Clippings

A town cannot live on dreams. The change was slow but harsh. The young men and women, boys and girls left to find work and to build another life. And the town became, not all at once but steadily, a town of pleasure. People swarmed in on weekends, and they still do. And it will no doubt go on. And there is no blame in this. The town had to find another way to live.

Previously there were small shops because it was a small town. Now there are small shops because the tourists want to think they are still in that little town, which has vanished. It is good business now to appear antiquated, with narrow aisles and quaintly labeled jars.

Darkness you are gentler than my lover . . . his flesh was sweaty and panting, I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me. (p. 109)

Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul (p. 56)

It is a simple case. The eye that does not look back does not acknowledge.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that?

Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.

. . . in solitude, or in that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathise not with us, we love the flowers, the grass and the waters and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring in the blue air there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.

'Thou shalt not live under the same heaven nor tread the same earth with the enemy of thy father or lord,'

They were grainy things, soot and chalk. They could have been anybody.

The window reflected the news. It was about power and sports and anger and death.

But it was too early in the evening for programs that allowed people with peculiar opinions to speak out. It was only a little after eight o’clock, so all the shows were about silliness or murder.

It was very exciting for her, taking his dignity away in the name of love.

“It would sound like a dream,” said Billy. “Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting, usually.”

And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

She upset Billy simply by being his mother. She made him feel embarrassed and ungrateful and weak because she had gone to so much trouble to give him life, and to keep that life going, and Billy didn’t really like life at all.

“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

There was a soft drink bottle on the windowsill. Its label boasted that it contained no nourishment whatsoever.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.

At that time, they were teaching that there was absolutely no difference between anybody. They may be teaching that still.

Being big is not necessarily a good thing: most organisms are bacteria and very few are elephants.

'The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.'

But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.

What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary.

It may be that the overall probability that a random member of the school is a relation is so high that the altruism is worth the cost.

parental care is just a special case of kin altruism.

Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself.

The 'goal' of a machine is simply defined as that state to which it tends to return.

It leaps from body to body down the generations, manipulating body after body in its own way and for its own ends, abandoning a succession of mortal bodies before they sink in senility and death.

A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of natural selection.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use,

The universe is populated by stable things.

(Curiously, peace-time appeals for individuals to make some small sacrifice in the rate at which they increase their standard of living seem to be less effective than war-time appeals for individuals to lay down their lives.)

Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.

“Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.

Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies.

I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.”

“Merde! I absolutely detest all openings and parties! They’re commercial, political, and everybody talks too much. They get on my tits!”

I always wanted to go at the world and try and do too much, and even to do it for something that was not too cheap. That was wrong of me

If you're under suspicion it better to be moving than still, as if you're still you can be in the pan of the scales without knowing it and be weighed along with your sins."

The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it. People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.

“I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure.

Most people need to go to some sort of therapist just to hear these questions asked for the first time.

Kids were given inane homework assignments, like writing down all the reasons why they thought they were special, or the five things they liked most about themselves.

Why? My guess: because giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.

should like it to help to open eyes, not to loosen tongues.

For is it not rather those who misuse 'scientific' language, not to enlighten but to impress the reader, who are 'talking down' to us—from the clouds

was tired of Miss Montag continuously watching his lips. In that way she took control of what he wanted to say before he said it.

The decisions that democracies make may not demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does.

What they disagree about is what democracy is for and what we can expect it to accomplish. Do we have it because it gives people a sense of involvement and control over their lives, and therefore contributes to political stability? Do we have it because individuals have the right to rule themselves, even if they use that right in ridiculous ways? Or do we have it because democracy is actually an excellent vehicle for making intelligent decisions and uncovering the truth?

“It is far more difficult to form an informed opinion about what is good for society as a whole than it is to determine where one’s self-interest lies,”

“The United States is a tenaciously philistine society,”

is that the best way to disclose public information is without hype or even commentary from people in positions of power.

Companies tend to pay people based on whether they do what they’re expected to do. In a market, people get paid based simply on what they do.

One of the real dangers that small groups face is emphasizing consensus over dissent.

“In science, one’s private property is established by giving its substance away.”

selfish—which is to say they are rational, in the economic sense—and always free ride.

People want to do the right thing, but no one wants to be a sucker.

The market may not teach people to trust, but it certainly makes it easier for people to do so.

what is the free market? It’s a mechanism designed to solve a coordination problem,

groups are better at deciding between possible solutions to a problem than they are at coming up with them.

trying to find smart people will not lead you astray. Trying to find the smartest person will.

Its easy to have frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go.

at night I go out for walks, wander around the city. I don't know why. To see faces, I guess.

"There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection.

ago the adolescent in me thought death could happen only to other people),

A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.

and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody.

