I will add quotes to this as I come across them. I think I will twitterize some— improve them by shortening and tightening them to twitter length.
#################
ANONYMOUS.
They took the con out of econometrics.
They took me out of metrics.
Now, all that’s left is trics.
Link or it’s a lie.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
It is like they joined all the soy boys in the world to cry together!
One of the jokes about auditors is that they are the people who come in after the battle is over to bayonet the wounded.
##############################################
AVERROES. From the Ralph Lerner translation, Averroes on Plato’s, Republic, p. 58, where Averroes is discussing IV-445:
The man in most human activities is more diligent than the women, though it is not impossible that women should be more diligent in some activities, such as is thought concerning the art of practical music. That is why it is said of melodies that they are perfected when men produce them and women do them well.
Bock, Randy. From Lynn Chu on Twitter, July 28, 2020:
Deaths subside so now
Nebulous “cases” to scare
Healthy out of health
Clingingsmith, DAVID @dclingi on Twitter:
There are two kinds of metrics papers.
1. We made you new toys.
2. We are taking your toys away.
Alex Peysakhovich @alex_peys adds
“We can make your standard errors smaller.”
“Sorry, your standard errors are too small.”
CHESTERTON
I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.
Connolly, GRAY
(a) using law & the state’s coercive power to promote virtue & punish vice is conservatism.
(b) using law & the state to make virtue & vice indistinguishable is liberalism.
(c) allowing ‘the market’ to decide which vice is the most profitable is libertarianism.
“https://twitter.com/GrayConnolly/status/1265967261006745600”
Coulter, Ann.
“Surprising news from MSNBC! See, I thought these fires were set by violent thugs. But the truth is, the fires just broke out.”
“https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/1266330342266482688”
Theodore Dalrymple
AUGUST 21, 2020
The Expanding Tyranny of Cant
To cant is to utter moral sentiment far in excess of what is felt or could ever be felt. The purpose of cant is either to present the person who utters it as morally superior to others or to himself as he really is, or to shut other people up entirely.
DESCARTES, RENE. See He Lives Well Who Lays Well Hidden, bene qui latuit bene vixit.
Dornbusch, Rudiger.
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/06/new-monetary-system-farhi.htm
FARHI, EMMANUEL. Jean Tirole writes in an obituary in Le Monde:
Toujours dans sa thèse, Ivan Werning et lui posent les fondements d’une taxation progressive du patrimoine et du capital pour construire un débat raisonné sur un sujet très sensible. La première phrase de l’article en dit long sur son contenu : « L’un des plus grands risques dans la vie est la famille dans laquelle on naît. »
Richard FEYNMAN,
In The Character of Physical Law (1965, 2001), 168.
Every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics. He knows that they are all equivalent, and that nobody is ever going to be able to decide which one is right at that level, but he keeps them in his head, hoping that they will give him different ideas for guessing.
Melvin Frank
Slavedealer: He lied to me, tricked me.
Friend: You, tricked?
S: Yes. But not for long. I’ll go to the captain
and see that that swine is killed!
F: Which swine?&Newline;
S: The lyingest, cheatingest slave in Rome, …
F: Oh,… Pseudolus.
“https://everythingsondheim.org/a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-forum/”
David GOTTLIEB. This math professor would only allow you to make statements you could derive at hte chalkboard, Louis Scott tells us, saying,
“Once you know it, it is yours.”
Richard HAMMING. He said,
“There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.”
ROB HENDERSON. A 2020 tweet on tradition:
You check out old software code and think “hey, what’s that for I bet we don’t need that.” Then you delete it and the whole thing crashes. You still don’t understand it but put it back and it works again
Milton Friedman.
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is…to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
https://youtu.be/MEVI3bmN8TI”
KILLINGSWORTH, JODY.
“Not everything we turn to sinfully is sinful.”
Sermon of May 31, 2020, Trinity Reformed Church.
LAWLER, PHILIP. Twitter, August 24, 2020:
Archbishop Vigneron said that the Council had “established that no one ‘even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.” I beg to differ. That’s what Vatican II SAID. What was actually established was precisely the opposite.
MARX, KARL.
“Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern”
(“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”). This is actually still enscribed in large letters in the main building of Humboldt University in Berlin. “Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx, 1845.
Raffi Melkonian. On Twitter:
“Listening to CA5 oral arguments, and I heard a lawyer struggle with how to tell the judge they were wrong about something (it was too aggressive). Different strokes here, but one I have adopted is
“Let me try to push back on what Your Honor said.”
That’s brilliant! “Let me *try* to push back. I’m probably wrong, but I know you don’t like easy victories, your honor; you’re too used to crushing people easily with your brilliance and you’d like them to put up a bit of a fight, wouldn’t you?” And the judge knows, of course, that you’re Raffi the Experienced and you think you’re the brilliant one, and maybe you’re right so he ought to listen, but you’re being very polite.
MSNBC. MSNBC Producer Quits, Writes Scathing Article Saying Network ‘Is Fundamentally Flawed’
by Jeff Dunetz, Aug 4, 2020.
