All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough.

Economics is now playing the role of Catholic theology in Medieval Europe. It has become an ideology that tells people that the world is what it is because it has to be, however unjust, wasteful and inefficient it may look.

It is not that we have a deficit of resources. We have a surplus of greed.

We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

Old fires leave warm ashes, until someone stirs them again.

There they gave me a hefty shot of morphine, and in a little while the pain left. More than the pain left. All my troubles, all my concerns, all my worries left. I lay there, I remember, facing the wall, in complete peace. It wasn’t euphoria; it was better than euphoria; it was quiet, calm nirvana. I didn’t feel bored. I didn’t have to think. I just lay there at rest. Neither before nor since have I ever felt so free of all the endless indignities of life.

Military mind remains unparalleled as a vehicle of creative stupidity.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.

A red rose absorbs all colours but red; red is therefore the one colour that it is not.

This particular thesis was addressed to me a quarter of a century ago by John Campbell, who … told me that all theories are proven wrong in time. … My answer to him was, ‘John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.’ The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don’t think that’s so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts.

The hurt from getting beaten only lasts a little while, but the hurt from giving up without a fight never goes away.

A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?

When we read someone else thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. … Accordingly in reading we are for the most part absolved of the work of thinking. … It stems from this that whoever reads very much and almost the whole day, but in between recovers by thoughtless pastime, gradually loses the ability to think on his own – as someone who always rides forgets in the end how to walk. But such is the case of many scholars: they have read themselves stupid. For constant reading immediately taken up again in every free moment is even more mentally paralysing than constant manual labour, since in the latter we can still muse about our own thoughts. But just as a coiled spring finally loses its elasticity through the sustained pressure of a foreign body, so too the mind through the constant force of other people’s thoughts.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority. Minority is inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Dare to be wise!

You don’t really know a technology until you’ve used it in anger.

The rich are those who play to win. The middle class plays not to lose.

It’s never hard to know if a painting is real art, because if you never tire of looking at it, then it’s art.

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

If you buy what you don’t need, you steal from yourself.