“I explained that to May,” Verhofstadt said. “I said, You have a problem, you try to solve it. We on the Continent are different. We need first a concept. If we have a concept, then we are going to try and put every problem that we have inside that concept.”

“There are two kinds of European nations,” Kristian Jensen, the Danish Finance Minister, said last year, referring to Britain’s situation. “There are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations.”


EU folks talking to/about the UK on Brexit (in The New Yorker)

I'm just an aging political officer.  Coffee is fuel, travel is opportunity.

In response to an old friend

All information is imperfect.

Jacob Bronowski 

He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfillment in such roundabout and often terrible ways.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

You don't need to be a deer to know to stay off the highway.


Heard on the Equator

The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

 Dag Hammarskjöld

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Niels Bohr

Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people so confident, as those who entertain us with fables.

Michel de Montaigne

There isn’t anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can’t believe it.


Mark Twain, as quoted in The Consciousness Deniers, Galen Strawson (NYRB, March 13, 2018)