George Caplan's Favorite Quotes
Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift
Bob Dylan Subterranean Homesick Blues
June 27, 1897
"Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
'Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth'?"
Thomas Hardy Lausanne: In Gibbon's Old Garden: 11-12 P.M.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
Ernest Rutherford
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Steven Jay Gould, "The Panda's Thumb"
Nature's final exams are a lot less organized than a college course - and unforgiving as well.
John Mather, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics
(See: swarthmore.edu)
... cooperation works better than competition when you are trying to get something done. There's no point in trying to be first if you're all riding in one canoe. I try to work with people so that we all get to our goal together, and then we let our creative juices flow. I think that's important because through most of my life in school, I saw people worrying about being better or worse than their fellow students and losing sight of their larger goals. I wish I could get people to stop worrying about comparing themselves with other people and just go after what they really care about.
John Mather, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics
(See: swarthmore.edu)
The greatest danger before you is this: you live in an age when people would package and standardize your life for you --steal it from you and sell it back to you at a price. That price is very high.
You have already been selected for this program. You have its credit cards and designer labels already expensively around you. In the months ahead, you will find yourselves working long hours, too exhausted for community life or even good friendships --too compromised to take a stand against the abuses of the system you serve. A great treadmill has been devised for you, and its operators do not care much if it wears you out or kills you. A system is in place to steal your life from you, if you will let it. Don't let it.
Granny D. (a.k.a. Doris Haddock)
Graduation speech to the students of Franklin Pierce College, New Hampshire
(See: grannyd.com)
They were not friends, Comrade Pillai and Inspector Thomas Mathew, and they didn't trust each other. But they understood each other perfectly. They were both men whom childhood had abandoned without a trace. Men without curiosity. Without doubt. Both in their own way truly, terrifyingly adult. They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew. They worked it. They were mechanics who serviced different parts of same machine.
from The God of Small Things by Arundahti Roy
And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself, another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature.
from The God of Small Things by Arundahti Roy
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew--or a Quaker--or a Unitarian--or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim--but tomorrow it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.
Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end--where all men and all churches are treated as equal--where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice--where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind--and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe--a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the first amendment's guarantees of religious liberty. Nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so--and neither do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test--even by indirection--for it. If they disagree with that safeguard they should be out openly working to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.
John F. Kennedy
September 12, 1960, from his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.
Mother Jones (Mary Harris)
May your life preach more loudly than your lips.
William Ellery Channing
There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe that there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve. On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
Chapter 6, Probability and Uncertainty - the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
Niels Bohr
A philosopher once said 'It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same results'. Well, they do not.
Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
Chapter 6, Probability and Uncertainty - the Quantum Mechanical View of Nature
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
Thomas Edison
Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
Opening lines of States of Matter by D.L. Goodstein
Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
Wernher von Braun
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race.
H.G. Wells
El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta.
(Socialism can arrive only by bicycle.)
Jose Antonio Viera Gallo
Quoted in Energy and Equity, foreword, Ivan Illich (1974)
Under capitalism, man exploits man; under socialism, the reverse is true.
Polish proverb
Course don't ever tell anybody they're not free, cause then they're gonna get really busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
George Hanson (Jack Nicholson), Easy Rider (1969)
The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.
James Marston Fitch, New York Times, 1 May 1960
Americans are broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater, and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there is something wrong with him.
Art Buchwald, "How Un-American Can You Get?," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966
Driving a car versus riding a bike is on par with watching television rather than living your own life.
Bruce MacAlister, Calgary cyclist
(see runmuki.com)
The best way to become fast is to ride lots.
Eddie Merckx, bicyclist, former Tour de France winner
There is no royal road to geometry.
Euclid's reply to King Ptolemy when asked if there was an easier way to study math than learning all the theorems.
One father is more than a hundred Schoolmasters.
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Education," Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1883
High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.
Kurt Vonnegut
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion: these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.
Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education (1960)
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman, on pinpointing the reason for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger by showing that O-rings grow brittle when immersed in cold water, Life magazine Jan '87
Toxic Sludge is Good for You!
Trust Us, We're Experts!
Titles of two books about public relations
Also, Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush's chief of staff, said last week
that the White House held back on promoting the Iraq policy in the summer because, "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
From newspaper reports during 2002
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
(As a rule, men willingly believe that which they wish to believe.)
Julius Caesar
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof s%#t detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway, "Paris Review," Spring '58
At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
....
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad...
....
To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! -- why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.
....
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
From Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.
E.B. White, The New Yorker, May 23, 1953
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert Einstein
I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires.
Albert Einstein
Zurich, after 2 December 1913
Dear Elsa,
But if I were to start taking care of my grooming, I would no longer be my own self. .... So, to hell with it. If you find me so unappetizing, then look for a friend who is more palatable to female tastes.
From a letter from Albert Einstein to his future second wife, Elsa Lowenthal
I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes ...
From Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Q: Is one of the problems with this, and the entire energy field, American lifestyles? Does the President believe that, given the amount of energy Americans consume per capita, how much it exceeds any other citizen in any other country in the world, does the President believe we need to correct our lifestyles to address the energy problem?
Mr. Fleischer: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we're able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation, into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.
whitehouse.gov
They say hard work never hurt anybody, but I figure why take the chance.
Ronald Reagan
Paris Review: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending to A Farewell To Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Paris Review: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug.
Mark Twain
Freedom means nothing if one has no shoes, my fellow men have no shoes.
Jean-Paul Sarte, when refusing the Nobel Prize
Freedom is having more than one, but fewer than twelve, pairs of shoes.
George Caplan, Feb. 12, 2005
A Father Mourns His Child
What have you gentlemen done with my child? He was conceived as a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, the uplifting of America's mass intelligence. You have debased this child, you have sent him out in the streets in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie music, to collect money from all and sundry for hubba bubba and audio jitterbug. You have made of him a laughing stock of intelligence, surely a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere; you have cut time into tiny cubelets, called spots (more rightly stains), wherewith the occasional fine program is periodically smeared with impudent insistences to buy or try.
Yet, withal, I am still proud of my child. Here and there from every station come each day some brief flashes worth the hearing, some symphony, some intelligent debate, some playlet worth the wattage. The average mind is slowly broadening, and despite all the debasement of most of radio's offerings, our music tastes are slowly advancing.
Some day the program director will attain the intelligent skill of the engineers who erected his towers and built the marvel which he now so ineptly uses.
Lee De Forest ("The Father of Radio")
Letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune
October 28, 1946
Quoted at: geocities.com on August 26, 2005
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Tennessee Ernie Ford "Sixteen Tons"
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