Quotes

"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things."

- Albert Einstein

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

- Albert Einstein

"History of science is the history of compression progress."

- Juergen Schmidhuber

"What's the point of living comfortably if you can't look across the street and see children of lesser men starving to death?"

- Ted Cruz

"The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."

- Orwell

"Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism - it's my least favorite quality, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen."

- Conan O'Brien

"No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

- Heraclitus

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

- Marcus Aurelius

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information provides a poverty of attention."

- Herbert Simon

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."

- Carl Sagan

"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not."

- Soren Kierkegaard, "The Sickness Unto Death", Datalinks

"Fathers and mothers, tell your sons and daughters you love them. For if not, they will wander the streets as a child devoid of love and respect for themselves, and that loneliness and insecurity will stand out like an unique scent. This scent is known to society and the youth; and will attract those with malice in their intentions. And thus it will happen that your child will follow this person; because for them, this is the first person of the opposite sex that tells them they love them. And they will follow them like a lost puppy to the end of to world, unconditionally, without any second thought."

- Unknown

"I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.

But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action.

The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex.
To be, in a word, unborable.

It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

"If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. But, and that is the main difference, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. This, simply, as a rule, tells you why things that have been around for a long time are not "aging" like persons, but "aging" in reverse.

Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.
This is an indicator of some robustness.
The robustness of an item is proportional to its life."

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

- Douglas Adams

"I like people, but I like them in short bursts. I don't like people for extended periods of time. I'm all right with them for a little while, but once you get up past around... a minute, minute and a half, I gotta get the fuck out of there."

- George Carlin

"Never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

""You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. - Wayne Gretzky""

- Michael Scott

"The chains of habit are too light to be felt, until they are too heavy to be broken."

- Warren Buffett

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of [people] in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

- Bobby Kennedy, 1968