Steve Trotter

This column is built using the words of others, odd scraps, random quotations that I saved over the years and savor still.

Most come from my reading. I attribute authors where I can. Some I heard. Some I cannot recall the source. I know that a few are wrongly attributed. Mark Twain is credited with many things he didn’t say — but certainly could have.

What follows is in no particular order. I hope you find each quotation both interesting and stimulating. Perhaps a few will evoke a laugh.

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The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

All of the biggest technological inventions created by man — the airplane, the automobile, the computer — says little about his intelligence, but speaks volumes about his laziness.

Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Technology… is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The basic question of politics is “Who does what to Whom?”

I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.

The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having a different past … NOT forgiving is taking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.