All Quotes

"They need to read the Scriptures; where it says in Matthew, chapter 4, verse 17, it says: "Shut the fuck up." That's the King James version, by the way."

"George Bush blocked the availability of morning-after pills over the counter, stating that it would "promote promiscuity". ...So? You know, I never had access to morning-after pills, but that did not stop me from fucking my way through the U.S.A. like I was Lewis and Clark. And if the issue is promiscuity, then why is Viagra everywhere? Doesn't it make more sense to leave the bullets out of the gun than to just avoid being shot?"

"I want morning-after pills more than over the counter; I want morning-after pills with my check at dinner. I want morning-after pills on my hotel pillow when I go to bed at night."

"[on Arnold Schwarzenegger] That motherfucker be ORANGE. ...I am not against people of color, but that is a fucked-up color. I think that him and Donatella Versace, they gonna start a whole new race of Oompa-Loompa."

"And especially, especially, don't fuck with vegans. Do not look vegans in the eye. If you get into an argument with a vegan, say "I'm wrong" and run away as fast as you can. Do not fuck with vegans because they will fuck you up...BECAUSE THEY'RE HUNGRY."

""Do not fuck with Björk! Björk will beat your ass! … I saw Björk beat this woman's ass one time in this videotape. She was in the Bangkok airport and she was pushing her luggage cart and this woman came up and just touched her and Björk went (roaring and hissing). And it was so scary, because you didn't expect it at all, because Björk is so cute. … And Björk called the woman she attacked afterwards to apologize. 'I'm very sorry I tried to pull your eyes up over your head. Somebody must have fed me after midnight.'"

"But Björk wore the best dress ever to the Oscars, ever. She wore a swan. And I'm not talking about a dress with white feathers on it. Oh, no. She rocked the whole bird. The beak was up here and shit. And she accessorized it with an egg -- what else you gon' wear with your bird?! And all of the fashion magazines said she was the worst dressed, but when they say you're the worst, that means you're the best."

"I vowed to myself if I ever go to one of these award shows I'm gonna wear some kind of a bird. So I went to the Grammys last years I had a dress made out of peacock feathers. And I didn't win a Grammy, was named worst dressed. And that's impressive, because if you win a Grammy you had to just beat out what, three, four people? But if you're worst dressed you beat fifteen thousand people! I beat Mary J. Blige! I beat Lil' Kim!"

"I became involved with this organization called MoveOn.org, and I got into it right in the middle of some serious stuff. So when I made some anti-Bush comments, I got this flood of emails from right-wing supporters. I really wish I could say that they were productive emails, but basically it was, "Fuck you, you dirty Chink cunt bitch fag-hag. Go back to your country. Four more years! Dirty Chink dyke slut! Jesus saves!" So I posted them on my website, including the return addresses, and some of these people wrote me from their work emails. So I had their work information, their names, their addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, Blockbuster card numbers, favorite flavor of ice-cream. And the thing is, I guess I have this whole fanbase that's ready to go to bat for me. They're already pissed off, so they just need half a reason. And basically I discovered Al Gay-da. They're a sleeper cell you do not want to wake up. So suddenly these people are emailing me back: "Please take my info off of your site. I'm so sorry. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I shouldn't have said what I said. And please make these gay people go away. Please, hurry! I think Cirque de Soleil is warming up on my front lawn!""

"Why do they think "fat dyke" is an insult? To me that means, "I'm-a eat fried chicken and pussy.""

"Do I look like a happy-ending to you?"

"I think it's very important to feel beautiful. I think it's very political to feel beautiful, especially if you're Queer, because if you're Queer you have to take on the world every single day of your life, so you have to feel beautiful to survive."

"I hate Sarah Palin, I would never vote for her, I hate her politics, but I kinda wanna fuck her. I know, it's unholy, it's so wrong. I want to eat her pussy from behind. Eskimo-style. No, you know I wouldn't eat that thing. 'Cause you know it's frozen. My tongue would stick..."

"And I have to explain what a G-spot is for all the gay men. A G-spot is basically this button in your vagina, that if you push it, it turns it on. You push it and makes a sound like... (imitates Mac start-up sound). That's if you have a Mac vagina... I don't know what noise it makes if you have a PC. ... I have a Mac sexuality. Don't touch my anus, because that is like my Force Quit. ... You will lose any unsaved changes."

"Like when Jay Leno made jokes about Koreans eating dog, but the hidden messages, our invisibility, is more harmful to us than any of those fools on "board"."

"When we never see who we are, never hear what we think about things, what we are doing as a group or what we are doing individually, then it is as if we are never there in the first place. Silence = Nonexistence."

"All I ask for is a chance to have the same kind of forum, the right to speak, the same credibility as thee wrong-ass ignant fools. But the producers of these types of shows think tht I will only talk about tai chi, where to get the best sushi on the West Side, how to feng-shui your office...the fact that the media at large look at my race before they hear my voice = fucked up shit."

