Accuracy

It is better for the blind man to see than a seen person who is blind.SOMETIMES...you see better when your eyes closed.

If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need science.

We like things to be black or white, tall or short, here or there. We like to consider two sides to every story. Unfortunately, there aren’t always two sides. Sometimes there’s only one; more often, there are multitudes. Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicolored.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution. — Jonathan Swift (Thoughts on Religion (1786))

We must all beware the very real and understandable human tendency to ignore or subvert facts, and findings of science, that discomfort us for reasons of ideology, politics, religion, or personal taste.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

A conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking.

If the village elders don't provide the scripts (for youth success), the village idiots will.

Zeroes are important. A million seconds ago was last week. A billion seconds ago, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. A trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC, and early humans were using stone tools.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

Thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.