Jim Holt Quotations

Jokes often arise involuntarily, like dreams, and tend to be swiftly forgotten. From these similarities Freud inferred that jokes and dreams share a common origin in the unconscious. Both are essentially means of outwitting our inner 'censor.

You have to have a temperamental attraction to dangerous ideas...

To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child.

When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.

The sun came up Sunday and the rakes started flying. I drove all over town and that's all I saw was people cleaning up their yards.

They've worked their buns off. What wasn't noticed in all this was the preplanning we did kept a lot of the flooding down. We spent three days before the hurricane made landfall going through all the ditches in town, pulling out shopping carts, basketballs, leaves and trash. That helped a lot.

They've worked their buns off, ... What wasn't noticed in all this was the preplanning we did kept a lot of the flooding down. We spent three days before the hurricane made landfall going through all the ditches in town, pulling out shopping carts, basketballs, leaves and trash. That helped a lot.