More random quotes from WikiQuote

A while ago I posted 10 random quotes from WikiQuote. I don’t make any great claims for this, perhaps some juxtapositions thrown up by this method may be interesting, perhaps not. I followed the same procedure as the previous post.

Egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world,for example, it is generally in the times and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: “Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.”

Not weird weird, but like exciting weird.

When a mixture of 1,3-butadiene and ethene is heated in the gas phase, a remarkable reaction takes place in which cyclohexene is formed by the simultaneous generation of two new carbon – carbon bonds. This is the simplest example of the Diels-Alder reaction, in which a conjugated diene adds to an alkene to yield cyclohexene derivatives. The Diels-Alder reaction is in turn a special case of the more general class of cycloaddition reactions between psystems, the products of which are called cycloadducts.

Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.

And most importantly, they showed us that no matter whom we choose to love, be they heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, bisexual, trisexual, quadrisexual, pansexual, transexual, omnisexual or that thing where the chick ties the belt around your neck and tinkles on a ballon, it has absolutely nothing to do with who we are as people.

You don’t really want my heart No, you just like to know you can Still be the one who gets it breaking You only want me when I’m taken.

Art thou the bird whom Man loves best,
The pious bird with the scarlet breast,
Our little English Robin;
The bird that comes about our doors
When autumn winds are sobbing?

Ich glaube ihm das, und ich bin davon überzeugt, dass er das ist. (I believe him, and I’m convinced that he is.)

Slow down, Thomas! You’re spilling my bubble liquid!

Shapin’s admirable essay misses, however, the point of Mara Beller’s piece in Physics Today (1998). Beller is not urging a more thoughtful attitude on physicists by pointing out that the wisdom of Bohr would sound like nonsense if it came from sociology or cultural studies. Quite the opposite. She is denouncing the great icons of quantum physics for uttering what she takes to be nonsense, and she is urging scientists to clean up their own act before they get on with the business of mocking others.