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Friday, September 18, 2009

Return to Toronto Quotations

I arrived back in Toronto last night, so now both my blog and physical vacations are over. It is time to get back to being productive, and part of that includes posts that are about science and mathematics. There will, of course, be a few more residual vacation-style posts, and I also plan on a couple more posts to showcase some more of my photography, but for the most part those should be interspersed with the rest of the posts rather than making up the bulk of my discourse.

Without further ado, here are the post-vacation quotations:

"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." - attributed to Lord Brougham*, Scottish lawyer and politician, 1778-1868

"The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them." - Lenny Bruce, American comedian, 1925-66

"An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support." - John Buchan, Scottish novelist and Governor-General of Canada, 1875-1940

"Learn to write well, or not to write at all." - John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, 1648-1721


*For those pedantic souls keeping track, I recognize that Brougham comes before Broun, and this quotation therefore should have been with the last installment while Broun's should have gone first on this one... I accidentally skipped this one when I posted the last one, so now I am selecting it.

7 comments:

G said...

Are you sure it was the "First Duke ... and 'Mormanby'"?

G said...

Guess we both make typing errors: Normanby not Mormanby.

Mozglubov said...

Yeah, I was worried about that too, but I double-checked and it appears to be correct (it is written as Normanby in both my Dictionary of Quotations and on Wikipedia).

G said...

Where in hell is "Normanby"?

Mozglubov said...

It appears to be a place in North York.

G said...

It is interesting. I could not find Normanby in my Oxford dictionary. When I looked up Buckingham only two of the dukes got space in the encyclopedia and dictionary of biography. In neither of the rather short pieces did it mention that either was both Duke of Buckingham and Normanby. By the way, my encyclopedia and dictionary both give the surname as Villiers.

Bianca M said...

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