Dubner Maggid Quotes & Sayings

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination. — Thomas Merton

The point of this example is that policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, namely, college loans. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family. — George Lakoff

I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember? — Isabel Allende

Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships. — Thomas Naylor

I have been hunted for twenty-one years. I have literally lived in the saddle. I have never known a day of perfect peace. — Frank James

Jessica's smile makes Ron slide his hand over the console, let it work down between her blue-jeaned thighs. — Blake Crouch

Taxation is, in fact, the most difficult function of government and that against which their citizens are most apt to be refractory. — Thomas Jefferson

All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca. — C.L.R. James

few things of worth are ever simple. Or easy.' Tomas — Raymond E. Feist

Coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. — David Mermin

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding
and not all from the government
than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues ... But there are plenty of innovative musicians ... who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies ... Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past? ... The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons. — David Byrne

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. — Walter Savage Landor