henry David Thoreau

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed."

-- Theodore Roosevelt

"I think men are most afraid of being . . . in direct communication with the world at large.  They fear reprisals, the most profound of which is that they 'won't be understood.'  Yet every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty -- trying to communicate themselves, understood or not -- miracles have happened."

-- Duke Ellington

"Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round -- remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped."

-- James J. Corbett

"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

-- Thomas Jefferson

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

-- Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1927

"This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields.  It was born of a struggle.  It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure.  And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away.  I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought.  I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.  If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation, I want to demand this freedom for future generations."

-- Richard P. Feynman

From The Meaning of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, the published text of three lectures presented in April 1963 as part of the University of Washington (Seattle) John Danz Lecture Series.

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once."

-- Ashleigh Brilliant

"Oh, no, not ANOTHER learning experience!"

-- Anon