shorts

John Maynard Keynes was famously quoted as saying: 'When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?'

From Healing Iraq:

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." - Jonathan Swift

seen somewhere in blogland, attributed to Sinclair Lewis: "It is difficult to convince a man of something if his paycheck depends on his not understanding it."

seen on Metafilter:

There's something to be said for finding a group of people who share your basic principles: it lets you get past arguing about the basic principles.

Friendship is almost always a union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots." -- George Santayana

via Andrew Tobias:

Spending tens of thousands of dollars on a person's last few months of life is compassionate -- but spending tens of thousands of dollars to improve a person's first few years of life is investment.

Also this one:

"The American ideal is not that we will all agree with each other, or even like each other, every minute of the day. It is rather that we will respect each other's rights, especially the right to be different, and that, at the end of the day, we will understand that we are one people, one country, and one community, and that our well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of each and every one of our fellow citizens."
- Arthur J. Kropp

Teresa Nielsen Hayden's archive of web classics, including the "tugboat meets bridge" series

speaking of tugboats, on Crooked Timber the Tugboat Potemkin asks "Never mind the evolutionary explanations for why 'frequent masturbation may protect men against prostate cancer', what's the creation scientist's explanation?"

At Poynter Online, Newspaper Nicknames: The Good, the Bad and the Scatological is kinda cute, but the real gems are in the reader responses.

D-Squared Digest with this:

Schopenhauer correctly pointed out that "Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents".

and these:

(That's the Blairite Third Way, btw, not the fascist movement of the same name, and astute readers will perceive here a man battling for his life against the forces of digression)
....
I happened to grow up in one of the small idealised in-and-out-of-each-others'-doors "communities" that the communitarian theorists went on about, and thus knew that it was bloody horrible.

(but do not visit mr. digest's dastardly doggerel on the deceased. at least not while drinking milk.)