-- Sir Isaac Newton had on his table a pile of papers upon which were written calculations that had taken him twenty years to make. One evening, he left the room for a few minutes, and when he came back he found that his little dog "Diamond" had overturned a candle and set fire to the precious papers, of which nothing was left but a heap of ashes.
"This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
-- This quote appeared in April 1953 in the scientific paper where James Watson and Francis Crick presented the structure of the DNA-helix, the molecule that carries genetic information from one generation to the other.
"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."
-- British Admiral David Beatty had just watched two of his battle-cruisers explode and disintegrate under German fire at the Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916.
"I think there's a problem between Shias and Sunnis."
-- The Egyptian Foreign Minister in a 2006 BBC interview regarding current affairs in the Middle East.
"The straw-man technique is also used as a form of media manipulation."
from Wikipedia's definition of Straw Man. According to the site, a straw man "is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position. To 'set up a straw man' or 'set up a straw man argument' is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact a misleading fallacy, because the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted."
