John Milton

The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

William Shakespeare

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

Macbeth Act IV, Scene III

Rainbow Connection, Over the Rainbow (Wikipedia)

"Rainbow Connection" serves the same purpose in The Muppet Movie that "Over the Rainbow" serves in The Wizard of Oz, with nearly equal effectiveness: an opening establishment of the characters' driving urge for something more in life.

Colin Murray Parkes

Pining is the subjective and emotional component of urge to search for the lost object.

Wikipedia: Colin Murray Parkes

Meta-ethical relativists (Wikipedia)

Many critics, including Ibn Warraq and Eddie Tabash, have suggested that meta-ethical relativists essentially take themselves out of any discussion of normative morality, since they seem to be rejecting an assumption of such discussions: the premise that there are right and wrong answers that can be discovered through reason. Practically speaking, such critics will argue that meta-ethical relativism may amount to moral nihilism, or else incoherence.

Wikipedia: Moral relativism

Mozart's influence on Beethoven (Wikipedia)

That Mozart's work continued to influence Beethoven is an uncontroversial claim. To give one example, the role played by Mozart's 40th Symphony in the composition of Beethoven's Fifth can be documented from Beethoven's sketchbooks, where Beethoven copied out a sequence from Mozart's work that he adapted into his own symphony; see Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven). It is also believed that some of Beethoven's works have direct models in comparable works by Mozart; for example Charles Rosen sees Mozart's C minor piano concerto K. 491 as a model for Beethoven's Third Concerto in the same key, the Quintet for Piano and Winds K. 452 for Beethoven's comparable work Op. 16, and the A major String Quartet K. 464 for Beethoven's A major quartet Op. 18 No. 5. Robert Marshall sees Mozart's C minor piano sonata Piano Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K. 457 as the model for Beethoven's Pathétique sonata Op. 13, in the same key.  Also, the 1st movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major (composed 1796–97) clearly references Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in C major, "Jupiter", K. 551 (1788).

Beethoven also wrote cadenzas (WoO 58) to the first and third movements of Mozart's D minor piano concerto, K. 466, as well as four sets of variations on Mozart's themes:

• on "Se vuol ballare" from The Marriage of Figaro for piano and violin, WoO 40 (1792–3)
• on "Là ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni for two oboes and English horn, WoO 28 (?1795)
• on "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen" from The Magic Flute for piano and cello, Op. 66 (?1795)
• on "Bei Männern welche Liebe fühlen" from the same opera, for piano and cello, WoO 46 (1801)

Jay-Z

Sorry junior, I already ruined ya

Cause you ain’t even alive, paparazzi pursuin’ ya

Sins of a father make your life ten times harder

I just wanna take ya to a barber

Bondin’ on charters, all the shit that I never did

Teach ya good values so you cherish it

Took me 26 years to find my path

My only job is cut the time in half

So at 13 we’ll have our first drink together

Black bar mitzvahs, mazel tov, mogul talk

Look a man dead in his eyes so he know you talk truth

When you speak it, give your word, keep it

And if the day comes I only see him on the weekend

I just pray we was in love on the night that we conceived him

Promise to never leave him even if his mama tweakin’

Cause my dad left me and I promise never repeat him

Never repeat him, never repeat him

Mark Twain

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning--knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

Mario Andretti

If everything's under control, you're going too slow.

Geoffrey K. Pullum

Languages love multiple meanings. They lust after them. They roll around in them like a dog in fresh grass.

Another polysemy quiz, Language Log, April 10, 2011 

Frank Sheeran and Charles Brandt

Judge Frank W. Wilson, in pronouncing sentence, said: Mr. Hoffa, it is the opinion of this court . . . that [in those jury-tampering incidents] of which you stand convicted . . . you [acted] knowingly and you [acted] corruptly [even] after the trial judge reported to you his information with regard to an alleged attempt to bribe a juror . . . . [I]t is difficult for the Court to imagine under those circumstances a more willful violation of the law. Most defendants that stand before this Court for sentencing . . . have either violated the property rights of other individuals or have violated the personal rights of other individuals. . . . You stand here convicted of having tampered, really, with the very soul of this nation.

