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  fortune index  all fortunes 
  
 |  |  | #10631 |  | "We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the Phone Company." 
 |  |  |  | #10632 |  | We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything. 
 |  |  |  | #10633 |  | We don't know who it was that discovered water, but we're pretty sure that it wasn't a fish.
 -- Marshall McLuhan
 
 |  |  |  | #10634 |  | We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids? -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
 
 |  |  |  | #10635 |  | We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated. 
 |  |  |  | #10636 |  | We laugh at the Indian philosopher, who to account for the support of the earth, contrived the hypothesis of a huge elephant, and to support
 the elephant, a huge tortoise.  If we will candidly confess the truth, we
 know as little of the operation of the nerves, as he did of the manner in
 which the earth is supported: and our hypothesis about animal spirits, or
 about the tension and vibrations of the nerves, are as like to be true, as
 his about the support of the earth.  His elephant was a hypothesis, and our
 hypotheses are elephants.  Every theory in philosophy, which is built on
 pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly
 by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose
 feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.
 -- Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind", 1764
 
 |  |  |  | #10637 |  | ... we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
 I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized
 brains -- and I am equally confident that our brains became large as
 an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting
 functions).  But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often
 uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities
 of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection.
 -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
 
 |  |  |  | #10638 |  | We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world.  We will see it when we believe it.
 -- Saul Alinsky
 
 |  |  |  | #10639 |  | ... we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
 years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
 descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
 do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
 flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
 things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
 established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
 to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
 cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
 into doubt.
 -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
 The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2.
 
 |  |  |  | #10640 |  | We warn the reader in advance that the proof presented here depends on a clever but highly unmotivated trick.
 -- Howard Anton, "Elementary Linear Algebra"
 
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