MALCOLM MARGOLIN :: Patrick Henry (of "liberty or death" fame) once said, "Since the achievement of our independence, he is the greatest patriot who stops the most gullies." I used to think this statement a bit outlandish, but the more I've gotten to know about land, gullies, and patriotism, the more I've come to agree.


WILLIAM BATESON :: I would trust Shakespeare, but I would not trust a committee of Shakespeares.


E.M. CIORAN :: In quest of a pattern that might please everyone Nature settled for death, which, as was only to be expected, pleased none.


WILLIAM JAMES :: It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need the critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten.


RICHARD WALLACE :: A good idea is one that has a high ratio of conception time to implementation time.


AUSTIN WARREN :: Even for a poor man, to buy books is easier than to read them; to read them, than to comprehend; to comprehend them, than to assimilate them; and all is easier than to correct and apply what one has found in them.


LAWRENCE FOSS :: Science is common-sense gone systematic.


WILLIAM CANTWELL SMITH :: I find it of interest -- in fact, revealing; casting bright illumination on the human condition -- that also in Chinese, as in Greek, the same word means both trusting and trustworthy. To be a person who trusts others, and to be a person whom others may trust, coincide. Is our society today wrong in thinking of these as two different acts, two distinct qualities?


SIMONE WEIL :: To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis -- to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives.


W. MACNEILE DIXON :: I am not sure I would intrust reason with the arrangement of a bowl of flowers. In respect of such things "the sane man is nowhere at all as compared to the madman." Who says so? Plato, than whom no more resolute and uncompromising advocate of reason ever trod the earth.

                                                                  3 x 5 x 1985                                                                                                               Jerry Van Polen
3 x 5 x 1985

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Jerry Van Polen