39 Quotations: for today and for posterity (some of my academic papers reduced to this, and yours too!) Author: Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan) Draft version: 3 (22nd October. Some developed from my papers or other contributions, some from Instagram, some simply new. If you are at risk of deletion, this unfully baked work makes sense.) 1. I know that someone is following me, but I have not seen them; it is simply rational for someone to. 2. A warning surely: the University of Manchester has books on Sri Lankan fiction but no books by the authors who wrote the fictions. 3. My friends, when will they give you an award? When they have figured out how to politely get rid of you! 4. O the loneliness of being a classic. O the loneliness of being a classic after the age of classics. 5. After I have written something, I always think: how can I rewrite it as an imitation of someone else? 6. They say “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” but those who literally spare the rod usually have a metaphorical one. 7. When the newspapers want to tell a gossipy story about the less famous, they often talk about a celebrity who looks or acts similar. 8. The science of economics does not progress much because if you come up with a clever model, you keep it to yourself and make money with its predictions. 9. Whoever runs academic philosophy must be so clever because it still has students. (After all, lots of other departments can offer some philosophy and without the impractical reputation.) 10. There are the people who can really do their job and then the people who best serve the interests of the department’s head. 11. Cook who demands the finest ingredients versus cook who says, “It is all about my skill.” 12. Each highbrow discipline has its little popular culture too, its low status material for the slightly above average student. 13. England is like an island in which half of the people hop around on one leg and the other half try to kick that leg away, shouting, “Be sensible.” 14. Because we have no clever business ideas, we must slave to give the customer exactly what they seem to want. 15. Libraries are for classics. Bookshops are for selling fictions we are not yet ready to study. 16. My favourite literary journals had everything (apart from whatever you do), but they didn’t last long. 17. What friendship can there be between a baby who fears the instability of two feet and a baby seeking more secrets of four-footedness? 18. Never seduce a woman whom you would lock out if she steps onto your (not ground floor) balcony for a cigarette. 19. Teaching in England is all about taking the stupidest person you can find and training them up, which is why it is so hard to avoid getting married. 20. If you can’t make a novel out of a character, write a short story, and if you can’t even do that, distrust literary fiction. 21. When a novel does not have a flashy opening, the author is not worried about attracting readers, I suppose. 22. What are the love lives like of all these people who think the professionals do it better: the professional economist, the professional psychiatrist, the professional poet and philosopher even? 23. If you find something has been stolen from your house, the first thing you should do is … maybe replace your food actually. 24. Politics in England today is a battle between a government trying to keep the geniuses and get rid of the rest and the rest trying to keep themselves at least. 25. Surely an old letter: “Dear supposedly immortal poet, I write fairytales because they are easier to translate.” 26. This socialist is against making profit through writing lots of second or third or fourth tier books; this other socialist is against such mass production even without the profit. 27. Amongst a foreign people, always be careful to act in line with their ideas of human nature? 28. You can turn a child into a man with the skills of this man but not in the gentle way that his parents did. 29. When a family is in a profession over generations, the children have the virtues and vices of military people. 30. The ghost of Diane Keaton says, “Have all but one quotation dull, because they will only remember one.” 31. Throughout history, parents have surely wondered: shall we leave to that island with our autistic children and try to produce an economics-first race? 32. If they praise you for reliability, maybe there is a reason for why everyone else is unreliable. 33. Work for your team until they give you a team it is insensible to trust. 34. Get a set of people without an instinct for a subject, a field, a profession, to idiotically apply a method because their rare successes are all the rarer. 35. I learnt that some Japanese buildings vibrate during earthquakes preventing collapse, but we in England prefer the image of stability to the real thing (or some of us do anyway). 36. When you tell an atheist to accept an explanation because the alternative is an incredible fluke, they say, “A lot of things are incredible flukes, like that we exist.” 37. The leaders of your profession are liberal and that makes you feel good but then you worry: their choice of followers, of workers, is between highly tactical liberals, who won’t do the work properly at the slightest incentive, and extreme nationalists: fascists basically. 38. What do the anti-immigration protestors want? No immigration whatsoever, like a closed state: “No.” Lots of people to do mundane jobs and we will do the talented stuff: “No, that’s too many.” Let in a few talents and they take over: “No.” 39. Epitaph for Piketty: “Oh no, not La Belle Époque!” References (will source more later) Edward, T.R. 2024. The death of A.J. Ayer, rational actor models, and the curriculum. Available on PhilPapers. (Quotation 9) Edward, T.R. 2025. To have your cake and eat it: social practices in British society and beyond. Available at PhilPapers. (Quotation 6.) Edward, T.R. 2025. On lack of progress in economics. Available on PhilPapers. (Quotation 8.) Edward. T.R. 2025. Analysis, blind review, and a modernist journals expert (a dialogue). Available on PhilPapers. (Quotation 16.) Edward, T.R. 2025. Instagram video on professionals to the limit. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPgr6ZJjczs/ (Quotation 22) Edward, T.R. 2025. The best movie role, but why one quote for preservation by Diane Keaton? Available on Researchgate. (Quotation 30) Edward, T.R. 2025. The reliability problem. Available on academia.edu. (Quotation 32) Alexandrova, A. and Northcott, R. 2015. Prisoner’s dilemma doesn’t explain much. In Martin Peterson (ed.), The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Classic philosophical arguments. Cambridge University Press. (Quotation 34 is my reaction to this.) Edward, T.R. 2025. The team in British politics and beyond. Available at academia.edu (Quotation 33.) Beebee, H. 2006. Does anything hold the universe together? Synthese 149(3): 509-533. (Quotation 36 is my reaction to this.) Edward, T.R. 2025. Recycling essay: Max Horkheimer on analytic philosophy (and coding homework appendix). Available on PhilPapers. (Quotation 37.) Edward, T.R. 2025. Why can’t television comedy sketch shows flourish because of convenience? No scouring the Internet required. Available at academia.edu (Quotation 38.)