Ockham S Razor Quotes

But a question needs to be asked, a basic logical scientific question. It is simply this, has anyone applied Ockham's Razor to the question yet? ~ Leviak B. Kelly

Brandon reached down and yanked up a handful of grass and roots, the sides of the blades cutting into his hand like a razor. What happened to the grass, Dana? Why isn't it green anymore? ~ James L. Rubart

People often tell themselves lies, in order to reach what they consider acceptance in difficult situations. In reality, they fool themselves into believing they are healed, until that lie is corrected by time, further information or their own personal growth. True healing comes when we learn to not avoid truth, but face it. Only then will we be set free. ~ Shannon L. Alder

One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug - especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

This time she is the one who leans forward. She is on her knees in front of him, grasping his shirt collar, pulling him close to her. He is clearly as startled by this as she herself is, but he allows himself to be drawn in. Their mouths meet, she moves even closer still until she is sitting on his lap takes his hands from her waist and puts them on her breasts, does everything but devour him, desperate to see if she can have something beyond her bondage with the razor.

Pictures of the accident start writhing beneath her closed lids, competing for attention with the image she holds of his face. A tidal wave of emotion threatens to engulf her. She is suddenly back in the basement with the bookcases. "I can't." Willow pushes him away. "I can't"

Willow claps her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to drown out the dreadful sounds of the accident. She jumps up, wheels away from him, fumbles in her pocket for the razor that she always keeps there. But just as she's preparing to slice, to save herself, to end the nightmare visions, Guy's hand clamps down on hers He pulls her down on the floor again roughly.

"No." He's shaking his head. "Not here. Not now. Not with me around."

"I have to." Willow is gasping. "Just let me do it!"

"All right then, you can cut yourself, but not like this, not like some concerned animal. You have to do it in front of me."

Willow doesn't flinch as she presses the blade into her flesh. S ~ Julia Hoban

Townsend's wife Rita, a striking, razor-sharp Latina lawyer, who seemed to be the brains in the household, lost her cool in front of the cameras at a rally in Charleston and called C2C a concha de tu madre before she could be hustled off the stage. Her press officer translated the phrase as "the seashell your mother likes," but the several million South Americans in the U.S. knew it to have a slightly different connotation. ~ Doug Magee

[T]hat his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will ... against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation's continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pepper spray on fourteen commercial flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House. ~ Dave Barry

Simple is never that simple. ~ Philip Roth

If you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. This sum may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors. ~ Benjamin Franklin

With a few exceptions, birds are not to be trusted; it is not normal to have such soft, vulnerable bodies bookended with slashing beaks and razor-sharp claws. It is as unnatural as an armed marshmallow. ~ Mallory Ortberg

What's going down in your brain?" Pigpen asks.
"Who shot me?"
"We don't know." The way he makes direct eye contact, he's not lying. ~ Katie McGarry

Nature operates in the shortest way possible. ~ Aristotle.

Soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways, We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days. Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth. ~ Tom Lehrer

Keep things simple. ~ William Of Ockham

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love. ~ Roberto Bolano

Into the counter behind her; her stick-thin arms fly into the air. I whip to my right, toward Razor, in time to see his chest blown apart by the kneeling recruit's round. ~ Rick Yancey

Pigpen's on the move. ~ Katie McGarry

The Doctor closed his eyes as the razor claws reached out through the rain, waiting for the killer blow.
It never came.
He opened one eye cautiously.
The creature was staring at its claws, turning them this way and that. It looked down at the Doctor.
'I think I chipped a nail.'
The Doctor blinked. 'I'm sorry?'
'A nail. Look.' It held out a claw. 'And that head. Do you think it's going to be fattening? You never know with foreign food, do you? ~ Mike Tucker

To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor. ~ Alexander Pope

No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed to almost vanish when seen edge on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing and a ghost light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew that it was sharper than any razor. ~ George R R Martin

Appreciation is not an otherworldly or good treat which we may take or push away as per the minute's impulses, and in either case without material outcomes. Appreciation is the very bread and meat of profound and good wellbeing, separately and all things considered. What was the seed of deterioration that tainted the antiquated's heart world past the purpose of perfect remedy ... ? What was it however selfishness? ~ Noel 'Razor' Smith

Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?

Humor works by confronting an audience with an incongruity, which may be resolved by switching to another frame of reference. And in that alternative frame of reference, the butt of the joke occupies a lowly or undignified status. ...

Humor with a political or moral agenda can stealthily challenge a relational model that is second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that it leads to consequences that the rest of their minds recognize as absurd. ...

According to the 18th-century writer Mary Wortley Montagu, 'Satire should, like a polished razor keen / Wound with touch that's scarcely felt or seen.' But satire is seldom polished that keenly, and the butts of a joke may be all too aware of the subversive power of humor. They may react with a rage that is stoked by the intentional insult to a sacred value, the deflation of their dignity, and a realization that laughter indicates common knowledge of both. The lethal riots in 2005 provoked by the editorial cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ( ~ Steven Pinker

In a flash, the previously lusty green irises morphed into an angry blood red. Nadua stood with a gasp, not sure what was happening to him. The horns that peeked out of his sandy brown hair began to alter their color as well, taking on the cast of burning embers. Razor-sharp fangs peeked out from his lips, twisted in rage. This was how he had looked when he was tearing through her men. ~ Kiersten Fay

The so-called poet with his vague dreams and ideals is indeed no better than a harmless lunatic; the true poet is the worker, who grips life's throat and wrings out its secret, who selects austerely and composes concisely, whose work is as true and clean as razor-steel, albeit its sweep is vaster and swifter than the sun's! ~ Aleister Crowley

Val turned, still naked, still impossibly beautiful. Only the gore spattered on his belly, chest, and arm, marred his perfection.
He walked toward her and she couldn't help it. She backed away from him.
He smiled.
Sweetly. Like a boy. The dagger still in his left hand. And caught her arm with his right hand.
"This is who I am, Séraphine. Naked, with blade and blood. I am vengeance. I am hate. I am sin personified. Never mistake me for the hero of this tale, for I am not and shall never be. I am the villain."
And he laid his lips over hers and pushed his hot tongue into her mouth and kissed her until she couldn't breathe and it was only later that she found the bloodstains on her dress.

Her lips had been sweet, like ripe figs, her mouth a cavern of delight. But her eyes- those dark inquisitor's eyes- had held only horror and disgust.
Val sipped his China tea the next morning and gazed out the window. The sun shone on his garden, giving the illusion of warmth, though his empty chest was ice-cold.
He could have explained to her that a razor-sharp blade was kinder than a hangman's noose. That death delivered in seconds with a few thrusts was preferable to a laughing, jabbering mob, gleeful at the jerking, agonizing execution.
But those saint's eyes would've seen the hypocrisy. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

Heather is the first interviewer to have ever caught me off guard. She has a razor sharp mind and a demeanor that could make her the next Barbara Walters. ~ Mark Joyner

Every few days the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, From Papa, With Love. ~ Julie Otsuka

Brooklyn's too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said I could be anything
I wanted - but I chose to live.
On the stoop of an old brownstone,
a cigarette flares, then fades.
I walk towards it: a razor
sharpened with silence.
A jawline etched in smoke.
The mouth where I'll be made
new again. Stranger, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled
with blood thin as a widow's
tears. I am ready. I am ready
to be every animal
you leave behind. ~ Ocean Vuong

It wasn't until after the body was scarred by a brush with danger that it learned fear. Conner thought of all the untouched places on his soul yet to teach him something. All the unblemished parts of him waiting for that razor of truth. ~ Hugh Howey

Prison Moon

Four a.m. work duty and I begin
my solitary trudge from outer compound
to main building. A shivering guard,
chilled in his lonely outpost, strip searches
me until content that my inconsequential nudity.
poses no threat and then whispers
the secret code that allows me admittance
into the open quarter-mile walkway.

I chuff my way into another day
as ice glints on the razor wire
and the rifles note my numbed passage,
silent but for my huffs and scuffle
on the cracked, slippery sidewalk
A new moon, veiled in wispy fog
and beringed in glory, hangs over the prison,
its gaudy glow taunting the halogen spotlights.

The moon's creamy pull upsets
some liquid equilibrium within me
and like tides, wolves and all manner
of madmen, I surrender disturbed by the certainty that under
the bony luminescence of a grinning moon
The lunar deliriums grip me
and I howl--once, then again, and
surely somewhere an unbound sleeper stirs,
penitence is dying a giddy death.

I shake myself sane
and as the echoes hang
in the frigid air I explain
to the wild-eyed guard that convicts,
like all animals under the leash,
must bay at the beauty beyond them. ~ Jorge Antonio Renaud

Razor noticed. "You know him," he said, narrowing his eyes.
I nodded.
He arched a brow. "Hmm ... know him or know-know him?"
"That's none of your business," I snapped. ~ Ada Adams

Kevin tried to sleep with a pillow tight over his face, and he nearly suffocated himself. When he tiptoed over to close the door, they were talking in a subdued tone on the narrow couch. Colette's bare legs were curled up on the pillows, her head riding on the camelback motion of his chest. But her eyes were open, and she looked more adrift than comforted. In a tired baritone, Jerry was talking about prison. It was a horror story -- about the echoing screams of young kids and eyeballs cut open with smuggled razor blades, beginning as the usual speech about the hell he'd seen. But somehow it bcame a lonesome country-western love song, about how every long night of his life he had dreamed of a woman like her-- quick-witted and beautiful and tenacious. It was more than Kevin expected from the man. He told her that if he could buy her safe passage out of this life, hers and Kevin's, he would; but it was hard with a teenage son always pressing to know more and a tiring and insatiable young girlfriend who wanted to devour the world. Think of the pressure on him. "You need to know that we're together like this partly because of you. You keep us up and running. I know it and Kevin knows it. I'm not a good person, Colette -- I never claimed to be, I don't want to be, and you can't expect me to be. But look me in the eye and accept me as a snake, and I'll tell you whatever you're waiting to hear: I need you, I want you, I hurt for you, down in the dust, honey, down in the dust of my bo ~ Peter Craig

They're selling razor blades and mirrors in the street
Pray that when I'm coming down you'll be alseep
If I ever hurt you your revenge will be so sweet
Because I'm scum
And I'm your son
I come undone ~ Robbie Williams

I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat. ~ Mark Twain