Themes

"The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness."

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly."

"If you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fortune. For most wooden-headed people worship money; and, really, I do not see what else they can do."

"I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this... that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes... pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts... all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not."

"He had the unique opportunity to watch Conina fight. Not many men ever got to see it twice. Her opponents started off grinning at the temerity of a slight young girl attacking them, and then rapidly passed through various stages of puzzlement, doubt, concern, and abject gibbering terror as they apparently became the center of a flashing, tightening circle of steel."

"I never saw any one like him. He is steel! He would go through you like a sword!"

"How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood [...]"

"I've long believed alas, that in highly organized industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, the stronger tendency is to converge — that if steel or automobiles are wanted and must be made on a large scale, the process will stamp its imprint on the society, whether that me be Magnitogorsk or Gary, Indiana."

"And he sang: "Hurra for my handiwork!" And the red sparks lit the air; Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made; And he fashioned the first ploughshare."

"The magnetism as exhibited in iron is an isolated phenomenon in nature. What it is that makes this metal behave so radically different from all other materials in this respect has not yet been ascertained, though many theories have been suggested. As regards magnetism, the molecules of the various bodies behave like hollow beams partly filled with a heavy fluid and balanced in the middle in the manner of a see-saw. Evidently some disturbing influence exists in nature which causes each molecule, like such a beam, to tilt either one or the other way. If the molecules are tilted one way, the body is magnetic; if they are tilted the other way, the body is non-magnetic; but both positions are stable, as they would be in the case of the hollow beam, owing to the rush of the fluid to the lower end. Now, the wonderful thing is that the molecules of all known bodies went one way, while those of iron went the other way. This metal, it would seem, has an origin entirely different from that of the rest of the globe. It is highly improbable that we shall discover some other and cheaper material which will equal or surpass iron in magnetic qualities."

"Steel is one of the most important construction materials today. Its application continues to grow and to diversify. Where before buildings were of bricks and mortar today ferro-concrete is the material of choice. In other countries steel-frame buildings are preferred. Although more expensive, steel-frame buildings are faster to build. In Malaysia there are a number of steel-frame buildings but the numbers are not big enough to create demand for steel sections and boost the steel industry. A steel industry used to be regarded as the measure of a country`s level of development. The more sophisticated the steel industry of a nation, the higher is its level of industrialisation. Today in the Information Age an advanced steel industry is not necessarily a measure of a country`s development. Nevertheless steel continues to be important for the physical development of a nation. The consumption of steel in a developed country remains high. While we focus on the K-economy we cannot neglect our steel industry."

"It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment."

"If men are to meet steel with steel, they should be adequately armed. Long spears and short swords to meet a charge of long swords. If you don't believe that, read the chronicles of Rome and Macedonia."

"Iron can destroy anything: families, fortunes, governments, whole countries. It's the most powerful stuff in the universe." "Oh?" Orry's skeptical glance fell down on the Plain below. "You really think it's more powerful than a big army?" "Without weapons - without this - there are no big armies."

"When iron was found, the trees began to tremble, but the iron reassured them: 'Let no handle made from you enter into anything made from me, and I shall be powerless to injure you.'"

"As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah."

"Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide. The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel, formerly used to kill men, but here In the sense of a symbol."

"Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude."

"The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune."

"A man of knowledge uses words with restraint, and a man of understanding is even-tempered."

"Through certain humors or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate."

"When you see anyone complaining of such and such a person's ill-nature and bad temper, know that the complainant is bad-tempered, forasmuch as he speaks ill of that bad-tempered person, because he alone is good-tempered who is quietly forbearing towards the bad-tempered and ill-natured."

"Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth."

"Courtesy of temper, when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown."

"Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth."

"If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it."

"Love rules without rules."

"Ces règles ne sont que des barrières pour empêcher les enfants de tomber."

"Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it."

"Rule, after you have first learned to submit to rule."

"This is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules."

"Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry [...] To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery."

"IAR is policy, always has been."

"Hillel HA-Babli, in the thirty-first book of The Sabbath in 30 B.C., raised the Golden Rule to the ultimate moral principle: "Whatsoever thou wouldst that men should not do unto thee, do not do unto them. This is the whole Law. The rest is explanation.""

"In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules … but it's impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time."

"Power over the rules is real power. That's why lobbyists congregate when Congress writes laws, and why the Supreme Court, which interprets and delineates the Constitution – the rules for writing the rules – has even more power than Congress. If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them."

"History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief."

"Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind."

"It is the nature of man to build the most complicated cage of rules and regulations in which to trap himself, and then, with equal ingenuity and zest, to bend his brain to the problem of wriggling triumphantly out again."

"Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed you, and do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it."

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other."

"Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law."

"It is paltry philosophy if in the old-fashioned way one lays down rules and principles in total disregard of moral values. As soon as these appear one regards them as exceptions, which gives them a certain scientific status, and thus makes them into rules. Or again one may appeal to genius, which is above all rules; which amounts to admitting that rules are not only made for idiots, but are idiotic in themselves."

"The majority of parents are poor psychologists and give their children the most questionable moral trainings. It is perhaps in this domain that one realized most how keenly how immoral it can be to believe too much in morality, and how much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world."

"Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in the society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations."

"By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist."

"... the Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does. ..."

"Not only may particular decisions made according to rules result in material injustice, but a rule may systematically discriminate against the poor and the oppressed. In such circumstances, to be committed to applying the rules, however fairly or impartially administered, come what may, is to ignore the more obvious and direct demands of justice and human welfare."

"The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules for action that can be drawn from it."