Quotes about razor

A collection of quotes on the topic of razor, likeness, blade, edge.

Quotes about razor

“I'm nobody. I'm a tramp, a bum, a hobo. I'm a boxcar and a jug of wine, and a straight razor if you get too close to me.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqrqaPThCmI

Wine

“It seems, my main thing was to be major paid
The game sharper than a motherfucking razor blade
Say money bring bitches, bitches bring lies.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

All Eyez On Me" (1996)
1990s, All Eyez on Me (1996)

Money, Game, Bitch

“Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful.
You might as well live.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Enough Rope

Pain, Law

“Turn the other cheek too often and you get a razor through it.”

John Lydon (1956) English singer, songwriter, and musician

Source: [John, Tobler, 1992, NME Rock 'N' Roll Years, 1st, Reed International Books Ltd, London, 303, CN 5585]

“Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

"On What There Is"
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)

Sense

“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 Bolaño book Amulet

Source: Amulet

Love

“Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken. A stick becomes a flute when it's loved.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

Source: Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings

Love

“Hush little baby, Dont you cry, Dont cut your arms, Dont say goodbye. Put down that razor, Put down that light, It maybe hard but, You'll win this fight.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Light, Fight, Baby, Cry

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Shelter from the Storm

Beauty

“One more dance along the razor's edge finished. Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.”

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos

Variant: Almost dead yesterday, maybe dead tomorrow, but alive, gloriously alive, today.
Source: Lord of Chaos

Dance, Dead

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Imagination

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.”

Philip K. Dick book VALIS

Source: VALIS (1981)

“Believe this," he whispered, and kissed her with the sharp, sleek kiss, the silver kiss, so swift and true, and razor sharp, and her warmth was flowing into him.”

Annette Curtis Klause book The Silver Kiss

Source: The Silver Kiss

Kiss

“I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,
sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through every
painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.”

Michele Bardsley (1970) American writer

Source: Don't Talk Back To Your Vampire

Life, Pain, Books, Knowledge

“If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Pain, Girl

“Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.”

Richard Russo book Straight Man

Source: Straight Man (1997), Ch. 2.

People, Thinking, Distant, Past

“A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth… Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicate to the sayings of Confucius. Such a society functions admirably in the production of cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end and joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit talking not of love and courage but of the convenience of safety razors.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

Love, Wisdom, Pain, World

“To endeavour to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Thoughts on Various Subjects (1727)

Sense

“With your Elvis Presley and wasp-waist and swivel-hippy, show you had, and I must say it showed it first self in pictures with the rhythmic contrapole of the wobbling of the hipper, sideways with the head and tilty, gave him that expression both also with a little doggy-lublike in the eyebold which he conveyed to the smaller femailode of the specie, coupled with his music because he did trittly-how fine on the strims, helped him along the roamer […. ] I heard it first of all on a record in the early mordy: I was doing the shavit-huff with my razor blade, which of course is a safety one, and suddenly, suddenly he did a little syncopole or a drop-it and how, or something he did and caused a jerkit over a pimplode and I've been suffering ever since!”

Stanley Unwin (comedian) (1911–2002) British comedian

On Elvis
Rotatey Diskers with Unwin (1960)

Music, Suffering, Help

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at 4 o'clock in the morning.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994-1995)

Books, World, Feeling, Drink

“All your dreams are made / When you're chained to the mirror and the razor blade”

Noel Gallagher (1967) British musician

Morning Glory
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995)

Dreams

“Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

2000s

Intelligence, Nature

“What is found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier ones. While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. While DNA could be claimed to be both simple and elegant, it must be remembered that DNA almost certainly originated fairly close to the origin of life when things were necessarily simple or they would not have got going.
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Life, Study, Science, Parting

“I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Antrobus, in Act 3
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

World, Home, Time, Country

“On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Writers at Work interview (1958)

Past, Future

“Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Blog comment, , to PZ Myers, " Always Name Names https://web.archive.org/web/20110706204901/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php" (), Pharyngula, quoted in Rebecca Watson, " The Privilege Delusion http://skepchick.org/2011/07/the-privilege-delusion/", Skepchick. <br class="br">Regarding the Rebecca Watson elevator incident.

Death, Cars, Coffee, Thinking

“With a simple shave of the razor Steve-O easily disguises himself in fooling the whale shark in thinking he's a harmless young boy.”

