Quotations: for today and for posterity (some of my academic papers reduced to this and one of yours too!) See quotations_four Author: Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan) Note: if some of this work looks half-baked, it makes sense to half-bake when at risk of deletion) 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!" 40. Yes, some people can change the path they are on, but it takes two world wars for that to happen. 41. You have a clever child and you teach them not to show off, but they end up stuck with a set of show off children and unable to shine; so you let your next child show off but they are put with people who cannot stand that. 42. It took me a while to realize: some people are against capitalism simply because they have never really been in the capitalist system. 43. If you want to build a philosophical system, stop moving on to new stuff: stick to a proposition and keep inferring conclusions from it! 44. Experiments, experiments: Islam is oppressive for women apparently, but how did that happen because I find it hard to oppress even one woman? 45. O French genius, can you synthesize common sayings about difficulties with getting a job into a neat system: "It is who you know not what you know," "Dress the part," "Money talks," etc.? 46. I have all sorts of clever objections to your proposal but still I find it is difficult to do anything else. 47. A person who tells you to stop doing annoying thing 1, and then when you think everything will be fine now, he tells you that you are also doing annoying thing 2, and then when you think everything will be fine now… 48. Beware of: people who don’t think it is too late to carry out character development projects on you. 49. If you think anarchism is so bad, then when you have evidence the government is so bad you will probably dismiss it. 50. Do you ever worry that there is actually too much social mobility in this society? Another imitation of Bernard Williams and you are hired to write government reviews. 51. On the one hand, you surely have to be clever to be a politician; on the other hand, some politicians don’t look that clever. 52. Some people think that each principle of the constitution should be different, but shouldn’t some important ones be basically the same just in case one of them is not implemented? 53. Surely a fair-minded way of teaching us the rules also teaches us all the dodgy things we can do within them, which those evil children learn. 54. Can you not trade one great novel for three very good ones? And three very good ones for eight good ones? And eight good ones for... 55. O Prophet, you are 9 out of 10 but you can be 8.5 out of 10 and the same people will receive your message; and you need to be 9.5 for anyone else to. 56. If you keep having lots of fun ideas, it is easy to overcome sensitivity and endure insults, because the next fun idea arrives and your thoughts turn to that. Honest! 57. These people fire you; these posher people make your life uncomfortable and then you leave; but what about these even posher people? 58. If the institutions ranked just above yours in our globalized world are all French, you are probably going French too. 59. Strange things must have happened to siblings in a liberal society for them to learn to take hints from others. 60. This philosophy which makes numerous fine distinctions is no good in prison with no writing implements. 61. Like people who finish a level of a video game and then show you what is in it, we have movies to show you the levels of high society we have got past. 62. Some people's conversation is a verbal substitute for pushing you. 63. We submit to lopsided professional norms, because the results are better than what we would naturally do. 64. It must have been prostitutes who first discovered that the face is an unreliable guide to what a person is like. 65. They tell us to do research thoroughly, never half-baked, but what if you are communicating to strangers and you don’t know which ideas will interest them? 66. It is so hard writing one-liners for hard working readers with high impulse control who like to spend time with a deep text. 67. We excuse a lot of an economist’s conclusions when we enjoy the tables they make. 68. If there is one thing Cambridge University folk cannot stand, it is you thinking something is clever which is not clever by their well-worked out standards. 69. What we learnt from botched translations of Milan Kundera’s The Joke: if the elites in one nation cause pain for you, the elites in another nation probably will as well, though in a different way perhaps. 70. If you are trying to beat a lot of competition by having the bonus of a fine writing style, you probably need to add a little poem too. 71. Forgotten objections: "If you say that mathematics reduces to logic, then the average mathematician needs to be good at logic!" 72. "What is Martha Nussbaum's big unforgettable idea?" people wonder. She is ready to compete with essay writing machines! 73. Now consider a man who compiles evidence that you are a threat, but would still believe that without any evidence: can you get him for paranoia? 74. Liberals: they like to write the rules of the game and also to play. 75. You say, "Put the nation first" to some rival groups but each thinks their art will outlast the nation. 76. First they translate you badly and you loudly complain; then a bit better and you still complain; then a bit better…: to find out when you finally settle. 77. O futile dream of a face that is the perfect mask: "No one will know what I am actually feeling." 78. If you had greater tolerance for less sparkly quotations, you would know much more of what I know. 79. The strange omissions of textbooks and the message quietly sent: "if you respected me more, I would include you." 80. Experiments, experiments. If you write lots, you are at risk of going mad, but test this: the next move up in risk after writing three essays is writing more than eleven. 