Samizdata

There are five Great National Delusions. The first is that there are solutions to all the problems. The second is that only a strong centre can solve the problems. The third is that the strong centre must embody one’s own views exclusively. The fourth Great Delusion is that heroic surgery is required, and the fifth, that the heroic surgeons must be oneself and one’s cronies armed with scalpels as big as machetes.
– Louis de Bernieres

God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.
-Voltaire

“Sometimes fate hits you with the Clown Hammer of Circumstance and there’s nothing to do but sit there and watch the little birds fly around your head.”

– Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz

Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known –
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
When deciding how best to be blown
– Winner of a limerick contest on Long Island – the requirements were to use the two words, Lewinsky and Kaczynski (the Unabomber), in a limerick

He whose desires have been throttled,
who is independent of root,
whose pasture is emptiness –
signless and free –
his path is as unknowable
as that of birds across the heavens
– Dhammapada

This passage, to me, is about a free cosmopolitan, freed from imposed ties, much of his life seemingly empty but in fact intellectualised and indeed virtualized, his actions seemingly random to those who look on from outside but, like the birds, actually quite purposeful