Information Of Quotes & Sayings

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. — Pankaj Mishra

The comics medium has some unusual features that do make it very different, in that it's combining a verbal narrative with a visual one that allows for much richer possibilities of transmitting information. — Alan Moore

Ignorance. In this root sense, ignorance is an act of will, a choice that one makes over and over again, especially when information overwhelms and knowledge has become synonymous with impotence. — Ruth Ozeki

The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes. — Malcolm Gladwell

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It reassures parents that we are aware of the employment difficulty and that we are doing as much as we can to provide information to their sons and daughters, and to help them deal with the post-graduate reality. — Michael Parkinson

[Ted] Cruz railed against his fellow senators for not appreciating the risk that Obamacare would destroy healthcare for America's families ... Cruz then lodged a more general complaint against his Senate colleagues who, he said, seemed more concerned with "cocktail parties in Washington, D.C." than with their constituents. Referring to calls that he said were pouring in from around the country, begging legislators to resist and defund, Cruz noted, "It is apparently an imposition on some members of this body for their constituents to pick up the phone and ask for assistance." As I heard him say that, I picked up the phone and called Cruz's local constituent service office in Houston. "Could someone there give me information about how to enroll in Obamacare?" I asked, when I was put on the phone with one of the senator's case workers. "No. We don't support the bill, and think it's a bad idea," I was told. — Steven Brill

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience." By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation. — Chip Heath

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive. — Ryan Holmes

Finding that she was determined to get to the bottom of what seemed to him a very trivial affair, extricated himself without hesitation or compunction by advising her to apply to Vincent for information, since he was the instigator of the quarrel. Before he could make good his retreat, however, he was incensed and appalled by a command to go immediately to Vincent's room, and to inform him that his mama desired to have speech with him before he went down to breakfast. Since it was the time-honoured practice of the brothers to sacrifice each other in such situations as now confronted Claud, it was not fear of Vincent's wrath at finding himself betrayed which prompted Claud to despatch Polyphant on the errand, but the knowledge that not even a messenger bearing gifts of great price would meet with anything but the rudest of receptions from Vincent at this hour of the morning. — Georgette Heyer

So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century. — Alfred North Whitehead

The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power. — Nick Drake

If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system's function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. — Donella H. Meadows

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. — Cordelia Fine

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation - itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust - marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. — Noah Feldman

There's a mountain of information about us. I mean there's so much. Anyway, I'm not an intelligence person. But I just look at it and it's a mountain of data. — Tim Cook

Maybe if we'd had more information...It wouldn't have made a difference at all. Those doors were already locked. What was going to happen was already a foregone conclusion. All that could have changed is the details.

Sometimes, it's the details that matter the most of all. — Mira Grant

There was this song I was working on called 'Swing.' It was almost finished, but there was something missing, and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And then this little piece of information - this little tweet - came to the forefront of my mind. — Imogen Heap

If I want to spend the rest of my life reading one day's output of information, which is about what it would take, OK fine. But I personally prefer calibration from an aggregator or newspaper, where the No. 1 story is one they consider important, [and] they're usually right. — Harold Evans

It must never be lost sight of what observation is for. It is not for the sake of piling up miscellaneous information or curious facts, but for the sake of saving life and increasing health and comfort — Katharine Kolcaba

More than a building that houses books and data, the library has always been a window to a larger world
a place where we've always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward ...
Libraries remind us that truth isn't about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we're the most religious of people, America's innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts.
And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a library, we've changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good. — Barack Obama

In the new conditions created by the global economy, the information revolution and the growth of smart technologies, it is more necessary than ever for all companies to be guided by their rich spiritual inheritance, as spiritual enterprises. — Ted Malloch

The human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can testify that your conscious mind cannot process anywhere near that amount. The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between sixteen and fifty bits per second. — Leonard Mlodinow

As I became Speaker in 1986, I made a point of setting up a public information office to respond to requests and provide information about Parliament and how it functions. — John Allen Fraser

I don't read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don't think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy. — Scott Adams

The Temple of Dendur," Zia said. "Actually it was built by the Romans - "
"When they occupied Egypt," Carter said, like this was delightful information. "Augustus commissioned it."
"Yes," Zia said.
"Fascinating," I murmured. "Would you two like to be left alone with a history textbook? — Rick Riordan

These are the days of lasers in the jungle, staccato signals of constant information ... — Paul Simon

I have a rule that I don't review shows from photographs or from video. I certainly might go back and look at photographs and look at video to remind myself of something or for personal information. But I never review from that. — Robin Givhan

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. — Jerome K. Jerome

It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection. — Terence McKenna

Incredible that liberals aren't more concerned about the monopoly of information in South Dakota. — Laura Ingraham

Read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information — Veronica Roth

Knowledge carefully recorded is knowledge available in time of need. Spiritually sensitive information should be kept in a sacred place that communicates to the Lord how you treasure it. This practice enhances the likelihood of receiving further light. — Richard G. Scott

