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Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
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Nature 430, 971 (26 August 2004); doi:10.1038/430971a

 

Seth Lloyd

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Inside this complex labyrinth of roads lives a great part of the city's population, whose existence is ignored by the government, despite it still demands abusive taxes from it. Taxes which are used in magnificent and useless buildings elsewhere in Rio de Janeiro.

 

Lima Barreto

 

Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present. A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.

 

Nikola Tesla

 

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

 

Richard Lewontin

 

What Senator McCain has lately been suggesting is that somehow I'm going to take money from people making over $250,000, and give it to people who "pay no taxes". What he's confusing is the fact that even if you don't pay income tax, there are a lot of people who don't pay income tax, but you're still paying a whole lot of other taxes. You're paying payroll tax, which is a huge burden on a lot of middle-income families. You're paying sales taxes. You're paying property taxes. There are a whole host of taxes that you're paying. So when we provide an offset to the waitress or the janitor, these folks are working. This isn't some giveaway to people who are on welfare. This is giving help to people who are working hard every day.

 

Barack Obama

 

Science Of Energetics. Although the mechanical hypothesis just mentioned may be useful and interesting as a means of anticipating laws, and connecting the science of thermodynamics with that of ordinary mechanics, still it is to be remembered that the science of thermodynamics is by no means dependent for its certainty on that or any other hypothesis, having been now reduced, to a system of principles, or general facts, expressing strictly the results of experiment as to the relations between heat and motive power. In this point of view the laws of thermodynamics may be regarded as particular cases of more general laws, applicable to all such states of matter as constitute Energy, or the capacity to perform work, which more general laws form the basis of the science of energetics, — a science comprehending, as special branches, the theories of motion, heat, light, electricity, and all other physical phenomena.

 

William John Macquorn Rankine