News stories advise us of yet another contributor to the menace of global warming, this one arising from the flatulence produced by cows. The metabolic processes engaged in by our bovine neighbors produce methane, one of the greenhouse gasses against which the environmentalist faithful are ever vigilant.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized.

—Terry Pratchett

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.

—Lord Kelvin (1895)

Video won’t be able to hold onto any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.

—Darryl F. Zanuck, head of

Twentieth Century Fox (1946)

I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won’t last out the year.

—Business books editor at

Hardly a week goes by without a news report of such senseless acts as a kindergarten boy being charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate on the cheek; or a grade schooler disciplined for violating an anti-drug policy by offering a friend an over-the-counter cough drop; or young boys threatened by the state with “assault with a weapon” prosecution for using their fingers as make-believe guns to play cops-and-robbers.

An Associated Press news report told of 1,900 sheep following one another over a cliff in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of 450.1 The sheep had been grazing when, without explanation, some members of the herd began leaping from the cliff.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

—Ezra Pound

Conservative, n.: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

—Ambrose Bierce

I am striving . . . to discover whether man still has a place in this tangle; whether he still has any authority among these colossal masses in movement; whether he still can exert any force whatever on the statistics which are slipping from his hands into the abstract and the unreal. Can he have a place, authority, and possibility of action on a better basis than ill-founded declarations of hope or blind acts of unreasonable faith?

— Jacques Ellul

They [feminist groups in Iraq] are very strong. Their approach is unique because they have no leaders. They do not have a head or branch offices. . . . This movement is made even stronger by not having leaders. If one or two people lead it, the organization would weaken if these leaders were arrested. Because there is no leader, it is very strong and not stoppable.

—Shirin Ebadi

2003 Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

I have mixed feelings about the use of labels to describe philosophical views, whether of myself or others.