"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa

Furman v. Georgia (per curiam)

A law that stated that anyone making more than $50,000 would be exempt from the death penalty would plainly fall, as would a law that in terms said that blacks, those who never went beyond the fifth grade in school, those who made less than $3,000 a year, or those who were unpopular or unstable should be the only people executed. A law which in the overall view reaches that result in practice has no more sanctity than a law which in terms provides the same.

Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 256 (1972) (per curiam)

Lee Smolin

I fully expect some readers to come back at me with "If you're so smart, why haven't you done any better than the string theorists?" And they'd be right. Because in the end, this book is a form of procrastination. Of course, I hope by writing it to make the way easier for those who will follow. But my craft is theoretical physics and my real job is to finish the revolution Einstein started. I haven't done that job. So what am I going to do myself? I'm going to try to take advantage of the good fortune that life has shown me. To begin with, I'm going to dig out my old paper, "On the Relationship Between Quantum and Thermal Fluctuations," and read it. Then I'm going to turn off the phone and the BlackBerry, put on some Bebel Gilberto, Esthero, and Ron Sexsmith, turn the volume way up, erase the blackboard, get out some good chalk, open a new notebook, take out my favorite pen, sit down, and start thinking.

The Trouble With Physics

Gregory Benford

Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real (true) information available.

Benford's law of controversy

Julian P. Alexander (Musselwhite v. State)

There are times when law and justice are themselves on trial.

Musselwhite v. State, 60 So. 2d 807, 811 (Miss. 1952)

Thurgood Marshall (Ford v. Wainwright)

For centuries no jurisdiction has countenanced the execution of the insane, yet this Court has never decided whether the Constitution forbids the practice. Today we keep faith with our common-law heritage in holding that it does.

Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399, 401 (1986)

Roger Ebert

Hitchcock said a movie should play the audience like a piano. "Death Race" played me like a drum. It is an assault on all the senses, including common.

In the meadow, we can pan a snowman

William Shakespeare

APOTHECARY: My poverty, but not my will, consents.
ROMEO: I pay thy poverty, and not thy will.

Mike Tomlin

We live in our hopes, not in our fears.

Lee Smolin

Although tenure protects people who are intellectually independent, it does not produce them. I've heard many colleagues say they are working on what is trendy in order to get tenure, after which they will do what they really want. But it doesn't seem ever to turn out that way. I know of only one case where that happened. In the others, it seems that if these people did not have enough courage and independence to work on what they wanted when they were worried about tenure, they did not suddenly gain courage and independence when contemplating what the panel reviewing their grant would decide.

Lee Smolin

I learned a crucial lesson [through my work on quantum gravity] . . . that it is possible to make progress on a seemingly impossible problem if one just ignores the sceptics and gets on with it.  After all, atoms do fall, so the relationship between gravity and the quantum is not a problem for nature.  If it is a problem for us it must be because somewhere in our thinking there is at least one, and possibly several, wrong assumptions.

Roger Ebert

Opposition to the death penalty, I suppose, comes down to this: Although the convicted may not deserve to live, no one deserves to be given the task of executing them. I think that's what Herzog is saying, although he doesn't say it. In some of his films he freely shares his philosophy and insights. In this film, he simply looks. He always seems to know where to look.

Gazing into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life

Mark Twain

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Christopher Hitchens

For most men, if they can't make women laugh, they are out of the evolutionary contest.

Writer Christopher Hitchens Dies At 62 (NPR)

Felix Frankfurter (Henslee v. Union Planters Bank)

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.

Henslee v. Union Planters Bank, 335 U.S. 595, 600, (1949) (dis. opn. of Frankfurter, J.)

John Adams

[T]hese and all other elections, especially of representatives and counsellors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, “where annual elections end, there slavery begins.”

These great men, in this respect, should be, once a year, 

Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.

This will teach them the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.

Lee Smolin

In 1867 Lord Kelvin proposed that the various atoms would correspond to different knots. At that time, we also knew very little about knots. No one knew how many ways there were to tie a knot or how to tell them apart. So, inspired by this idea, mathematicians began studying the problem of how to distinguish the various possible knots. This slowly turned into a whole field of mathematics called knot theory. It soon was proved that there are an infinite number of distinct ways to tie a knot, but it has taken a long time to learn how to tell them apart. Some progress was made in the 1980s, but there is still no known procedure for telling whether two complicated knots are the same or different.

