Poems List

Necessity is the ethnicity of truth.

Innovation is the creation of the new, Or the re-arranging of the old in a new way.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we *can* suppose.

Nature, by its very nature, is very brutal and unequal. However, Man has somehow managed to transform the nature of its brutality and inequality.

If you do, it's too little. Just being will do.

What happens depends on our way of observing it or on the fact that we observe it.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

What can be greater to life than to understand its meaning.

History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

The sound of life has divine silence.

The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence.

Why do strong arms fatigue themselves with frivolous dumbbells? To dig a vineyard is worthier exercise for men.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

In love, as in war, a fortress that parleys is half taken.

The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most of the people understand the language of sword with greater power than the language of word.

For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish. There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. "If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge thousands of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room, he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence."

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.

It is true that I was born in Iowa, but I can't speak for my twin sister.

The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.

[Common sense] is the best sense I know of.