Chris Pontius (1974) American actor

Jackass: The Movie

Fools, Boy, Thinking

“Shave my face with a rusty razor!”

Mike Lange (1948) Canadian sportscaster

"Eddie Spaghetti! The Story Behind Mike Lange-isms"

“But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was forever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter I

Life, People, Alcohol, Fear

“…because of the myth of progress, it is much easier to sell a man an electric razor than a straight-edged one.”

Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Vintage, p. 41
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1965)

“After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation--a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 9 (p. 75)

Thinking

“Rochester: [checking his equipment] Shaving cream, brush, razor, smelling salts.”

Jack Benny (1894–1974) comedian, vaudeville performer, and radio, television, and film actor

The Jack Benny Program (Radio: 1932-1955), The Jack Benny Program (Television: 1950-1965)

“…when I went out I tried to push the door instead of pulling it. 'Pull it, mate,' said someone, and I had to obey. I nearly tripped over a footscraper and, the door closed, had the impression of loud laughter. The vile blunt-razor-blade wind blew hard from my sister’s house. I felt ashamed and furious. In the East there was politeness, doors opened the right way, there were no footscrapers.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Way, Sister, Laughter, Housing

“Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor.”

Homér Iliad

X. 173–174 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Life, Death

“It was while Princess Margaret was attending a high-society party in New York that the hostess asked her politely how the Queen was keeping. "Which one?" she is reported to have replied with her typically razor-sharp wit. "My sister, my mother or my husband?"”

Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930–2002) younger daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother

From Snowdon: The Biography

Sister, Princess

“Where does the hand become the wrist?
where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor's edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.”

Simon Armitage (1963) Poet, playwright, novelist

'Gooseberry Season', from Kid.

“A fellow in a market town,
Most musical, cried razors up and down.”

John Wolcot (1738–1819) English satirist

Farewell Odes, Ode iii; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Music

“I kind of had a disaster, I was doing a show, and I changed there, and I couldn’t wear underwear — I don’t think I can tell this story on TV … Let’s just say everyone went scrambling for a razor, so I went from being the most beautiful to the most humiliated in one day.”

Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) American actress, singer, and food writer

In an interview in The Ellen DeGeneres Show. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/04/gwyneth-paltrow-ellen/ (April 26, 2013)

Beauty, Thinking, Change

“When you sit at home comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on outside there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking about how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on right under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find. Then again, I'm not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as vicious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead.”

Mickey Spillane (1918–2006) American writer

My Gun is Quick (1950)

Life, People, Books, School

“Dark Energy. It can be found in the observable Universe. Found in ratios of 75% more than any other substance. Dark Energy. It can be found in religious extremists, in cheerleaders. To come to the conclusion that Dark signifies mean and malevolent would define 75% of the Universe as an evil force. Alternatively, to think that some cheerleaders don't have razors in their snatch is to be foolishly unarmed.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

American Doll Posse, biography by Pip

Thinking, Universe, Evil

“I wanted to kill myself. I would have done it, too, if I had owned a gun. I was considering the gruesome alternatives — pills, slitting my wrists with a razor blade, jumping off a bridge — when another student called to ask me a detailed question on relativity. There was no way, after fifteen minutes of thinking about Mr. Einstein, that suicide was still a viable option. Divorce, certainly. Celibacy, highly likely. But death was out of the question. I could never have prematurely terminated my love affair with physics.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Richard Wakefield" in Rama II (1989)
1980s

Love, Death, Way, Question

“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 (1947) American writer

Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) (2007)

Housing, Box

“Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Iliad of Homer, Rendered into English Prose (1898), Book X

Life, Death

“Wow. Well on a personal level this century has been going so well for us, we finished our album, I had a little baby boy a little while ago, the whole Jubilee 2000 work has been incredible, just everything has been going great. There's also been some great breakthroughs in science, the disposible mobile phone, 3 blade razor and the female orgasmatron which is great - anyway now this... thanks everybody our record company has been great, our management have been great and our producer's amazing.”

The Edge (1961) Irish rock musician, guitar player of U2

2001
Acceptance speech at the Grammy's

Boy, Science, Baby, Personality

“Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s Razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing.”