"Newton's own motto, "hypotheses non fingo" was, in a sense, disregarded by Newton himself: he rejected hypotheses only where they violated his own "regula philosophandi", that is to say, his principle of their strict parsimony. In terms of present-day methodology, we reject hypotheses as scientifically meaningless if they are incapable even of indirect test; and we reject them as superfluous or as implausible if they are too complex and artificial to conform with well established canons of inductive probability. But freedom of scientific theorizing must be preserved wherever the conditions of meaningfulness and of economy appear to be satisfied."

"Kepler succeeded in showing that the planets move along elliptic paths and that the sun lies at a focus of each of these s... Each planet moves so that a straight line drawn to connect it with the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times. ...The discoveries ...enabled Newton to formulate the laws of mechanics in general and those of gravitation in particular. ...He was able to develop Kepler's laws into a comprehensive physical theory only because he managed first to create the necessary mathematical tools... differential and integral calculus, the basic mathematical techniques for dealing with variable quantities, such as the movement of bodies in the course of time. ...[H]e succeeded in drawing from Kepler's empirical laws the principles of motion that applied [to] every instant of time and thus shaped planetary motion into complete orbits."

"Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me ; 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight, And threefold in soft Beulah's night, And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision, & Newton's sleep !"

"No monument should stand over [my] grave, only an apple-tree, in memory of the three apples; the two of Eve and Paris, which made hell out of earth, and that of Newton, which elevated the earth again into the circle of heavenly bodies."

"The landscape has been so totally changed, the ways of thinking have been so deeply affected, that it is very hard to get hold of what it was like before... It is very hard to realize how total a change in outlook he has produced."

"[T]he life and writings of Sir Isaac Newton abound with the richest counsel. Here the philosopher will learn the art by which alone he can acquire an immortal name. The moralist will trace the lineaments of a character adjusted to all the symmetry of which our imperfect nature is susceptible; and the Christian will contemplate with delight the high-priest of science quitting the study of the material universe,—the scene of his intellectual triumphs,—to investigate with humility and patience the mysteries of his faith."

"If Sir Isaac Newton had not been distinguished as a mathematician and a natural philosopher, he would have enjoyed a high reputation as a theologian."

"Newton is known for humbly declaring that he had achieved his great breakthroughs by 'standing on the shoulders of giants.' Though this may be true in part, it is largely humbug. Newton was hardly humble, and it would be just as true to say that he achieved greatness by stamping on the shoulders of giants. When others, such as Robert Hooke and Gottfried Leibniz, made breakthroughs in fields he was also researching, Newton fought ferociously to deny them credit for their work."

"There is a basic incompatibility between any organization and freedom of thought. Suppose Newton had founded a Church of Newtonian Physics and refused to show his formula to anyone who doubted the tenets of Newtonian Physics?"

"A student of the history of physical science will assign to Newton a further importance which the average man can hardly appreciate. ...the separation ...of positive scientific inquiries from questions of ultimate causation."

"The history of mathematics and mechanics for a hundred years subsequent to Newton appears primarily as a period devoted to the assimilation of his work and the application of his laws to more varied types of phenomena. So far as objects were masses, moving in space and time under the impress of forces as he had defined them, their behaviour was now, as a result of his labours, fully explicable in terms of exact mathematics."

"When Newton saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation ... A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation'."

"My quotations from Newton suggest the motive which induced him to take a stand against the use of hypotheses, namely, the danger of becoming involved in disagreeable controversies. ...Newton could no more dispense with hypotheses in his own cogitations than an eagle can dispense with flight. Nor did Newton succeed in avoiding controversy."

"Newton had other postulates by which he could get the law of angular momentum, but Newtonian laws were wrong. There's no forces, it's all a lot of balony. The particles don't have orbits, and so on."

"Opticks was out of harmony with the ideas of 19th-century physics. ...an exposition of the "wrong" (i.e., corpuscular) theory of light,—even though it also contained many of the basic principles of the "correct" (i.e., wave) theory. Not only had Newton erred in his choice... but also he apparently had found no insuperable difficulty in simultaneously embracing features of two opposing theories. ...by adopting a combination of the two theories at once, he had violated one of the major canons of 19th-century physics... Today our point of view is influenced by the theory of photons and matter waves, or the... complementarity of Neils Bohr; and we may read with a new interest Newtons ideas on the interaction of light and matter or his explanation of the corpuscular and undulatory aspects of light."

"Of the many references to Newton in 18th-century electrical writings only a small number were to the Principia, the greater part by far were to the Opticks. This was true not alone of the electrical writings but also in other fields of experimental enquiry. ...[The Opticks] would allow the reader to roam, with great Newton as his guide, through the major unresolved problems of science and even the relation of the whole world of nature to Him who had created it. ...in the Opticks Newton did not adopt the motto... —Hypotheses non fingo; I frame no hypotheses—but, so to speak, let himself go, allowing his imagination full reign and by far exceeding the bounds of experimental evidence."

