the first celebrity

"For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction."
- Lord Byron [1788-1824]

father of history

"If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it."

- Herodotus [c. 484 – c. 425 BCE]

father of comedy

"Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever."
- Aristophanes [c. 460 - c. 380 BCE]

father of sculpture

- Polykleitos [5th century BCE]

TKO

"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
- Mike Tyson

theoretical physics

“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.”
– Albert Einstein

theoretical physics

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
– Max Planck

woeful unawareness

“I want to be a guileless rook to discolor the blackness of all crafty human hearts”
― Munia Khan

enervating

“Nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”
– William James

disgustingly drunk

When accused of being 'disgustingly drunk' by a female - possibly socialist - the Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded: 'My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.'

integrative

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

duel

"Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool."
- Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin

code

“If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
- Alan Turing

existential

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

lateral thinking

"Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals."
- T. E. Lawrence

bent elbow

"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
- Ernest Hemingway

on betrayal

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”
― William Blake

dissembling

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."
- Napoleon Bonaparte

on blah

"Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair."
- Gautama Buddha

Secret Path

on limits

“Other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them, but not the desire of knowledge: the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our storybook.”
- A. E. Housman

baroque

"The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always."
- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951)

violence inherent in the system

Michael Palin knighted here.

’The "Green Reaper" Has Your Guide to Eco-Friendly Burials

"With the enormous costs of chemically-treated wood coffins, concrete burial vaults, liners, cremations, urns, cemetery space, and embalming, an average funeral in America costs about $10,000. In addition to adding a financial burden to the backs of grieving families, these burial methods are also notoriously toxic for the environment."

Full story here.

melanin

"Throughout history, we have found all kinds of reasons to put ourselves above other people."
- Barack Obama

Vietnam: Canada’s Shadow War

Watch here.

Group of Seven documentaries

 Watch here, here and here.

on Hollywood

"There are a lot of broken people in this business."
- Billy Bob Thornton

wilderness

"No man ever did a real thing that was not in the beginning misunderstood. A new path is bound to be somewhat lonely."
- Lawren Harris, founder of the Group of Seven

victory

"Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."

- Coach Vince Lombardi