Favourite quotations

One of the features of Facebook that was heavily emphasised in its early days, but not mentioned much nowadays, was the favourite quotation. I think you were only supposed to choose one or two, but I went a bit overboard. Here is the list I put on Facebook, reproduced here for non-Facebook users, or in case Facebook withdraw the feature.

• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C Clarke
• We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. Richard Dawkins
• I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. (This quote, very similar to Dawkins's above, has sometimes been attributed to the Australian historian Sir Stephen Henry Roberts [1901-1971], but this appears to be an error. The quote is actually from Stephen Frederick Roberts. It almost certainly predates Dawkins's quotation.)
• That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. Christopher Hitchens
• The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. Christopher Hitchens
• Since at most one faith can be true, it follows that human beings are extremely liable to believe firmly and honestly in something untrue in the field of revealed religion. Hermann Bondi
• In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age. Thomas Gold
• Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards. Fred Hoyle
• The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit. Avicenna
• Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. Euripides
• Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear. Thucydides
• A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man: he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue. Aristophanes
• There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. Homer
• Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule. Jaggers, character in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Coal kills more people when it goes right than nuclear power does when it goes wrong. In fact coal kills more people every week than nuclear power has in the entire history of its deployment. George Monbiot
• Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear or anti-wind. I’m just pro-arithmetic. Sir David J McKay
• Plutonium-239 is a rather innocuous material, in spite of the character given to it in horror movies. Wade Allison
• That's the problem with plutonium, Craven: it's limited in its application. It's not user-friendly, but as a vehicle for regaining one's self-respect, oh, it's got a lot going for it! Darius Jedburgh, character in Edge of Darkness by Troy Kennedy Martin
• If speaking to nonscientific audiences is something that interests you or will likely be asked of you, keep in mind three overriding requirements: first, you must be a human being... second, you must be accurate in what you say... and third, if your subject is scientific knowledge, you must remain a scientist and not slip into the role of advocate or activist. Scott L Montgomery
• A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. C P Snow
• Then there is electricity – the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power... by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The House of the Seven Gables
• When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth... we shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. Nikola Tesla
• A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one. Dimitri Shostakovich
• If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over? John Wooden
• If one meets a powerful person... one can ask five questions: what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Tony Benn
• A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. Douglas Adams
• The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. Douglas Adams
• Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. Isaac Asimov
• The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed. Robert Heinlein
• Progress doesn't come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. Robert Heinlein
• Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well. Mark Twain
• Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. Charles Babbage
• Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Edsger Dijkstra
• Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California. Edsger Dijkstra
• Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you play with them. Richard P Feynman
• Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy. Albert Einstein
• In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. George Orwell
• I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love. Mitt Romney
• The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury. John Maynard Keynes
• A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. Mark Twain
• Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought. Dennis Moore, played by John Cleese in Monty Python, Ep 37.