#principle

I will not be someone who abandons my principles as soon as they become inconvenient. I will not be someone who says that certain things have to be done… as long as somebody else does them. ↗

— Zoe Cannon

#life

The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. t ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three; The period four, as learned men agree. ↗

— Cecil Hartley

#men

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible...Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#humor #irony #morality #principles #writing

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life. ↗

— Paul Davies

#chance #coincidence #fine-tuning #fred-hoyle #id

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any moan, however much we have suffered from him. ↗

— Socrates

#injustice

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#simplicity #life

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. ↗

— Eric Bentley

#bright #genuine #ideas #instead #jargon

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. ↗

— Mark Twain

#except #force #principles #real #well-fed

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle. ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#appeal #assembly #business #principle #ranks

So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out. ↗

— Jim Hightower

#dissent #especially #ever #forceful #including