« Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t? »
Mark Twain
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation
« When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. »
P. J. O’Rourke
Patrick Jake « P. J. » O’Rourke (born November 14, 1947) is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O’Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio‘s game show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s, as well as two appearances on the comedy panel show Have I Got News for You in 1995 and 2004 respectively.
Two ways to slide easily through life
“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.”
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski ([kɔˈʐɨpski]) (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics. Korzybski’s work argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and by the structure of language.
For Korzybski, people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs which human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. To embody this insight, Korzybski is remembered as the author of the dictum: « The map is not the territory« .
Two great energies
“There are two great energies of change in human affairs: fear and aspiration.”
Peter Sengee
Peter Michael Senge (born 1947) is an American scientist and director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known as author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization from 1990 (new edition 2006). He is a senior lecturer at the System Dynamics Group at MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute.
Two reasons for doing anything
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”
J.P. Morgan