QUOTES

[Princess of Tap]

"Nobody's right if everybody's wrong"

 

Buffalo Springfield - For What is Worth

"Paranoia strikes deep."

[NipkowDisc]

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

"nobody can make you do anything. all they can do is open the door but you have to walk through the door"

 

-from a film I can't recall

 

[Sepiatone]

"Never have a method to your madness without a madness to your method. "

 

'n' I said that. 

 

 

Sepiatone

[Arsan404]

"Paranoia strikes deep."

 

"Into your life it will creep"

[Princess of Tap]

"Into your life it will creep"

" It starts when you're always afraid. "

[laffite]

"nobody can make you do anything. all they can do is open the door but you have to walk through the door"

 

-from a film I can't recall

 

 

...but we are so easily led ... Many of us, all of us maybe, don't know at times how to resist the open door, especially if we are been lured by the expert con ... that's the point. Monsieur Voltaire is right.

[Arsan404]

" It starts when you're always afraid.

 

"Step out of line, the men come and take you away"

[Sepiatone]

"Step out of line, the men come and take you away"

 

That's "The MAN come and take you away".   But then...

 

"Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong." 

 

 

Sepiatone

[Arsan404]

That's "The MAN come and take you away".   But then...

 

"Nobody's right, if everybody's wrong." 

 

 

Sepiatone

 

Mea culpa. My hearing isn't as good as it used to be.

[SansFin]

"Had our positions been reversed, I probably would have slit your weasand with a shiv of exotic design." Xiulan to Edda while recalling their first meeting. 9 Chickweed Lane

[SansFin]

"Interesting stories are never about people who make the right decisions." - Edda Burber

[Sepiatone]

"God must love the common man.  He made so MANY of them."

                                                                                             --Abraham Lincoln

 

 

Sepiatone

[Arsan404]

"An apology for the devil. It must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books."

 

                                          Samuel Butler

[laffite]

//

 

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

 

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

 

//

[Sepiatone]

Just put this in DB's "feminism dying" thread----

 

 

"Liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of."--Robert Fulghum (from "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten")

 

 

 

Sepiatone

[SansFin]

To Err is Human. To Really Foul Things Up Requires a Computer.

- William E. Vaughan

 

To Err is Human but it feels Divine.

- attributed to: Mae West

 

To Err is Human. To Forgive is Not Company Policy.

- Anonymous 

[laffite]

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

---Russell Baker (1925-

 

[I'm guessing he penned this prior to the Fake News craze]

[Sepiatone]

Used to LOVE reading Baker's column in the Detroit Free Press when they carried it.  Thanks for his quote. 

 

 

Sepiatone

[Arsan404]

"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable"

 

                                                                       Oscar Wilde

[SansFin]

Never assume the obvious is true. - William Safire

 

The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right. - William Safire

 

Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague. - William Safire

 

 

[laffite]

One of my favorite columns by William Safire is below. He discusses "Begging the Question" a phrase that is often misused.

 

***

***

***

 

July 26, 1998

ON LANGUAGE; Take My Question Please!

By William Safire

 

The following sentence, in its entirety, appeared in The New York Times Magazine last month: ''Which begs the question of whether Upper East Side residents might be wise to refrain from walking their corgis in the neighborhood for a while.''

 

I tore it out to use in an excoriation of sentences without clear subjects. (Famous fumble rule: ''No sentence fragments.'') But the Rev. Darrell Berger, Minister of the Fourth Universalist Society in New York, found a greater sin:

 

''This sentence fragment uses 'begs the question,' '' he writes, ''in the sense of a question that begs to be asked, usually because it is obvious to all. However, I am plagued by my logic course of some years ago, which taught me that begging the question is nothing of the kind. Rather, begging the question is a logically invalid form of argument that uses the point to be proven as part of the argument for its proof.''

 

Amen. Readers have been protesting this misuse of a term about a concept set down by Aristotle, a student of Plato Cacheris, in his book on logic written about 350 B.C. (Here comes mail on B.C.E.) His Greek term en archei aiteisthai was translated by the Romans as petitio principii, and rendered into English in 1581 as begging the question. In whatever language, it described the fallacy known as ''the assumption at the outset.''

 

In his 1988 book, ''Thinking Logically,'' Prof. James Freeman explains: ''An argument begs the question when the conclusion, in the same or different words, or a statement presupposing the conclusion, is introduced as a premise. The case for the conclusion ultimately depends on accepting the conclusion itself.''

 

Judith Meyers, who taught logic at Hunter College in New York, gives an example of begging a question: ''Lying is wrong because you shouldn't say things that aren't true.'' There's no logic to it; such an argument takes you around the barn, which is why it is known as ''circular reasoning.'' You can argue that lying is wrong because deception undermines moral values, or even that lying is wrong because it can get you in trouble, but when you say that lying is wrong because it's wrong, you're nothing but a question-beggar, an illogical sidestepper of the issue and a corrupter of all that is precious in Aristotelian thought.

 

This demands that a question be asked: since readers have sent me half a dozen examples of misuse of this phrase, in The New York Times, no less, can it be that common usage has changed the meaning? Put another way: When does an error become correct?

 

Let's say you argue: ''Common usage makes it correct because that's the way most people talk.'' I say that begs the question because ''the way most people talk'' is the definition of ''common usage.'' You could logically argue that ''common usage makes it correct because language is changing constantly'' or that ''common usage makes it correct because rigid prescriptivists have been shown to be the laughingstocks of linguistics,'' but you cannot argue in a straight line that ''common usage is correct because it's common usage.''

 

Dictionaries have long reported that to beg no longer means only ''to ask for a handout'' or ''to entreat humbly,'' as in ''I beg to differ.'' It also means -- especially in the phrases to beg the question or to beg the point -- ''to take for granted, to assume without logical proof.'' And beyond that, ''to avoid the issue; to sidestep the argument.'' (Sentence fragments are O.K. when used for stylistic emphasis.)

 

''I wonder,'' wonders Ms Meyers, not begging but asking, ''has such frequent misuse of the technical term to beg the question made it somehow a proper use of the phrase? Or does such usage remain mistaken?''

 

Stay on those ramparts, logical thinkers -- hold the fort for Aristotle, the English language and St. George! To use to beg the question as a synonym for ''to call for the question'' is a mistake. Why? It's a mistake because it is in error. (That's begging the question.)

 

The New York Times

 

[Sepiatone]

Laffite, you'd probably get a kick out of Lake Superior State University's "Unicorn Hunters".

 

Check them out.

https://www2.lssu.edu/banished-words-list

 

 

Sepiatone

[laffite]

"So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

 

(...in other words, pay heed to who you vote for)

[NipkowDisc]

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

---Russell Baker (1925-

 

[I'm guessing he penned this prior to the Fake News craze]

then liberals must be consistent and apply that rationale to the unproven theory of evolution...but they don't.  

[laffite]

then liberals must be consistent and apply that rationale to the unproven theory of evolution...but they don't.  

 

The quote says "almost always." Evolution is an exception.