Memoirs of an Obscure Professor

10. Afterthoughts

10 Afterthoughts • In the academic world it helps if you stuff your shirt a bit. • Wisdom involves knowing when your opinion is worth something and when it isn't. • The profundities of today arc the simplicisms of tomorrow . • There's just enough (futh in some ideas to make them dangerously false. • A dosed system of thought imprisons the encloser. • You are free co believe in determinism if you wish; I simply have to believe in frcc will. • His(Qrians tell us why things happened as they did, when it's too late to do anything about it. • Ideologues have a tendency to transmute coincidence into conspiracy. • He who can, does; he who cannot, signs petitions. • If you read between the lines in some books, you don't find anything there. • We are continually admonished to face reality, but never to face ideality. • Honesty and ideology are immiscible. • Do the means justify the ends? • Science deals with processes; religion, with purposes. 237 ~I'l of an Obscu,. Protestor 238 • Never underestimate the cruelty of well-meaning people . • I would hate to be operated on by a surgeon who was so filled with compassion for my plight that the tears streamed down his eyes as he performed the operation. • Nothing becomes more quickly out of date than the immediately relevant. • An optimist is a person who thinks things could have been better but might have been worse. • Improbability: "We interrupt this commercial to bring you a news flash!" • Sooner or later our present-day conservatives must come to realize that greed isn 't the highest good, and our liberals learn that guilt isn't the only virtue. • He labored like a mountain and brought forth a rat. • He was so convinced they were wrong that he could afford to be fair about it. • Some critics of OUT society assert that the people in our mental institutions arc the really sane ones and i('s those outside who are crazy, but they do 110t go all to show any compassion for the latter. • Sometimes a piece ofwit is the shortest distance between two points you're trying to make. • Your view of the past depends largely on your vision of the future. • Some music is more fun to play than listen (0. • A person who knows all the answers is asking the wrong questions. • In some fields ofinquiry so little is known that just about anything may be said. • Hypocrisy pays lip service to virtue; cynicism denies its possibility. • When we can't understand something, we give it a highsounding name. • A word always means a lot more than its dictionary definition. • The question is not, Is it true? but rather, How much truth is there in it? The same with good. • Sometimes being in the right isn't nearly enough. • There are no easy ways to master a difficult subject, but some ways arc more interesting than others. • Some historians look down on the people they write about with the same kind of contempt they condemn those people for showing to some of their contemporaries. • O ne person's aphorism is another's asininity. 239 TCU-BollerJr.pdf 252 8/10/2012 8:22:54 AM ...