Quotes in Context (I)

One way of browsing this blog is to scroll down the list of titles in the column at the right-hand side of your screen.  If you spot one that strikes your fancy -- say, “Romney’s Overseas Shenanigans” -- just click on it, and there you go.  To see earlier posts, just click on the month or year.

That is the table-of-contents, top-down approach.  But here is an experiment from the bottom up.  The following are intriguing epigrams, taken out of context:  for the post each comes from, just click.

For instance:

To them, the reductionist voyage that has taken physics so far has come to an end.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.

The man on the omnibus  figures he knows a bit of Beauty when he spots some, just don’t bother him with a lot of messy maths.  

This, however, is not the method of modern science, which spurns the affordances of mere reason, and denies the evidence of our eyes, …

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of “Olbers’ Paradox”  is not its discovery several hundred years before Olbers, but that Kelvin’s definitive work was totally overlooked…

the nigglings of the Linguistic Turn, vice the Big Bow-Wow issues of Aquinas or Plato

… one of those philosophical mathematicians-manqués of the stripe of Putnam or Quine, who write with wit and erudition about technical subjects, but (one eventually finds) pretty much plow the same furrow in their various works.

These should become available as soon as I sell the one millionth copy of my books -- so buy your copies now!