It Has Been Said

Abstract

IT HAS BEEN SAID* and collected by NORMAN PASKINi "To try to map our tomorrows with the help ofdata supplied by our yesterdays means ignoring the basic element of the future which is its complete nonexistence ."—Vladimir Nabokov "Credibility is an expanding field. . . . Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight."—Tom Stoppard "Logic is a tool. . . . and a tool alone does nothing. It has to have a point of leverage and a guiding hand."—Stanislaw Lem "If anyone asks, What is culture? Who is cultured? the needle points, by an extraordinary coincidence, in the direction of ourselves."—C. P. Snow "There is great difference betwixt the being able to make experiments and the being able to give a philosophical account of them."—Robert Boyle "Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."—Jonathan Swift "Most ofhuman sentences are aimed at getting rid of the ambiguity which you unfortunately left trailing in the last sentence."—Jacob Bronowski "Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant."—Lewis Carroll " 'My project,' he told us, 'is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been.' "—John Barth "Mathematics and death are never in error."—Yvgeney Zamyatin ?Material appearing under this tide is collected with the aim of making the serious a bit less serious, the ponderous a bit less heavy, and the reading hours a bit more fun. We invite you to share a collection of your humorous treasures with PBM readers. tAddress: Backershagen 27, 1082 GR Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Perspectives in Biology andMedicine ¦ Spring 1979 | 359 "His heart and soul were at the end of his pen, and they got into the ink."— Rudyard Kipling "If a man were to rummage in his past, he'd find material in it for a whole set of lives."—Karel Capek "Ask yourself what you remember from the last articles and books you read, beyond their titles and, perhaps, an idea or two—that, and a sense of time spent in reading."—Ronald Christ "I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public, to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology."—Thomas Love Peacock "It is venturesome to suggest that a co-ordination of words can resemble the universe very much."—Jorge Luis Borges "Philosophy has a fine saying for everything—for death it has an entire set."—Laurence Sterne "I noticed, with respect to experiments, that they became more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge."—René Descartes "In these modern times, you are damn nothing unless you can produce statistics . Columns and columns of figures, readings and percentages. Where would we be if we couldn't produce our certified statistics?"—"Flann O'Brien" (Brian O'Nolan) "Always, in our trade, look a gift horse at both ends and in the middle. He may throw you."—Rudyard Kipling "How often language is the cloak with which a man conceals, not his thought, but his want of thought."—Robert Louis Stevenson "Nothing annoys me so much in the stupid as that they are better pleased with themselves than any reasonable person has a right to be."—Michel de Montaigne "Journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."—G. K. Chesterton " 'Kismet', i.e. fate—if at all anything, and as potent as suspected for centuries—is a dam' baffling thing!"—G. V. Desani "Ifthe Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I should have recommended something simpler."—Alphonso X of Castile 360 Norman Paskin ¦ It Has Been Said ...