He's no Freud or Jung or Pavlov or Watson, but he's doing something important and I respect his dedication—maybe even more because he's just an ordinary man trying to do a great man's work, while the great men are all busy making bombs."

It's getting harder for me to write down all my thoughts and feelings because I know that people are reading them.

Only in the matirnity ward by the babys where it dont matter if she talks too much.

“No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”

Good fences make good neighbors.

Everyone knows that they personally are the only good driver on Earth.

All software becomes legacy as soon as it's written.

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Better never means better for everyone,

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

who can remember pain, once it's over?

nobody dies from lack of sex, It's lack of love we die from.

It's like a fart in church.

We lived in the gaps between the stories.

What you don't know won't hurt you,

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

It's black, of course, the color of prestige or a hearse, and long and sleek.

Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you

There's always a black market, there's always something that can be exchanged.

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.

It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained.

Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.

Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

I’d have many acquaintances, friends even, and women, maybe even one woman.

and humans are defined by their papers.

Besides, it isn’t these sorts of revelations, more worthy of poetry than science, that are hoped for by the “believers,” oh no; though they themselves are unaware of it, what they are waiting for is a Revelation that would explain to them the meaning of humankind itself!

It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah.

Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.

If an elephant isn’t a very large bacterium, then an ocean can’t be a very large brain.

Every science comes with its own pseudo-science, a bizarre distortion that comes from a certain kind of mind: astronomy has its caricaturist in astrology, chemistry used to have alchemy.

We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.

We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.

The common people will let it go, oh yes.  They will sell liberty for a quieter life.  That is why they must be prodded, prodded -

A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man."

"He resisted his lawful arresters."

More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty.  But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

They don't go into the cause of goodness, so why the other shop?  If lewdies are good that's because they like it,

human hole products,

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.  The important thing is moral choice.

Happiness is never grand."

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.

It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose-well, you didn't know what the result might be.

Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.

"If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed.

He hated these things-just because he liked Bernard.

"Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly."

the three great London newspapers-777e Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, the pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror.

The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.

“I must pursue my goal through thick and thin and I must not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine,”

“work is still the best way of escaping from life!”

seeking a “biological” (which is to say, an adaptive) explanation for all patterning and collectivity in animal populations runs the risk of invoking a contingent explanation for something that is in fact an immediate consequence of the “physics” of the situation.

"Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational."

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous.

Major instruments of social stability.

For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

Wintriness responded to wintriness.

The DLA cluster is a map of frozen accidents of history.

“Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures,”

“Free will is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.”

Assessing individual events in the context of their average rate of occurrence is a relatively modern practice. Without it, the world is ripe for magic, superstition, miracles, and conspiracy theories.

“Man is free if he needs to obey no person but solely the laws.”1

Hobbes’s supreme authority, whether an individual or a collective body, subsequently had the right to decide who would succeed it—democracy is exercised once and then relinquished.

Mankind’s volitions, therefore, are divided by Hobbes into “appetites” and “aversions”:

The greater the religious diversity, it seemed, the greater the intolerance.

Memory is immortality of a sort. In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.

A few minutes of that reminded me why I always resisted visiting till I had forgotten the despair a visit inspired.

Is that what happens when you get old? You worry more about people and their interaction than you do about drama and the violence and the wicked deeds those people do?

“You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you’re glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Generating rumors is one thing even the most inept armed force does exceedingly well.

The ability to ignore seems to be coupled with a talent for sorcery.

I had plenty of regrets. I am sure she had more. She gave up so much more.

“The Captain is still solving her personnel problems by exiling the questionables to Khatovar.”

the past is, as history, a hall of mirrors that reflect the needs of souls observing from the present. Absolute fact serves the hungers of only a few disconnected

The thing that you know to be true is the lie that will kill you.

“Physician, heal thyself.”

Soldiers live. And wonder why.

God is Great. God is Merciful. In Forgiveness He is Like the Earth. But He can become a tad mean-spirited with unbelievers.

Bunions should be our seal, not a fire breathing skull.

If you always do the easier thing, then you cannot possibly remain steadfast when it becomes necessary to take a difficult stand.

“She’ll be pretty when she’s older and she doesn’t have a brain in her head to complicate things.”

Men driven solely by a need for revenge are flawed tools at best.

“Places are natural, Sleepy. People are good and evil.”

diarrhea of the mouth.

I realize that most history may really pivot on personal considerations like that, not on the pursuit of ideals dark or shining.

Kind of like real life, where the same demon comes back again and again.

This asymmetry of information prevents the various parties from joining forces—which is precisely the point of a democratic government.

it will become harder to access the political messages our neighbors are seeing—and as a result, to understand why they believe what they do, often passionately.

Only the machine knew, and it wasn’t talking.

arbitrary, unaccountable, unregulated, and often unfair—in short, they’re WMDs.

The model is optimized for efficiency and profitability, not for justice or the good of the “team.” This is, of course, the nature of capitalism.

Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested. Big Data can fall into the same trap.

People who favor policies like stop and frisk should experience it themselves. Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other.

In a system in which cheating is the norm, following the rules amounts to a handicap.

when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it.

We’re modeled as shoppers and couch potatoes, as patients and loan applicants, and very little of this do we see—even in applications we happily sign up for.

Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.

The privileged, we’ll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.

You gain nothing by arguing with your critics.

The best of the diviner breed are never wrong because they never set anything in stone.

People want to believe what they want to believe, good, bad, or indifferent, and do not confuse them with facts.

I have always found the religious tolerance of the southerners amazing and disconcerting, though it was really only an ancient habit predicated on the fact that no religious community was strong enough to show the rest the errors in their thinking at swordspoint.

Like any good soldier, if he was bitching he was perfectly all right.

Nobody got hurt. In our gang.

Hagop and I each spent one of our diminishing supply of single finger salutes.

Fickle folk. A little hunger and stress and they forgot all about liberty.

in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.

But is selection really necessary in the strongest sense to create the complex creatures we see around us? Or is it possibly a restriction that limits the creativity of evolution?

If you don’t have a clear objective, then you can’t be wrong, because wherever you end up is okay.

All of us can transform the present into the future. None can transform the future into the present.

The problem is that when individuals with opposing preferences are forced to vote, the winner often represents no one’s ideals (which perhaps explains the nearly-universal frustration people have with politics).

“You can’t control what you can’t measure [69].”

The past doesn’t tell us about the objective but it does offer a clue to something equally if not more important—the past is a guide to novelty.

The theory goes that ideas are rare, so the trick is to capture them. It's like non-musicians being awed by a guitar player, not realizing that great talent is so cheap it literally plays on the streets for coins.

It's like non-musicians being awed by a guitar player, not realizing that great talent is so cheap it literally plays on the streets for coins.

Ideas are cheap. What does work sensibly as property is the hard work we do in building a market.

Diversity beats education any time.

In business, marriage, and collective works, sooner or later, we either stop caring, or we fight and we argue.

Software dies, but community survives.

there are no dangerous opinions, only dangerous responses.

Profits often come from the ignorance of customers.

The core trick is to accept authority without giving it the "right to command."

diversity of opinion, independence of members from one another, decentralization, and effective ways to aggregate opinions.

‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts . . . and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own . . . Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Religion’s surest foundation is the contempt for life.”

he was able to avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a degree of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford.

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

The call to prayer is self–cancelling.

People don’t have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer.

First came the conquerers, unstoppable in war. Then came the administrators, who bound it all together into one apparently unshakable, immortal edifice. Then came the wasters, who knew no responsibility and squandered the capital of their inheritance upon whims and vices.

Nice people tend to think everybody is nice.

“Careful is my middle name.”

any dork who became a soldier for an idea instead of the money deserved to die for his country.

He had learned self-control in a hard school. He had been married for thirty years.

Short people weren’t supposed to be joyous, they were supposed to be cocky and obnoxious. Then you could thump on them and shut them up without feeling bad about it.

I’ve never met a priest who honestly expected miracles in his own lifetime.

More evil gets done in the name of righteousness than any other way. Few villains think they are villains.

hadn’t planned on investigating the source of the noise, because, as you know from watching scary movies, people who investigate noises die.

It was the time of the Monthly Meeting. The big confab during which nothing gets done.

Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.

Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die,

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them.

Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.

Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?"

"Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine."

"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,"

Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

In some ways he was an ideal overlord. All he wanted from his people was to be left alone. He was willing to grant the same favor.

“The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”

Being watched by females changed everything.

the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise.

The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story.

Communicating and coordinating with others was often more trouble than it was worth.

brain was so organized that he was blind to facial expressions.

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

I have been too close to her. I am not in love now.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints.

“Dead heroes don’t get a second chance.”

“It's difficult to work in a group when you are omnipotent.”

‘History,’ the witcher smiled. ‘Is a relation, mostly mendacious, of events mostly irrelevant, given by historians, mostly idiots.’

the agony of choice.’

A philosophy, which is sometimes called an understanding of the law, is simply a way that a person holds the laws in his mind in order to guess quickly at consequences.

It is usually said when this is pointed out, ‘When you are dealing with psychological matters things can’t be defined so precisely’. Yes, but then you cannot claim to know anything about it.

you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.

And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is

Requirements made in the abstract are invariably wrong. Requirements produced by asking people what they need are invariably wrong. Requirements are developed by watching people in their natural environment

There is nothing like a firm deadline to get creative minds to reach convergence

Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

It is a strange world we live in – that all the new advances in understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years.

Destiny is not the way to providence or comfortable fatalism. Destiny is hope.

Do you know, Ciri, what university studies give a person?’ ‘No. What?’ ‘The ability to make use of sources.’

somebody always wants to give to a pauper, even if out of calculation.

The king loved the queen boundlessly, and she loved him with all her heart. Something so fair had to finish unhappily.

A given land’s history is very often created by foreigners. Foreigners are the cause–but the effects are always invariably borne by the local people.

Charles Lamb PART ONE Chapter 1 When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged,

Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved

It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life

“You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”

when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.

“Math is not a spectator sport; you need to play the game.”

Many people, of course, use ' sentimentalism' as a term of abuse for other people's decent feelings, and 'realism' as a disguise for their own brutality.

The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.

A man's first duty, a young man's at any rate, is to be ambitious.

Good work is not done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it.

The public does not need 64 to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

'It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.'

‘In Wonder all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends…But the first Wonder is the Offspring of Ignorance; the last is the Parent of Adoration.’

Consider, for a moment, the following information: A man who preaches love and tolerance is recognized by political and civic leaders as a man of God. He runs a wealthy and growing church. He can show his power to raise the dead and cure fatal illnesses, and no one denies his abilities. He creates and promotes interest in a community in another country wherein followers will be safe from the evils of pollution and prejudice. He teaches them methods of self-defense, warns them against "outsiders," and is obeyed and believed in all he does. Would it not be logical to follow this man wherever he leads?

Nothing succeeds like failure.

already. The real story of automation is not what it replaces but what it enables.

Statisticians are prone to murder and maim for much less provocation.

“How many Bayesians does it take to change a lightbulb? They’re not sure. Come to think of it, they’re not sure the lightbulb is burned out.”

data mining means “torturing the data until it confesses.”

“every time I fire a linguist, the recognizer’s performance goes up.”

Michelangelo said that all he did was see the statue inside the block of marble and carve away the excess stone until the statue was revealed.

"Man wishes to be deceived; deceive him."

But he at no point calls to our attention the miracle known as Chartres Cathedral, the Parthenon in Greece, or even Stonehenge—that most remarkable astronomical construction—because these wonders are European, built by people he expects to have the intelligence and ability to do such work. He cannot conceive of our brown and black brothers having the wit to conceive or the skill to build the great structures they did leave behind.

"bread before poetry"

"Quacks are the greatest liars in the world, except their patients."

Pleasure is nature’s shortcut; it enables humans to respond quickly to changing life demands by prioritizing basic needs that involve different neural systems on a single metric.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

Happiness is a Norman Rockwell painting hanging over your fireplace on a cold winter’s eve. Pleasure is the warmth and aesthetic beauty of the flames, the heat beating on your skin.

‘Do not grieve for the cabbage when the forest is burning,’

Two kinds of people use these machines: the children of the rich, or the fully grown adults of the poorer class, who remain all their lives children.

Enough to feed a whole family, or one rich man.

From the amount of garbage thrown outside the walls of the house, you knew that rich people lived here.

The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs.

a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

and logs of wood, as many as we could pay for, were piled on top of the body.

The printing press changed the way in which we made mistakes. Routine errors of transcription became less common. But when there was a mistake, it would be reproduced many times over, as in the case of the Wicked Bible.

“vast amounts of theory applied to extremely small amounts of data,”

Only death consistently excites your emotions, whether contemplating it when life is safe and stale, or fleeing it when life is threatened and precious.

If he wants to test this hypothesis, one in twenty, he cannot do it from the same data that gave him the clue.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines.

So in science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.

And the newspapers, as you know, have a standard line for every discovery made in physiology today: "The discoverer said that the discovery may have uses in the cure of cancer." But they cannot explain the value of the thing itself.

If you look closely enough at anything, you will see that there is nothing more exciting than the truth,

Only fear can defeat life.

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.

he sent me to all these universities in order to find out those things, and he never did find out.

For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out.

Socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers.

animals don’t escape to somewhere but from something.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he’s not careful.

Hate is many-sided, just as love can be.

The doer must do only when the receiver is ready to receive. Otherwise, the act is wasted.

the only thing a sane person can do in a lunatic asylum is to pretend that he is as mad as the others and at the first opportunity scale the walls and get out.’

Logic was never a strong point with Sikhs;

‘A wise man swims with the current and still gets across.’

His mind was like the delicate spring of a watch, which quivers for several hours after it has been touched.

when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost.

Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?

reading books of medicine, you are always convinced you feel the pains of which they speak.