Selections from my personal book of quotes

I have this habit of collecting quotable sentences or phrases I have read. These are pithy statements that have made an impact on me, in the context where they appeared. Some of them are well recognized and others are more personalized. What follows is an installment from my personal diary of quotes which I put up periodically but with no specific periodicity.

Ø ‘Nobody cares about what you know, if they don’t know you care’ – Anon (courtesy Mr D Sampath)

Ø ‘Science is but one form of rationalism, while religion is the most common form of superstition’ – Jerry Coyne

Ø ‘The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth’ – Bertrand Russell

Ø ‘…the biggest mistake any of them [teachers] can make is to assume that their students are interested in what they are about to say’ – Lawrence Krauss

Ø ‘Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time’ – Sam Harris

Ø ‘Those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math’ – Niall Ferguson

Ø ‘A humility that disclaims responsibility for its actions is dangerous’ – John Sulston

Ø ‘The one thing that all humans do at the last moment and never earlier – die!’ – Anon

Ø ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race’ – John G. Roberts Jr.

Ø ‘Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it’ – Mark C Taylor, Columbia University, religion department

Ø ‘The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death’ – Montaigne

Ø ‘Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist’ – Thomas Carlyle

Ø ‘The writer cannot be a mere story teller, he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils, he or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.’ – Saro-Wiwa (Nigerian (Ogoni) activist and martyr)

Ø ‘A thing is not necessarily false because badly uttered, nor true because spoken magnificently’ – St. Augustine

Ø ‘Math is the lie that makes us realize the truth’ – Steven Strogatz, Professor of applied mathematics, Cornell University

Raghuram Ekambaram