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 6, “The Infinite Ocean” (p. 52)

“I have staked my career—my life itself—on the things I could see, on the stories I could credit, and on the eventual vindication, when the book was closed, of the reasonable and skeptical approach. In the face of twenty-five years of bloodshed, mayhem, criminality, and the universal human pastime of ruination, I have clung fiercely to Occam’s razor, seeking always to keep my solutions unadorned and free of conjecture, and never to resort to conspiracy or any kind of prosecutorial woolgathering. My mother, whenever she was confronted by calamity or personal sorrow, invoked cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues; it has been the business of my life to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation. But we were fools, she and I, arrant blockheads, each of us blind to or heedless of the readiest explanation: that the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

The God of Dark Laughter https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/09/the-god-of-dark-laughter, The New Yorker (April 9, 2001)

Life, Books, World, Fools

“No company in its right mind tries to sell to everyone. Gillette does not try to sell razor blades to preteens, and Kimberly-Clark doesn't try to sell its Huggies to childless families. A savvy steel company doesn't try to sell steel to every steel-using company.”

Philip Kotler (1931) American marketing author, consultant and professor

Philip Kotler (2012). Kotler On Marketing, p. 125: About defining the Target Market

Family

“Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.”

Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) writer and poet from England

To the Imitator of the First Satire of Horace, Book ii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told
Not to thy credit;
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost—
Useless, except to roast—
Doctors have said it:How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards;
Go mad, and beat their wives;
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving knives
Into their gizzards.”

Charles Stuart Calverley (1831–1884) British poet

Ode to Tobacco.

Cats, Madness

“Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife. Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life. Oooh.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Bright College Days"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Life, World

“[Nasreddin Hoca is being shaved by an inexperienced barber. ]
"One moment, Sir!" said the barber, and he stuck a bit of cotton on the wound. In the next pass of the razor, another bit of the Hoca's cheek went with it. "One moment, sir!" and he stuck a bit of cotton on the second wound. With each stroke of the razor, another bit of cotton joined the crop sprouting on the Hoca's left cheek. "Now," said the barber, "I'll do the other side." "One moment, young man!" said the Hoca as he studied the bits of cotton that dotted his left cheek. "Stop right there! I believe I'll plant wheat on the other side."”

Nasreddin (1208–1284) philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes

Barbara K. Walker and Helen Siegl, The Art of the Turkish Tale (1990), Vol. 1, , p. 57

Study

“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Wifebeater"
The Book of Folly (1972)

Women, Food, Color, Star

“A barber is by nature and inclination a sport. He can tell you at what exact hour the ball game is to begin, can foretell its issue without losing a stroke of the razor, and can explain the points of inferiority of all the players, as compared with the better men that he has personally seen elsewhere, with the nicety of a professional.”

Stephen Leacock Literary Lapses

Men Who Have Shaved Me
Literary Lapses (1910)

Men, Game, Nature, Sport

“There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born,
Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn;
And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Naaman's Song http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/LimitsRenewals/naamansong.html, Stanza 2. <br class="br">Other works

Love, Youth

“Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus… of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship.
Now the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.
This is indeed amazing.
Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.
But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.”

G. Spencer-Brown (1923–2016) British mathematician

Source: Laws of Form, (1969), p. 104-05; as cited in: David Phillip Barndollar (2004) The Poetics of Complexity and the Modern Long Poem https://www.lib.utexas.edu/etd/d/2004/barndollardp50540/barndollardp50540.pdf, The University of Texas at Austin, p. 12-13.

World, Law, Way, Travel

“The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades — ka-ching!”

David Pogue (1963) Technology writer, journalist and commentator

" The Kindle: Good Before, Better Now http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/technology/personaltech/24pogue.html," The New York Times, February 24, 2009.

Books

“Okemah was one of the singiest, square dancingest, drinkingest, yellingest, preachingest, walkingest, talkingest, laughingest, cryingest, shootingest, fist fightingest, bleedingest, gamblingest, gun, club and razor carryingest of our ranch towns and farm towns, because it blossomed out into one of our first Oil Boom Towns.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

Pastures Of Plenty: A Self Portrait (1990), p. 3

“When two hypotheses are possible, we provisionally choose that which our minds adjudge to be simpler, on the supposition that this is the more likely to lead in the direction of truth. It includes as a special case the principle of Occam's razor-entia non multiplicana praeter necessitatem.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Truth

“I did not like the colonel at all. He had eyes like razors…the eyes of a machine. An educated machine… I realised he was drinking less than we were…And that he was playing with me. That he was a realist… Also that Anton was careless with his tongue…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Education, Drink

“Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion… Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip… fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.”

