Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on Error and Human Nature)

“The laws of nature will defend themselves;⁠—but error⁠…error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.” —Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

And these days, with all the attempts to make human labor obsolete, error creeps into AI, too. 

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Moon, on People, ‘Messy and Mutable’)

“People are people, messy and mutable, combining differently with one another from day to day—even hour to hour.”— American science fiction and fantasy writer Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark (2003)

The image accompanying this post, of Elizabeth Moon at Worldcon 2005 in Glasgow, Scotland, was taken in August 2005 by Szymon Sokol.

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on ‘The Great Error of Our Nature’)

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”—Anglo-Irish statesman (and father of conservatism) Edmund Burke (1729-1797), A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on the Human Tendency to Gullibility)

“There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it."— American novelist, short-story writer, lecturer and journalist Mark Twain (1835-1910), Autobiography of Mark Twain (1906)

For the latest example—and surely not the last—of this phenomenon, the concept of “the average human being” will have to be defined down, given Rep. Marjorie Turner Greene’s other-worldly speculation about a “space laser” spreading California wildfires—involving a Jewish banking firm.

Quote of the Day (Marcus Aurelius, on the Divine and Human)

“What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad - as terrible a blindness as the kind that can't tell white from black."—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Two