The trouble with physics

Daniel Kahneman

Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives . . . they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders--not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Steve Yegge

A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product.

Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Paul Krugman

The [academic] journals have long served as tombstones, certifications for tenure committees, rather than a forum in which ideas get argued.

Our Blogs, Ourselves

Scott A. Hughes

There’s a big difference between precision and accuracy — you can measure with precision a very inaccurate result.

MIT physics professors examine the subatomic speed limit controversy

Thomas J. Sargent

In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.

University of California at Berkeley graduation speech

Steve Jobs

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Stanford University commencement speech, 2005
Apple Fans Mourn Steve Jobs, Hold IPhone-Lit Vigils

Steve Jobs

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Quotes from late Apple founder Steve Jobs

Cicero

[T]he Greek name for law (νομος), which is derived from νεμω, to distribute, implies the very nature of the thing, that is, to give every man his due. For my part, I imagine that the moral essence of law is better expressed by its Latin name, (lex), which conveys the idea of selection or discrimination. According to the Greeks, therefore, the name of law implies an equitable distribution of goods: according to the Romans, an equitable discrimation between good and evil.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC)

Plato

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

Martin Luther King Jr.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

Martin Luther King Jr.

If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. . . . [W]e must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Sermon on Peace, December 24, 1967

Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. (Amen) Say that I was a drum major for peace. (Yes) I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. (Yes) I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. (Amen) And that's all I want to say.

The Drum Major Instinct, February 4, 1968 (Stanford Encyclopedia)

Carol Steiker

[T]he decline in lynchings probably also depended on their replacement with speedy trials that reliably produced guilty verdicts, death sentences, and rapid executions. . . . [P]rosecutors appealed to juries to convict in order to reward mobs for good behavior and thus encourage similar restraint in the future.

Steiker's Criminal Procedure Stories: An In-Depth Look at Leading Criminal Procedure Cases

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

People Who Photograph Food and Display the Pictures Online (NY Times)

Gary Wolf

When magnifying lenses were invented, they were aimed at the cosmos. But almost immediately we turned them around and aimed them at ourselves. The telescope became a microscope. We discovered blood cells. We discovered spermatozoa. We discovered the universe of microorganisms inside ourselves.

Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain (Wired)

Carl Sagan

What we know is encoded in cells called neurons

And there are something like a hundred trillion neural connections

This intricate and marvelous network of neurons has been called

An enchanted loom

The neurons store sounds too, and snatches of music

Whole orchestras play inside our heads

Twenty million volumes worth of information

Is inside the heads of every one of us

The brain is a very big place

In a very small space

No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain

We can change ourselves

Think of the possibilities

Ode to the Brain - Symphony of Science

Cicero

What can be grander or nobler than jurisprudence? or what can be more insignificant and quibbling than the practice of lawyers?

Seneca

You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd.  It is something which you cannot entrust yourself yet without risk.

Letters from a Stoic

Edward Marjoribanks

The advocate must have a quick mind, an understanding heart, and charm of personality. For he has often to understand another man's life-story at a moment's notice, and catch up overnight a client's or a witness's lifelong experience in another profession; moreover, he must have the power of expressing himself clearly and attractively to simple people, so that they will listen to him and understand him. He must, then, be histrionic, crafty, courageous, eloquent, quick-minded, charming, great-hearted.

For the Defence: The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall

Bertrand Russell

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Alex Kozinski (Pinholster v. Ayers)

Meanwhile, prison has been good to Pinholster. He sits in his cell reading Machiavelli, Voltaire “and all the philosophers,” drawing pictures to sell over the internet. He enjoys the gravitas, authority and mentoring opportunities that come with being an elder in his prison gang, and has surgery performed on his knees at taxpayer expense. He still stabs people whenever he can, without passion or regret; “it was just business,” he explains. His conscience doesn't trouble him about the fact that he took the lives of two fellow human beings; he has never expressed the least remorse for his killings. The people of California are entitled to put an end to Pinholster's paid vacation and insist that the punishment lawfully imposed on him be carried out.

Pinholster v. Ayers

Eminem (Rock Bottom)

We see them dollar signs and let the cash blind us

Money will brainwash you and leave your ass mindless

Snakes slither in the grass spineless

That's rock bottom

Clarence Darrow

History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.