Dick Hebdidge

Dick Hebdidge (1979). . p.106-12

School, Art, Fashion, Clothes

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act…The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. Houseman's test for great poetry.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

The Name and Nature of Poetry

Memory

“And their mouths are cut like razor blades, and their eyes are like stilettos, and her radiator's steaming and her teeth are in a wreck, she won't let you kiss her, but what in the hell do you expect?”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

"Small Change", Small Change (1976).

Hell, Kiss

“One afternoon I went to visit him. [Jacob, an older and close friend of Jopie - a real freebooter]. I knew he was home, I took pen, ink and my sketchbook with me and did half a liter of gin in my pocket. He lived in the back of an alley and was sitting in his chair by the window.... I told him, 'You will get the whole bottle, but one condition. I want to make a beautiful drawing of you, so first you have to sit still for twenty minutes and look at me closely. If I look at you and you don't look at me, the deal is over....'Okay', he said. I never had a model like him before... Stock-still he sat.... and looked at me without a single blink of his eyes. Within half an hour he was there on the paper - razor-sharp... While I am writing this down, it is as if he is sitting in front of me again..”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Op een middag ging ik bij hem op bezoek. [bij Jacob, een oudere en hechte vriend van Jopie en een echte vrijbuiter]. Ik wist dat hij thuis was, nam pen en inkt en mijn schetsboek mee en deed een halve liter jenever in mijn zak. Hij woonde achter in een steegje en zat in zijn stoel bij het raam.. .Ik zei: 'Je krijgt de hele fles van me, onder één voorwaarde. Ik wil een prachtige tekening van je maken en daarvoor moet je eerst twintig minuten doodstil zitten en me strak aankijken. Als ik naar jou kijk en jij kijkt niet naar mij, dan gaat het over.. ..'Afgesproken', zei hij. Ik heb nog nooit zo’n model gehad!.. .Doodstil zat hij.. ..en keek me zonder ook maar één keer met zijn ogen te knipperen strak in mijn gezicht. Binnen een half uur stond hij haarscherp op het papier.. .Terwijl ik dit opschreef was het net alsof hij weer voor me zat.
Source: Jopie de Verteller' (2010) - postumous, p. 58

Beauty, Home, Drawing

“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde…
“It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”
“It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”

Tim Powers book Expiration Date

“I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”
Source: Expiration Date (1995), Chapter 40 (p. 308; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Shoe, Thinking, Grass, Cry

“We did not flinch but gave our lives to save Greece when her fate hung on a razor's edge.”

Simonides of Ceos (-556–-468 BC) Ancient Greek musician and poet

From the Cenotaph at the Isthmos

Fate

“(Sylvia at typewriter) A lady never offers a new lover a complimentary tooth brush, razor and sewing kit the next morning.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 123

Lovers

“I think The Razor's Edge is a pretty good movie. But at the time, it was just as reviled as any other comedian doing a serious thing now.”

Bill Murray (1950) American actor and comedian

Rolling Stone Issue 903 (22 August 2002)
Context: I think The Razor's Edge is a pretty good movie. But at the time, it was just as reviled as any other comedian doing a serious thing now. Like The Majestic [with Jim Carrey], movies where comedians go straight, people don't like them.
It angers people, like you're taking something away from them. That's the response I got. I thought, "Well, aren't we all bigger than that?" I wasn't shocked by it, but I thought that the professional critics would be able to say, "OK, we shouldn't rule this out, because the guy normally does other stuff."
Unless it's really despicable, then you have to just jump with both feet on the neck.