A tiny portion of the population controls the lions share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media ... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse. — Michael Parenti

A few years after you disappeared, a postal worker named Ben Carver was sentenced to death for murdering six young men. (He is a homosexual, which, according to Huckleberry, means he is not attracted to murdering young women.) Rumors have it that Carver cannibalized some of his victims, but there was never a trial, so the more salacious details were not made public. I found Carver's name in the sheriff's file ten months ago, the fifth anniversary of your disappearance. The letter was written on Georgia Department of Corrections stationery and signed by the warden. He was informing the sheriff that Ben Carver, a death row inmate, had mentioned to one of the prison guards that he might have some information pertaining to your disappearance. — Karin Slaughter

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

One of the trickiest things about 'Game of Thrones' is just seeding those first couple of episodes with that basic information that people need to know, both about the world and the ground rules of the world, and the relationships between the characters, as far as who means what to whom and why. — D. B. Weiss

What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit. — Olivia Wilde

I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish
this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.
Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was. — Neal Stephenson

She'd fucked him over hardcore. She'd betrayed him and she'd lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she'd led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she'd hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he'd felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he'd eventually decide she'd been punished enough and they could maybe move on. — Stacia Kane

Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway. — John Stossel

Believing that our greatest need is for the general public to be able to get better information, to have an opportunity to learn better the real issues of the less fortunate, we centered the activities of the Fairness Project on that. — Mike Lowry

What makes a media company successful is how it copes with competitive markets in which people have a choice. Competition today is at a more intense level than it has ever before been because the barriers to providing information in the virtual world are so low and the choice of provider nearly infinite. — James Murdoch

Well, getting behind the camera is something I've always wanted to get involved with. Ever since I was doing movies like 'Zathura' I was very interested in all the different jobs on set and kind of soaking all the information up like a sponge. — Josh Hutcherson

Words are words. People add meaning to words.
Information is information. With words people add value to information.
Words breathe life into information. Words move mountains of information.
Words are action. Momentum for living evolves from pursuit of deeper, wider and higher significance, utility and value of words.
Words we sow, nourish and harvest feed hungry minds and hearts. Gathered words strengthen, ignite and release us.
Words identify, signify and proclaim our individuality. Words pronounce a purposeful life's choices.
With wisdom, courage and patience we must choose high-performing words for long-term relationships. Chosen words become soul mates. — John R. Dallas Jr.

The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day. — Abhijit Naskar

I believe our education system as a whole has not integrated the histories of all people into our education system, just the Eurocentric view of itself, and the White-centered view of African Americans, and even this is slim to nonexistent. What I find is that most people don't know the fact they don't know, because of the complete lack of information. — Ronald Takaki

Communism in Cuba will collapse sooner or later because you can't control the free flow of information. Communism prevents organizations from developing by stopping the flow of information. The system is based on police and listening devices and triggers the worst characteristics in humans. — Lech Walesa

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance. — Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same. — Joe Hill

To enter into a partnership with one of the many thousands of kinds of fungi, a tree must be very open-literally-because the fungal threads grow into its soft root hairs. There's no research into whether this is painful or not, but as it is something the tree wants, I imagine it gives rise to positive feelings. However the tree feels, from then on, the two partners work together. The fungus not only penetrates and envelops the tree's roots, but also allows its web to roam through the surrounding forest floor. In so doing, it extends the reach of the tree's own roots as the web grows out toward other trees. Here, it connects with other trees' fungal partners and roots. And so a network is created, and now it's easy for the trees to exchange vital nutrients (see chapter 3, "Social Security") and even information-such as an impending insect attack.

This connection makes fungi something like the forest Internet. — Peter Wohlleben

In any conversation, it's often something that seems quite insignificant at the time that gives you the piece of information you're looking for. — Jeffrey Archer

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams. — Kenichi Fukui

The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves. — Virginia Postrel

The information age has off-loaded a great deal of the work previously done by people we could call information specialists onto all of the rest of us. We are doing the jobs of ten different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. It's no wonder that sometimes one memory gets confounded with another, leading us to show up in the right place but on the wrong day, or to forget something as simple as where we last put our glasses or the remote. — Daniel J. Levitin

If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like? What I do is put that together. — Michael Fassbender

Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information. — Jean Baudrillard

This filing spike is a result of bad information being pushed on people, and then they file for bankruptcy out of fear. — Steve Bartlett

We got a lot of information from the detainees that eventually led us to bin Laden. — Jose Rodriguez

The ultimate insanity is to so organize society that power, wealth, and information are concentrated in the hands of so few people that they have the power, for whatever reason, to put to death our species and the living earth as well. But so we have. — Dee Hock

A problem of future research is to clarify how young children learn what type of social comparative information is most useful for efficacy evaluation — Albert Bandura

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances. — Alfred Korzybski

Every day, streets papered with more and more for .
Reward, reward, reward.
Reward for information.
If you see something, say something.
A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a message of posion and jealousy.
If you know something, do something.
I'm sorry, Lena. — Lauren Oliver