81. Cambridge University take over of a field: they send some really good people in stage 1; then solid people in stage 2; then slightly worse in stage 3 - "Hey, I can take that field back." 82. Academic advice: if you really want citations, maybe it is best to make stupid errors and someone cites you in a paper entitled "How did this get published?" 83. An old problem: what should a mostly clever family do with a stupid child? 84. What people simply don't realize is that a lot of science goes into novel writing: it is hard to write a novel with this main character but not with that, etc. 85. Everyone prefers hard floor over carpet, until they are forced to sleep on hard floor. 86. New proverb: carpet got going somehow. 87. These people are risk-takers or these people have information that there is not much risk? 88. To people who anticipate violence in a multicultural society: could it not be "I just don’t do my work properly for them" instead? 89. Are there really geniuses ignored in their lifetime, or are there lots of faint imitations of them, which we do not now have eyes to spot? 90. I am suddenly struck by the similarity between the words "quote" and "quota." 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.) More references Edward, T.R. 2023. Paternalism and Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 41) Edward, T.R. 2022. Why Bourdieu? Five responses to Toril Moi’s question. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 45) Edward, T.R. 2025. Marilyn Strathern on artefacts as mere illustrations and my objections. Available on Researchgate. (Quotation 46) Edward, T.R. 2023. Etiquette and on saying, “No”. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 48) Edward, T.R. 2023. Governmentality and madness: when anarchism is enough. Available on academia.edu. (Quotation 49) Edward, T.R. 2025. Instagram video. (Quotation 50). Available at: https://www.instagram.com/terence_r_e_onelinerjokes/ Edward, T.R. 2023. The paradox of the politician’s appearance? Available on academia.edu (Quotation 51) Edward, T.R. 2023. On spending one's days defending the difference principle: another response to Mark Reiff. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 52). Edward, T.R. 2023. Fair equality of opportunity and the teaching of rules. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 53) Edward, T.R. 2025. Michel Foucault's economic error? (And CODING task and John Searle remark.) Available on academia.edu (Quotation 45) Edward, T.R. 2025. Are you crazy? Enduring online insults by means of many fun ideas. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 56) Edward, T.R. 2025. Inductive reasoning, social climbing, and moving job. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 57) Edward, T.R. 2025. What is the relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia? Available on academia.edu (Quotation 58) Edward, T.R. 2025. Hint-taking and philosophy marking. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 59) Edward, T.R. 2025. Just beyond C.D. Broad level and marking. Available on academia.edu Also a PhilPapers reference. (Quotation 60) Edward, T.R. 2025. Life as a video game really: a subversive perspective on The Innocents (1961). Available on academia.edu (Quotation 61) Edward, T.R. 2025. Wittgenstein, Oedipus, conversation, and the function of professional norms in philosophy. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 62, 63) Edward, T.R. 2025. Face-character assessment, prostitution, and Nietzsche (humorous). Available on academia.edu (Quotation 64) Edward, T.R. 2025. Cross-disciplinary communication and in defence of half-baked academic work. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 65) Edward, T.R. 2025. "I should be so lucky": Nozick's literary challenge to Rawls. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 66) Edward, T.R. 2025. Martha C. Nussbaum and a more recent economist (I believe). Available on academia.edu (Quotation 67) Edward, T.R. 2025. Kundera and translation games: a third perspective by simple counting. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 68) Edward, T.R. 2025. Comparison between H.L.A. Hart and myself. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 31) Edward, T.R. 2025. On an hidden objection to logicism? Available on academia.edu (Quotation 32) Yet more references Edward, T.R. 2025. A minor European intellectual on being perceived as mad. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 73) Edward, T.R. 2025. Specialization and Rawls's rules and Wittgenstein (a humorous piece). Available on academia.edu (quotation 74) Edward, T.R. 2025. Why did the Bostonians attack Poe? Available on academia.edu (Quotation 75) Edward, T.R. 2025. Milan Kundera and English translation: a game. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 4) Edward, T.R. 2025. Dream of the perfect mask. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 76) Edward, T.R. 2025. The economic view on textbooks versus mine (and fair equality of opportunity). Available on academia.edu (Quotation 77) Edward, T.R. 2025. Writing lots fast and avoiding going mad. Available on academia.edu (Quotation 78) Edward, T.R. 2025. Friends and the logic of citation. Available on philpapers.org (quotation 83) Edward, T.R. 2025. Fair equality of opportunity and l'idiot de la famille. Available on philpapers.org (Quotation 84) Edward, T.R. 2025. The science of novel writing, versus psychologist Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. (Quotation 85) Edward, T.R. 2025. "A bird in the hand is worth two in a bush": in praise of carpet. Available on philpapers.org (Quotations 86 and 87.) Edward, T.R. 2025. The habitus of other primates versus humans. Available on philpapers.org (Quotation 88) Edward, T.R. 2025. An economic problem for multiculturalism instead. Available on philpapers.org (Quotation 89) Edward, T.R. 2025. Geschichte: on the myth of the neglected genius (Frege, Soseki, Instagram). Available on philpapers.org (Quotation 90).