Random quotes

I spend a while recently trying to find interesting quotes for my dissertation. Here's a few from one list of quotes that I found interesting but which didn't make it in:

"If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance" - G.K. Chesterton

"The trouble with simpli?cation is that things are complicated. The trouble with things being complicated is that we need to simplify them" - Charles Crawford

"Before you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn't far better. After you study public opinion, you wonder why policy isn’t far worse" - Bryan Caplan

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution" - Clay Shirky

At the moment my concluding chapter summing things up is the only one lacking an introductory quote. I was a little tempted to throw in the following quote from Kenneth Starr but decided doing so would be a bit too facetious:

After an extensive investigation, the office produced a report that addressed the many questions that confronted the difficult issues, it laid out new evidence, and it reached a definitive conclusion.