Cigarettes

This is an interesting article on why a man started smoking. Choice quotes:

"China has become so polluted, he told me, that it's better to breathe through a cigarette filter than just take in the air on its own. And if your lungs are going to get shot to hell anyway, you might as well enjoy it."

Past and Future

"There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past."

- G. K. Chesterton

Freeman Dyson

This is an interesting interview with Freeman Dyson. I think we should know who he is. :)

Minds

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,"
- Allen Ginsberg

"I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats."
- Theodore Dalrymple