Perles of Wisdom: Diet

Favorite Quotes

Talent is long patience. – Gustave Flaubert
We have shown that a treatment offers the greatest benefit to patients who have a poor prognosis without treatment (or on standard treatment), who are highly responsive to the experimental treatment, and who are minimally vulnerable to the adverse effects of the treatment; a treatment offers less benefit to patients with the opposite characteristics. Kravitz RL, Duan N, Braslow J. Evidence-based medicine, heterogeneity of treatment effects, and the trouble with averages. Milbank Q. 2004;82(4):661-87.
The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.” Antiphanes
The desire to be right and the desire to have been right are two desires, and the sooner we separate them the better off we are. The desire to be right is the thirst for truth. On all accounts, both practical and theoretical, there is nothing but good to be said for it. The desire to have been right, on the other hand, is the pride that goeth before a fall. It stands in the way of our seeing we were wrong, and thus blocks the progress of our knowledge. - W.V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (Random House, New York, 2nd edition, 1978), p. 133
"Nothing is worse than active ignorance." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Our facts must be correct. Our theories need not be if they help us to discover important new facts." Hans Selye
Sit down before fact as a child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly where nature leads you, or you will learn nothing! Thomas Huxley
So no degree of commitment to beliefs makes them knowledge. Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behavior is a certain skepticism even towards one's most cherished theories. Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime. Imre Lakatos - "Science and Pseudoscience"
"What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are." Epictetus
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. W. Edwards Deming
"He who will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator." Francis Bacon, Of innovations 1624
"Science progresses, one funeral at a time." Max Planck
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man - Thomas Jefferson
Too many people confuse being serious with being solemn. - John Cleese
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. - Confucius