The American media produce a product of very poor quality. Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy, but it's basically junk. — Michael Crichton

Every thought, feeling, and emotion creates a molecule known as a neuropeptide. Neuropeptides travel throughout your body and hook onto receptor sites of cells and neurons. Your brain takes in the information, converts it into chemicals, and lets your whole body know if there's trouble in the world or cause for celebration. Your body is directly influenced as these molecules course through the bloodstream, delivering the energetic effect of whatever your brain is thinking and feeling. — Deepak Chopra

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it. ... The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise. — Atul Gawande

I am very puzzled by the fact that young people are getting infected again. They don't take precautions despite an enormous amount of information. It's like riding a race car at 200 kilometers an hour. Some people like the risk. — Luc Montagnier

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon's presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost. — Tim Weiner

I would argue that in times of war, sealed lips sink entire democracies. If we don't have access to vital information, we lose everything. — Ted Gup

Real intelligence is a creative use of knowledge, not merely an accumulation of facts. The slow thinker who can finally come up with an idea of his own is more important to the world than a walking encyclopedia who hasn't learned how to use this information productively. — Susan Winebrenner

My best advice is to not start in PowerPoint. Presentation tools force you to think through information linearly, and you really need to start by thinking of the whole instead of the individual lines. — Nancy Duarte

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening. — Nate Silver

Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use. — Anna C. Brackett

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. — Carl Sagan

Optimism is lack of information. — Faina Ranevskaya

They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchanging confidences about how to keep their sugar daddies suitably happy, suitably jealous and suitably on their toes. — Jo Nesbo

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? — Italo Calvino

The Weirdos

On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients' theories of light, how it streams at all angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. — Ottessa Moshfegh

Progress in computer science is made with the distribution of revolutionary software systems and the publication of revolutionary books. We don't need a fancy information system to alert us to these grand events; they will hit us in the face. Another good excuse for ignoring the literature is that, since everyone has strong beliefs about fundamentals but can't support those beliefs rationally or consistently convince non-believers, computer science is actually a religion. — Philip Greenspun

An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out "skilled workers") that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a "value-free" education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative. — James K.A. Smith

Chaos is a creator of information - another apparent paradox. — James Gleick

Obfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection. — Finn Brunton

Wilson-Donovan had already submitted their application to the FDA in January, months before. Based on the information they were developing now, they were going to ask for Vicotec to be put on the "Fast Track," pressing ahead with human trials of the drug, and eventually early release, once the FDA saw how safe it was and Wilson-Donovan proved it to them. The "Fast Track" process was used in order to speed the various steps toward approval, in the case of drugs to be used in life-threatening diseases. Once they got approval from the FDA, they were going to start with a group of one hundred people who would sign informed consent agreements, acknowledging the potential dangers of the treatment. They were all so desperately ill, it would be their only hope, and they knew it. The people who signed up for experiments like this were — Danielle Steel

If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot not support the policies of his government. — Steven Spielberg

Wisdom is not increased by acquiring more information, but by increasing the capacity of seeing. — Belsebuub

I always feel funny when I don't reveal things, especially to you [the press], who have supported us so much and are really the big reason we're here. But, we hold back information about the plot because we want to reward the fans for sticking with us, and that's so much fun. That's the funnest part of it. — Mitchell Hurwitz

[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires. — Steven Levy

As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful. — Hans Christian Von Baeyer

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we're constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. — David Graeber

A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects.
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete. — Barbara Kingsolver

Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news. — Peter Diamandis

A speech should not just be a sharing of information, but a sharing of yourself. — Ralph Archbold

A seed does not contribute much materially to the plant it grows into; the material comes from the soil, sunlight, water, and air. What the seed contributes is information. It has the same DNA as every other living entity, but when its genes begin to be expressed, it pulls from the environment what is needed to make a plant of just a particular kind. — Anonymous

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims. — Evgeny Morozov

It is intolerable that around 1 in 5 of the world's adults are illiterate. How can we build equitable information societies or thriving democracies if so many remain without the basic tools of literacy? — Koichiro Matsuura

I don't want to know everything about bands, I want to have some mystique remain because sometimes when you get all of this information you realize that they are just people and that actually takes away a little bit from the aura of somebody. — John Bush

Corporations understand the value of security because the leakage of their competitive information could be the end of the corporation. — John McAfee

Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion. — Edith Wharton

General revelation provides us with the knowledge that God exists. "The heavens declare the glory of God," says the psalmist. God's glory is displayed in the works of His hands. This display is so clear and manifest that no creature can possibly miss it. It unveils God's eternal power and deity (Romans 1:18-23). Revelation in nature does not give a full revelation of God. It does not give us the information about God the Redeemer that we find in the Bible. But the God who is revealed in nature is the same God who is revealed in Scripture. — R.C. Sproul

Up the stairs I found an imposing headquarters, decorated with the portraits and busts of solemn, whiskered old darlings who, no doubt, bled their customers with leeches and passed on the information to alarmed small boys that self-abuse leads to blindness. — John Mortimer