"In the year [1666] he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth, but must extend much farther than was usually thought — Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself, & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit. Whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition being absent from the books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that to 60 Engish miles were contained in one degree of . His computation did not agree with his Theory and inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the power of gravity there might be a mixture of that force which the moon would have if it was carried along a vortex, but when the Tract of Picard of the measure of the earth came out shewing that a degree was about 69 1/2 English miles, he began his calculation anew & found it perfectly in agreement to his Theory."

"[Newton] bought a book of Iudicial Astrology out of a curiosity to see what there was in that science & read in it till he came to a figure of the heavens which he could not understand for want of being acquainted with Trigonometry, & to understand the ground of that bought an English Euclid with an Index of all the problems at the end of it & only turned to two or three which he thought necessary for his purpose & read nothing but the titles of them finding them so easy & self evident that he wondered any body would be at the pains of writing a demonstration of them & laid Euclid aside as a trifling book, & was soon convinced of the vanity & emptiness of the pretended science of Iudicial astrology."

"[Newton] achieved the clearest appreciation of the relation between the empirical elements in a scientific system and the hypothetical elements derived from a philosophy of nature."

"Galileo first studied the motion of terrestrial objects, pendulums, free-falling balls, and projectiles. He summarized what he observed in the mathematical language of proportions. And he extrapolated from his experimental data to a great idealization now called the “inertia principle,” which tells us, among other things, that an object projected along an infinite, frictionless plane will continue forever at a constant velocity. His observations were the beginnings of the science of motion we now call “mechanics.”... Newton also invented a mathematical language (the "Fluxions" method, closely related to our present-day ) to express his mechanics, but in an odd historical twist, rarely applied that language himself."

"But to return to the Newtonian Philosophy: Tho' its Truth is supported by Mathematicks, yet its Physical Discoveries may be communicated without. The great Mr. Locke was the first who became a Newtonian Philosopher without the help of Geometry; for having asked Mr. Huygens, whether all the mathematical Propositions in Sir Isaac's Principia were true, and being told he might depend upon their Certainty; he took them for granted, and carefully examined the Reasonings and Corollaries drawn from them, became Master of all the Physics, and was fully convinc'd of the great Discoveries contained in that Book."

"Multiple-prism arrays were first introduced by Newton (1704) in his book Opticks. In that visionary volume Newton reported on arrays of nearly isosceles prisms in additive and compensating configurations to control the propagation path and the dispersion of light. Further, he also illustrated slight beam expansion in a single isosceles prism."

"Newton was at heart a Cartesian, using pure thought as Descartes intended, and using it to demolish the Cartesian dogma of vortices."

"In accordance with Newton's system, physical reality is characterised by concepts of space, time, the material point and force (interaction between material points). Physical events are to be thought of as movements according to law of material points in space. The material point is the only representative of reality in so far as it is subject to change. The concept of the material point is obviously due to observable bodies; one conceived of the material point on the analogy of movable bodies by omitting characteristics of extension, form, spatial locality, and all their 'inner' qualities, retaining only inertia, translation, and the additional concept of force."

"In order to put his system into mathematical form at all, Newton had to devise the concept of differential quotients and propound the laws of motion in the form of total differential equations—perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make."

"Newton's age has long since passed through the sieve of oblivion, the doubtful striving and suffering of his generation has vanished from our ken; the works of some few great thinkers and artists have remained, to delight and ennoble those who come after us. Newton's discoveries have passed into the stock of accepted knowledge."

"The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied."

"It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. ...Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. ...There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them."

"Newton's version of gravity violates common sense. How can one thing tug at another across vast spans of space? ...Newton's formalism nonetheless provided an astonishingly accurate means of calculating the orbits of planets; it was too effective to deny."

"The prejudice for Sir Isaac has been so great, that it has destroyed the intent of his undertaking, and his books have been a means of hindering that knowledge they were intended to promote. It is a notion every child imbibes almost with his mother's milk, that Sir Isaac Newton has carried philosophy to the highest pitch it is capable of being carried, and established a system of physics upon the solid basis of mathematical demonstration."

"Newton said that he made his discoveries by 'intending' his mind on the subject; no doubt truly. But to equal his success one must have the mind which he 'intended.' Forty lesser men might have intended their minds till they cracked, without any like result. It would be idle either to affirm or to deny that the last half-century has produced men of science of the calibre of Newton. It is sufficient that it can show a few capacities of the first rank, competent not only to deal profitably with the inheritance bequeathed by their scientific forefathers, but to pass on to their successors physical truths of a higher order than any yet reached by the human race. And if they have succeeded as Newton succeeded, it is because they have sought truth as he sought it, with no other object than the finding it."

"I esteem his [Newton's] understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of this work, where the author studies things of little use or when he builds on the improbable principle of attraction."

"I do not mind at all that [Newton] is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction."