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[arpad89]

What we call definitions are not definitions; they’re just hints. If you take the Oxford English Dictionary—you know, the one you read with a magnifying glass—and they give you a long, detailed thing which they call a definition of a word; in fact, it’s very far from a definition of a word. It’s a few hints that a person who already knows the concept can use to understand what’s going on.

Noam Chomsky

[arpad89]

How stupid of me to try to look younger. It was only because I’d hoped to save up to take Mrs Tebbs for a last holiday to her birthplace in Wales. For old times’ sake… to Bangor.

Mr Tebbs

[arpad89]

Q: How do tennis players resolve disputes?

A: They go to court.

[arpad89]

Life today is a race between the death of the natural world as we know it and the death of the Enlightenment. In either case, sloth and apathy will allow the darkness to descend.

Stephen Fry

[arpad89]

I know how to use an apostrophe and that is not quite, but nearly, it.

David Mitchell

[arpad89]

Q: What do you call a person who directs the performance of an orchestra only halfway through a symphony?

A: A semiconductor.

[arpad89]

The unfailing instinct of the populist is to declare that the answer to a problem is obvious and to impugn the integrity or even patriotism of anyone who disagrees. The tragedy of ‘populism’ in recent times is that it has ceased to be the exclusive preserve of fringe groups and has become mainstream.

John Bercow

[arpad89]

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.

Robertson Davies

[arpad89]

Q: What do you call a Chow Chow in Spain?

A: An Adiós Adiós.

[arpad89]

Spotify can present oddly satisfying pairings of cover art.

[arpad89]

It’s become increasingly important in these terrible times to emotionally invest in other things than your hopes for sanity to prevail in the political arena.

David Mitchell

[arpad89]

Very often, what’s getting between us and the truth is our own tendency to leap to conclusions.

Tim Harford

[arpad89]

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

George Orwell

[arpad89]

Nostalgia is certainly not always nice – you only want so much of it, I reckon, or you become crushed by the unbearable poignancy of the passage of time.

David Mitchell

[arpad89]

Nobel Prizes come from people who are willing to give up cherished theories in the face of good data.

Vint Cerf

[arpad89]

[arpad89]

In the show next week, we’ll be meeting Maisy Dotes, the girl who blames her loose morals on a mistake she once made knitting. She read the pattern backwards and made herself a pushover.

Ronnie Barker