Quotes

Edward Tufte, March 20, 2002
"The design of project charts appears to have regressed to Microsoft mediocrity; that is, nothing excellent and nothing completely useless. (Is the reduction of variance around a modest average the consequence of monopoly?) Most the project charts (do Google search on "project management charts" or "Gantt charts" to see plenty of examples) look the same and make the same mistakes: analytically thin, bureaucratic grid prison, not annotated, little quantitative data. The computer Gantt charts, so lightweight and tinker toy, do not appear to have been designed for serious project management."
Dr LEE Jong-wook, Director-General, World Health Organization
"Water and Sanitation is one of the primary drivers of public health. I often refer to it as Health 101, which means that once we can secure access to clean water and to adequate sanitation facilities for all people, irrespective of the difference in their living conditions, a huge battle against all kinds of diseases will be won."
Rev. James Forbes
"Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor."
Louis Pasteur
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
Quoted by Bob Hastings (attributed elsewhere to Henry John Kaiser, US industrialist (1882 - 1967)):
"When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt!"
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children....This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross."

From a speech by President Eisenhower in 1953, at the end of the Korean War [The Washington Spectator, V29, No. 4, 2/15/2003].

Samuel P. Huntington
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
The Washington Spectator, V29, No. 4, 2/15/2003:
"The international monitor Human Rights Watch points out that global support for the U.S. in its war on terrorism has diminished because Washington 'too often neglects human rights in its conduct of the war' by overlooking undemocratic practices in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, and among Afghan war lords."
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
"There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man."
Mitch Ratliffe (Technology Review, April 1992)
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."
Henri Poincare (Science et Methode)
"For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination. By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took me a few hours."

More on Poincare and black coffee:

According to Poincare, the creative process is set in motion during a period of concentrated, conscious work. Poincari also describes an instance in which, unable to sleep because of too much black coffee, he felt his mind crowded with ideas that collided until they locked into a stable combination; by the next morning, he had the solution to a problem that had plagued him for weeks (thus anticipating, and perhaps motivating, the late Paul Erdos's definition of a mathematician as a machine for turning coffee into theorems).

Paul Erdos
"A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."
Henri Amiel
"Life is short and we have not much time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind."
Edward Abbey, naturalist and author (1927-1989): A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, 1989
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931):
"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'"
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973):
"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone." (cited in A word a day listserve, Wordsmith <wsmith@wordsmith.org> )
Alvin Toffler:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. "
Eric Hoffer:
"In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882):
"The secret of education is respecting the pupil."
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"It is not length of life, but depth of life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
J. K. Galbraith:
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832):
"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, American writer (1804-1864):
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."
Robert Hilliard Barrow (sometimes attributed to Omar Bradley):
"Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare."
[ael: I think of Ulysses S. Grant, who was a quartermaster in the army before the Civil War. He knew that an army travels on its stomach. He also knew that he had more men than Lee, and, that if he lost them one-for-one, then he would win the war. I guess that's a strategy, however! See the quote above on "organized violence". They called Grant a butcher because he was willing to see soldiers die; but Grant knew that that's generally how wars are won....]
Oswald Chambers:
"We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions in life -- those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of life, and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength."
Indira Gandhi:
"You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."
Abigail Van Buren:
"The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back."
Mark Twain:
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939):
'as an English writer has wittily remarked, the man who first flung a word of abuse at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilisation.'
The witty English writer was the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955):
Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the former.
Bob Tindall: 
Subject: Accepting Myeloma
Nancy Bengston wrote:

>I don't consider MM the "beast"  It is a condition that I happen to have.

I agree. I consider myeloma simply as a particular glitch in body chemistry
that I just happen to have. I have no negative feelings about it. It's just
something that's happened. As one gets older, these things can be expected.
 
So my approach is to accept my glitch and keep on trucking. Eventually I'll
have to check out, but this would be true whether I had myeloma or not.
 
Best Wishes
 
Bob Tindall
Tyler, Texas
Age 64. IgGk - dx 6/96 - plasmacytoma on L2 - eliminated by local radiation
and dex. Then melphalan/dex and aredia 90mg*4 weeks until 6/97 - Since 6/97
no treatment except aredia 90mg*2 weeks
Kahlil Gibran (In The Prophet):
A teacher does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Epictetus (c.55 - c.135), in The Art of Living
Nothing can truly be taken from us. There is nothing to lose. Inner peace begins when we stop saying of things, "I have lost it" and instead say, "It has been returned to where it came from." Have your children died? They are returned to where they came from. Has your mate died? Your mate is returned to where he or she came from. Have your possessions and property been taken from you? They too have been returned to where they came from. Perhaps you are vexed because a bad person took your belongings. But why should it be any concern of yours who gives your things back to the world that gave them to you? The important thing is to take great care with what you have while the world lets you have it, just as a traveler takes care of a room at an inn.
Martin Gardner
"I am a philosophical theist. I believe in a personal god, and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don't believe in any established religion. This is called philosophical theism. It was defended by a lot of famous philosophers, starting with Kant. It includes Charles Pierce and William James and my favorite, a Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno, who's not very well known." [Quoted in The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 36, No. 4, Sept. 2005, who expounds on these views in his favorite of his books, Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener.]
Theodosius Dobzhansky
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." (Quoted in The Skeptical Inquirer, Getting the Monkey off Darwin's Back, 5/2005)
Theodosius Dobzhansky
"It is a matter of opinion, or of definition, whether viruses are considered living organisms or peculiar chemical substances."
[ael: I'm glad to hear Dobzhansky say that, in The American Biology Teacher, March 1973. I've always held that viruses are alive, but was told by some biologists that they are not. I guess it's simply a matter of opinion or definition!]
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longa@nku.edu