Red Haircrow

You don't have to disrespect and insult others simply to hold your own ground. If you do, that shows how shaky your own position is.

I welcome questions. I hate assumptions.

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them.

I write to believe in goodness.

Whatever your difficulty, whatever your hardship in life: Dance and make the song you sing your prayer. Sing it courageously, and with each step strengthen yourself with the knowledge and wisdom of your elders, so that whatever next happens, you can survive and not lose your rhythm.

Mary Roach

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her

Life contains these things: leakage and wickage and discharge, pus and snot and slime and gleet. We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.

The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.

It is the mind that speaks a woman's heart, not the vaginal walls.

Hormones are nature's three bottles of beer.

In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

Wassily Kandinsk

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul.

… lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?

Color directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.

That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.

Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Paul Farmer

The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.

It is very expensive to give bad medical care to poor people in a rich country.

Anywhere you have extreme poverty and no national health insurance, no promise of health care regardless of social standing, that's where you see the sharp limitations of market-based health care.

WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.

We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it is not worth it. So we fight the long defeat.

I've been asked a lot for my view on American health care. Well, 'it would be a good idea,' to quote Gandhi.

There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives.

Leonard Susskind

There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

There is so much to groak; So little to groak from.

Dick Feynman was a genius of visualization (he was also no slouch with equations): he made a mental picture of anything he was working on. While others were writing blackboard-filling formulas to express the laws of elementary particles, he would just draw a picture and figure out the answer.

We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

I would guess that there are limits to what we can understand. But old people always think there are limits to what we can understand. It's the young people who push past those limits.

Before World War II, when physics was primarily a European enterprise, physicists used the Greek language to name particles. Photon, electron, meson, baryon, lepton, and even hadron originated from the Greek. But later brash, irreverent, and sometimes silly Americans took over, and the names lightened up. Quark is a nonsense word from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but from that literary high point, things went downhill. The distinctions between the different quark types are referred to by the singularly inappropriate term flavor. We might have spoken of chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, pistachio, cherry, and mint chocolate chip quarks but we don’t. The six flavors of quarks are up, down, strange, charmed, bottom, and top. At one point, bottom and top were considered too risqué, so for a brief time they became truth and beauty.

Gordon Korman

Ask yourself: 'Do I feel the need to laminate?' Then teaching is for you.

I hate France. It's like the whole country's on a diet.

Don't think of it as losing a boyfriend. Think of it as gaining a stalker.

The dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.

For someone who's smarter than a supercomputer, sometimes you're a real idiot.

No fair! Those guys ripped off what we rightfully stole!

In our family, you don't get a childhood. We're too busy trying to dominate the world.

Donald Ervin Knuth

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

Nearly every example of faulty reasoning that has been published is accompanied by the phrase "of course" or its equivalent.

Albert Pike

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.

Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore.
And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store;
The absent friends remembered be, in all that’s sung or said,
And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead.

Christopher Moore

People, generally, suck.

If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.

Children see magic because they look for it.

Stephenie Meyer: Her vampires are sparkly, which I think we can all agree is wrong.

Nobody's perfect. Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him....

Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

Blessed are the dumbfucks.

Love: the sickest of Irony’s sick jokes. The place where logic and order go to die.

That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

Karl R. Popper

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.

No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.

All life is problem solving.

Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.