“Everything is what it is because it got that way."
    -- Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson

“It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate. - Penn Gillette 

As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on. And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t. -- Joe Walsh

 Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. -- Herman Hesse

I imagine that every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. Where is the center of events, the common standpoint around which they revolve and which gives them cohesion? In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might ensue and that it can in some way be narrated, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless. -- Herman Hesse

"Later equals never." - Le Blanc's law

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.“ ~ Bertrand Russell