In God we trust. All others must have data.

“The clinician, no matter how venerable, must accept the fact that experience, voluminous as it might be, cannot be employed as a sensitive indicator of scientific validity,” Fisher wrote in an article. He was willing to have faith in divine wisdom, but not in Halsted as divine wisdom. “In God we trust,” he brusquely told a journalist. “All others [must] have data.”

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 200

Anglo-catholicism, reaction and whimsy

I discussed over the weekend whether this was a quotation book for conversation. I think it is, though the bon mots would have be exceptionally bon. However, it is certainly a place for excellently written bloggage, of which the following is an exemplar. It's from my favourite blog at the moment, which I would urge you all to read. Anyway, I can't decide which of these two bits is best, so I'll have both:

'We advertise our letters as containing Anglo-catholicism, reaction and whimsy; but like all Church of England publications we actually cover mostly the gays, internal church politics, and nostalgia for an impossibly golden age. For most Anglicans this utopia is the 1950s: for us, true to form, the 1670s. Or possibly the 1630s. Certainly not the 1650s, though.

... 

We encourage you to speak again more of kings than of queens; to become once again the Tory party at prayer. The seventeenth-century Tory party at prayer, of course. Not today's soi-disant version.'

S.Fisher, Posing as a Jacobite, retrieved 22 May 2013 from http://plumsteadletters.blogspot.co.uk/

<http://plumsteadletters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/posing-as-jacobite.html>