The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

Miscellaneous Quotes of Wisdom

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again."
- Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism

"All models are wrong, some are useful."
  - George E. P. Box, one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there."
 - Clare Booth Luce

“Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good.”
 - Voltaire

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
  -  New York Senator Danial Patrick Moynihan

"Experts ought to be on tap and not on top."
  - Irish editor and writer George William Russell

"I think we ought to exercise one of the sovereign prerogatives of philosophers— that of laughter."
 - Charles L. Black

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything."
  - from Darrell Huff's book "How to Lie With Statistics" (1954)

"Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them."
  - Albert Camus

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"
 - Sir Walter Scott

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
 - Baruch Spinoza

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.”
- Edmund Burke

"The simplest explanation, that fits all the known facts, is most often the correct explanation."
- Variation of Occam's Razor

"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
- George Orwell

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
  - Edmund Burke

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
  - George Santayana

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
   - Christopher Hitchens

"When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything."
Émile  Cammaerts (often mistakenly attributed to G. K. Chesterton)

"You are free to choose, but you are not free from the consequence of your choice."
  - Ezra Taft Benson