Thinking, Time

“But you will mark the limitation of my approval of Ockham's razor. It is a sound maxim of scientific procedure. If the question be what one ought to believe, the logic of the situation must take other factors into account.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.60
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well. No matter if it takes fifty generations of arduous experimentation to explode the simpler hypothesis, and no matter how incredible it may seem that that simpler hypothesis should suffice, still fifty generations are nothing in the life of science, which has all time before it; and in the long run, say in some thousands of generations, time will be economized by proceeding in an orderly manner, and by making it an invariable rule to try the simpler hypothesis first. Indeed, one can never be sure that the simpler hypothesis is not the true one, after all, until its cause has been fought out to the bitter end. But you will mark the limitation of my approval of Ockham's razor. It is a sound maxim of scientific procedure. If the question be what one ought to believe, the logic of the situation must take other factors into account. Speaking strictly, belief is out of place in pure theoretical science, which has nothing nearer to it than the establishment of doctrines, and only the provisional establishment of them, at that. Compared with living belief it is nothing but a ghost. If the captain of a vessel on a lee shore in a terrific storm finds himself in a critical position in which he must instantly either put his wheel to port acting on one hypothesis, or put his wheel to starboard acting on the contrary hypothesis, and his vessel will infallibly be dashed to pieces if he decides the question wrongly, Ockham's razor is not worth the stout belief of any common seaman. For stout belief may happen to save the ship, while Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem would be only a stupid way of spelling Shipwreck. Now in matters of real practical concern we are all in something like the situation of that sea-captain.

Question

“There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

“But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s
Context: The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet...

Truth

“Certain actual sleeping pills cause retrograde amnesia. It can be true that, if I take such a pill, I shall remain awake for an hour, but after my night’s sleep I shall have no memories of the second half of this hour. I have in fact taken such pills, and found out what the results are like. Suppose that I took such a pill nearly an hour ago. The person who wakes up in my bed tomorrow will not be psychologically continuous with me as I was half an hour ago. I am now on psychological branch-line, which will end soon when I fall asleep. During this half-hour, I am psychologically continuous with myself in the past. But I am not now psychologically continuous with myself in the future. I shall never later remember what I do or think or feel during this half-hour. This means that, in some respects, my relation to myself tomorrow is like a relation to another person. Suppose, for instance, that I have been worrying about some practical question. I now see the solution. Since it is clear what I should do, I form a firm intention. In the rest of my life, it would be enough to form this intention. But, when I am no this psychological branch-line, this is not enough. I shall not later remember what I have now decided, and I shall not wake up with the intention that I have now formed. I must therefore communicate with myself tomorrow as if I was communicating with someone else. I must write myself a letter, describing my decision, and my new intention. I must then place this letter where I am bound to notice it tomorrow. I do not in fact have any memories of making such a decision, and writing such a letter. But I did once find such a letter underneath my razor.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), pp. 287-288

Life, Making love, Feeling, Communication

“The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet...”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s

Truth, Law, Swine, Housing

“Harvey was not especially introspective, but this didn’t mean he was stupid. He was moral, within his lights; he understood the value of subtlety even if he wasn’t much for it himself, and one of the reasons he could get away with being loud and obnoxious was that he was a fair stick at strategy and logistics. Give him a job and he’d do it, usually in the most entropy-producing way possible, yes, but also in a way that achieved exactly the aim it was supposed to. One of Harvey’s guiding lights in terms of strategies was simplicity; all things being equal, Harvey preferred the course of action that let him get into the middle of things and then just buckle down. When asked about it, Harvey called it his Occam’s razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone’s ass was usually the correct one.”

John Scalzi book The Ghost Brigades

Source: The Ghost Brigades (2006), Chapter 14 (p. 315)

Stupidity, Way, Light

“Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djam karet.”

Harlan Ellison book Eidolons

We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
"Eidolons" (1988)

Heart

“Is Corona laboratory-made? Nah. I think it's way more reasonable to assume that a bat fucked a pangolin. And some guy then fucked that pangolin. Mystery solved. Occam's razor.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

73rd Communique of the CPSUZoeD https://www.derstandard.at/jetzt/livebericht/2000116238563/ <br class="br">Quotes as Nikita P. Chrusov

Way, Guy, Thinking

“Gerry had once said to her in the middle of an argument that he didn't believe in souls but if, just perchance, they did exist, hers would be like a razor. She had been made that way by the Catholic Church, he said. Inflexible, narrow, capable of doing terrible damage by her adherence to rules and systems. But she totally objected. She told him that if she was a good person at all, it had come from her religion. If she had any sense of justice and fairness, any concept of equality, then it had come from the Church.”

Bernard MacLaverty book Midwinter Break

Ch 11 - p.217
Novels, Midwinter Break (2017)

Religion, Justice, Way, Soul