A senior producer at the network told her, “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
PATTON, GEORGE.
“An army is like a piece of cooked spaghetti. You can’t push it, you have to pull it after you.”
PRYOR, RICHARD.
Who Are You Going To Believe, Me Or Your Lying Eyes? February 21, 2016 by Marc Debbaudt:
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Richard Pryor in his filmed comedy performance, Live on the Sunset Strip, tells the story of his wife catching him with another woman. He denies anything is going on, and asks his wife, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” Before Richard Pryor, Chico Marx, playing the character Chicolini while impersonating Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx), spoke the line in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup.
###########################################
RASMUSEN, ERIC (me).
Man is depraved, and people make arithmetic mistakes, so transparency trumps technique.
The test of a good business is not so much whether it makes mistakes as whether it knows how to fix mistakes after they happen.
It’s detestable how many people on Twitter tell me to be respectful of women using obscenities in a public forum where ladies are present.
Twitter is helpful to remind us of how dumb the average person is, and how smart he thinks he is if he has a college degree.
“If you’re following someone’s Likes, you need to get a life yourself.”
“To recommend all is to recommend none.”
“Recommend all, recommend none.”
“To praise all is to praise none.”
“Praise all, praise none.”
“Praise every child, and you’re saying they’re all mediocrities.”
None of these are ideal. Would it be better in Latin or German or Chinese or French? It probably is not original with me, but I can’t find it by googling. Is there a better variant?
“He who writes lays bare his soul.”
“He who writes lays bare his heart.”
I’m sure this isn’t entirely original, though since it doesn’t show up in Google, I’ve probably improved it. I think it might be from Nietzsche. See He Lives Well Who Lays Well Hidden, bene qui latuit bene vixit
The political views of a lot of people are not about getting the country to change, which they can’t, but about venting their bitterness, which they can.
##########################################
ROBERTSON. SILAS
“What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer “Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”)
But if you da-aah, all bets ‘r off.
— Uncle Si
##############################
STEVEN SAILER. From a blogpost.
“The Democrats demand equity … the equity you’ve built in your home, to be precise.”
&Newline;
From a 2020 Tweet:
White Guilt is over whether your ancestors were too ethnocentric, while Jewish Guilt (according to Philip Roth’s definitive “Portnoy’s Complaint”) is over whether you are ethnocentric enough to satisfy your ancestors.
“Feynman didn’t himself figure out why the Challenger blew up. The pocket protector guys already knew what had gone wrong. But they saw that the suits were going to rig the inquiry. So they asked each other: Who on the Commission can we explain to?”
(from a blogpost, twitterized by me)
I’ve been mentioning for awhile a growth in articles about people complaining about the color of various objects, such as blue or green medical scrubs or the little white man who tells you to walk on a traffic light as indicative of systemic racism. It’s like 5-year-olds talking about their favorite color Power Ranger.
The problem for the Democrats that they always run into when they get excited about gun control is that:
– They want to take handguns away from dangerous urban minorities.
– They will never ever admit that’s what they want to do.
So whenever the Democrats start talking about gun control, they end up going on and on about how the real threat is all those evil redneck white males with their scary rifles.
They just can’t help themselves.
And then they lose the election.
##################################
SAVAGE, RICHARD. Statistical Science, 1999, Vol. 14, No. 1, 126–148 “A Conversation with I. Richard Savage,” Allan R. Sampson with Bruce Spencer in attendance:
I think I became a non-Neyman–Pearsonite without Jimmie’s help. The first time Wolfowitz told me what a confidence interval was, I knew it was an absolute joke and that nobody in their right mind would ever interpret a confidence interval in the mathematically correct way.
SAVAGE, LEONARD.
From Economics Job Makret Rumors:
You are in a small world when it is possible to “look before you leap”,and you are in a large world when you must “cross the bridge when you come to it”(Savage, 1954, p.16)
##################################
William Shakespeare
Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Henry IV Part 2, Prologue. “https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry4p2&Act=0&Scene=1&Scope=scene”
The loose encounters of lascivious men
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Leave off discourse of disability
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
perversely she persevers
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
With falsehood, cowardice and poor descent,
Three things highly women highly hold in hate.
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Where your good word cannot advantage him,
Your slander never can endamage him;
Therefore the office is indifferent,
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
#################################
Alan SIMPSON.
“We have two political parties in this country, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I belong to the Stupid Party.”
#################################
SOWELL, THOMAS.
Many of the words and phrases used in the media and among academics suggest that things simply happen to people, rather than being caused by their own choices or behavior.
The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
&Newline;
From Twitter:
The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics
Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
######################################
WELLS, KITTY. From a country song.
I don’t want your money, honey
I just want your time
######################################
WILDE, OSCAR. Some Oscar Wilde quotes from a webpage that didn’t have sources.
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
“The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
“The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.” (wrong and discussable)
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” (wrong, but to start a discussion)
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
###############################################