Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key

[Hygro]

"Notice how it's always 'How will we explain it to children', not 'How will children be able to understand it.'"

Now that's a great quote.

 

[Gucumatz]

Seconded - you should add that to your signature!

 

[Dachs]

"Well, sir, you are a cowardly son of a [gun]. You just shot an unarmed man!"
"He should've armed himself, if he's going to decorate his saloon with my friend."
-Sheriff William "Little Bill" Daggett and William Munny, Unforgiven

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"O Lord our God arise,
Scatter her enemies,
And make them fall:
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix:
God save us all."
-the "belligerent imperious second stanza" of God Save the Queen

 

[Dachs]

"The Patriots are doing what they’ve always done under Bill Belichick: what works."
-Peter King, "The Monday Morning Quarterback", 13JAN2014

"A pragmatist's defense of cheating."
-Mike "Christmas Ape" Tunison, Kissing Suzy Kolber, 13JAN2014, written in direct response

 

[Phrossack]

"Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise they won't go to yours."

-Yogi Berra

 

[Kyriakos]

I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.

F.Kafka

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

 

[cardgame]

That's not the full text, is it?

I thought there was more to it, like just one nation amongst a planet of nation-states or the like.

 

[say1988]

This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

Longer version

 

[Phrossack]

“Everyone else is out there having fun, and someone is out there trying to destroy the whole thing. Terrorists, or whoever they are, I just don’t have much use for it.”

-Bill Iffrig, who was knocked down by the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings just short of the finish line at the age of 78. He was helped back up and finished the race.

 

[bhsup]

"I promised you, dad, not to do the things you done. I walked away from trouble when I can. Now please don't think I'm weak, I didn't turn the other cheek. And papa I hope you understand, sometimes you gotta fight when you're a man." - Tommy

 

[classical_hero]

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. " Francis Crick

 

[Arakhor]

Indeed, I quite agree.

Did you read about Crick's views on religion, CH? I very much doubt that you would agree with those too.

 

[Phrossack]

"Terry Jones is Welsh. And he tries to hide the fact, but his name gives it away. And what Terry has never been able to accept is that the Welsh are subject people put on Earth to carry out menial tasks for the English. And he could never quite swallow this - I don’t know why, but there seemed to be some block in his understanding. And I think that’s why he and I had a few very friendly arguments… "

John Cleese, Monty Python: Almost the Truth

 

[Gucumatz]

Longer version

This made my day . Even if in thousands of years we still are around and haven't managed to find any other life-forms in the Universe, I could imagine a shuttle of humans/probe discovering that relic one day. The Spirit of Humanity

 

[cardgame]

Civilization advances one funeral at a time. – paraphrasing Max Planck

 

[Kozmos]

- Highlight Loc. 7440-46 | Added on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 07:34 PM

Meanwhile, our basic Kapitänleutnant has got to be asking himself: what the hell are the chances that a tramp Trinidadian steamer is going to just happen upon us and our milchcow, out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean? You could probably work it out, given the right data: Nn = number of Negroes per square kilometer Nm = number of milchcows Aa =Area of the Atlantic Ocean . . . and so on. But wait a sec, neither Negroes nor milchcows are randomly distributed, so the calculation becomes immensely more complicated. Far too complicated for a Kapitänleutnant to mess around with, especially when he’s busy trying to effect a dramatic reduction in Nn.

From one very long book.

 

[Phrossack]

From one very long book.

What's the book? It doesn't seem like the sort of thing a German submariner would say, not with "wait a sec."

 

[Borachio]

I wonder if it was this book?