Some interesting (to me) quotes

It has been a long time since I shared with myself some quotes from my personal collection. So, I thought I will fill in this gap. It is just coincidence that I have nothing specific to post on right now (as though I ever had).

‘And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky / Whereunder crawling coop’t we live and die, / Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It / Rolls impotently on as Thou or I’ – Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat).

This, from someone who is treated as a Sufi master, surprised me. On second thought, I should not have been surprised as I hold only simplistic ideas of Sufism ­– preferring intuition to rational thoughts. What Sufism says about God (the ‘It’ in the Rubaiyat), if it says anything at all, is beyond me.  Yet, the fact that I read this in an introduction to an interview of Richard Feynman – rationalism personified – added irony to it, and made it memorable!

‘[N]obody ever figures out what life is all about, and … it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting on with living’ – Vincent A. Van Der Hyde

This is a father trying to tell his son that he should pursue his interests and stick with it, do his very best on it without worrying much about what future brings. But, the son should also give a nod to the grade-obsessed high school education. How to balance these two near orthogonal ideas? The worried father asks in a letter. He was advised that the son would do better not to think of “What he wants to be”, but rather think along the lines of, “What he wants to do.”

‘Never express yourself more clearly than you think’ – Niels Bohr

When I read this I laughed out loud. I thought this was a jibe at the management types, who use jargon extensively. My claim is that they don’t think and just in case they do, they are not confident of what they are going to say and they think jargon helps in protecting them from probing queries! Jargon confuses even when there is no background thinking!

“Nobody questions jargon as none understands it!” – Raghuram Ekambaram!

[D]emocracy means that you can’t always get what you want’ – Paul Krugman

I have read many statements of what democracy is, but none has made me go Wow! This one did. The economist was trying to tell the US Republican politicians that they cannot have their way every time in bringing governance under a Democratic President to halt (remember the Fiscal cliff). Ironically, as per this conception of democracy, particularly of the constitutional kind (as opposed to the majoritarian kind), democracy allows holding a gun to the head of governance, however, not too often. I think this happens in India.

‘Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society’ - Peter Drucker

This from one of the most quoted / revered management guru! So, even he is not all gung ho about leaving companies to worry only about profits to its shareholders. This can almost be taken as endorsement of meaningful Corporate Social Responsibility. Do I think this statement of Drucker had reached the ears of our free-marketers, leave alone the Ayn Randian Libertarians? No. They are deaf to even voices from within themselves!

‘As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance’ - John Wheeler

This I consider as one of the most truthful statements of science – the more we learn, more is the mystery that emerges. I associated an image with this statement. From the image below a pattern of building triangles upon triangles, at an ever diminishing size emerges. What is funny is the area within the perimeter keeps on increasing but it is limited to the area that can be no larger than 8/5 times that of the original triangle. However, the perimeter increases without limit; indeed the length approaches infinity! The island of knowledge is the area under the Koch Snowflake, but the shore of the island is ignorance.

Raghuram Ekambaram