Some quotations

I have been collecting a few quotations, and now, before the list gets any longer, I thought I’d do a post with them all in. In due course, I will add these to my quotations page on my main blog.

I’ll begin with one about discrimination - from someone who turned out to have some racist skeletons in his closet.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

often attributed, without evidence, to Albert Einstein

Now one from George Orwell’s “1984”, which I saw as an unflattering meme about a conservative politician. It does, however, tie into something I wrote about despot’s sycophants - see here.

“He was a ... man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms - one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the party depended.”

George  Orwell, “1984”

  . . . and . . .

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Along that same sort of line, one from me:

Just because you can comprehend, carry out, and are comfortable with an idea does not mean it is correct.

Gnwmythr

And one for the sycophants and beneficiaries of nepotism to consider directly:

Lifted on tiptoes, one cannot stand firm.

The Dao De Ching, Chapter 24,
from “Sitting with Lao-Tzu” by Andrew Beaulac

On the other hand . . .

One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

(some reflections on that here)

And, on ideas, a warning to the despots:

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.

Barbara Tuchman
“The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam”

But, in terms of implementing ideas, one caution that I found had a specific source:

Perfect is the enemy of the good.
(more literally “the best is the enemy of the good”)

Voltaire

Now, a variation of the concept that the means affect the end:

When the wrong person uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.

an “old Chinese saying” cited in “Sitting with Lao-Tzu” by Andrew Beaulac

And I will end with one on compassion:

However, with compassion, you remain victorious when attacked and when defending you are invincible.

The Dao De Ching, Chapter 67,
from “Sitting with Lao-Tzu” by Andrew Beaulac