Douglas E. Richards > Quotes

“T.S. Elliot: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens

“The universe was infinite, and there were most likely an infinite number of universes. To sit on one tiny planet in an ocean of infinite infinities and believe you understood anything about the true nature of existence and reality was absurd.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Wired

“this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” —Robert Pirsig”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“be the master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it.’”  “Oliver Wendell Holmes,”
― Douglas E. Richards, Game Changer

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Representatives of the Copernicus, still the most respected global authority on all things alien, held press conferences, and individual nations did the same. Scientific and governmental authorities everywhere tried to calm nerves and avert panic. Each described experiments showing the nanites were harmless—that a person could ingest them all day, could bathe in them, without any adverse effects—and insisted that that they would reach a population equilibrium as did all organisms. They called on microbiologists to hit the airwaves, reminding people that humanity had always shared the planet with microbes, which were the dominant form of life on Earth in terms of biomass, and had been for ages, despite being invisible.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Amped

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. ” —Arthur Schopenhauer “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” —Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate & Quantum Physics Pioneer”
― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens

“Unless you truly believed in something to the deepest depth of your being, as did Delamater, all men were whores in the end. There was an old joke that had always struck Delamater as defining of the human species. A man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for ten million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she would sleep with him for a dollar. She is aghast. “What kind of woman do you take me for?” she asks. To that, the man responds, “We have established what you are, madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“But I begin to wonder if he also doesn’t have a demented sense of humor, and thinks it’s fun to throw wild shit our way.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Politics, noun: [Poly ‘many’ + tics ‘blood-sucking parasites’]”             —Larry Hardiman”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”  —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Review of Southey’s Colloquies on Society”
― Douglas E. Richards, Seeker

“It’s impossible to say. Normal motives don’t necessarily apply to psychopathic personalities. Jeffrey Dahmer murdered and cannibalized seventeen people, three of whose skulls were found in his refrigerator.” “That’s perfectly rational behavior,” said Desh sarcastically. “He just didn’t want them to spoil.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Wired

“In my book, though, they should have changed Unidentified Flying Objects to Mysterious Otherworldly Flying Objects—or MOFOs. This name was more accurate after all. And I’d give my last dollar to hear TV reporters using the new acronym.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Unidentified

“was reality? Was anything real? Didn’t every schizophrenic convince themselves that their reality was self-consistent and rational?”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“And while looks deteriorated with time, a great personality and great chemistry only strengthened.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“when you didn’t know what you didn’t know, you could fool yourself pretty easily.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker, Harvard Professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler”
― Douglas E. Richards, Seeker

“And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“He would become a career politician, the profession that attracted a higher percentage of fellow psychopaths than any other. And while there were a number of pathetic men and women who had chosen politics in a sincere effort to help others, on the whole, politicians were narcissistic backstabbers. Professional liars. Totally selfish and without conscience, most couldn’t care any less about others, although they could con anyone into believing they were the most compassionate people on Earth.”
― Douglas E. Richards, BrainWeb

“studied.” “The cocktail party effect?” “Right.” “Good name for it,” said Megan with a smile. “So how does it work?” “The gist of it is that people soak up far more information than we realize. All the time. At the subconscious level, we’re monitoring everything. But our subconscious can’t bring all of it to our conscious attention or we’d drown. Too much information. So in the party example, your brain is taking in all of the conversations around you, but sparing you from having to deal with them. So you can focus on your own conversation. But when your subconscious hears your name, or the words, ‘run, the house is on fire,’ or something else of great interest to you, it decides that this is important information and brings it to your conscious attention. It seems like magic. It’s not that you’re suddenly paying attention. Part of you was always paying attention. You just didn’t know it.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“To every man upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better, than facing fearful odds. For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods.” —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius at the Bridge”
― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube

“The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.”   —James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Wired

“Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“Things have improved dramatically, but we still have a ways to go. And never underestimate the ability of human beings to take things for granted, and find ways to be miserable. The truth is, even though we live in the best of times, most of us believe the opposite. That poverty, and literacy, and so on have gotten worse, even though they’ve gotten considerably better. This is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. Just in the last thirty years or so.”
“Why would that be?” asked Otto.
Boyd frowned. “Turns out that in our day we’re drowning in news,” he explained. “Every second, every day, a weight of news that is almost inconceivable. And those providing this news know that only the most dramatic will stand out. So we’re told the sky is falling a hundred times a day. And rather than discuss how far we’ve come, the dire problems we thought our way out of, we amplify every problem, every behavior that is less than perfect, into crisis proportions. Pessimism sells far better than optimism.”
― Douglas E. Richards, The Enigma Cube

“Make coffee, not war,”
― Douglas E. Richards, Quantum Lens

“You have greater access to sanitation and clean water than ever before. To privacy, leisure, and artificial light. To transportation, communication, and computation. The list goes on and on.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Seeker

“In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Seeker

“In the West, the phone had become a drug even more addictive than opioids. In a culture becoming ever more secular, the phone had become a god.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Seeker

“Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Humanity seemed to have a singular ability to find destructive uses for any constructive technology. Invent the computer, and you could be certain someone would invent computer viruses and other ways to attack it. Invent the Internet, an unimaginable treasure trove of information, and you could bet it would be used as a recruiting tool for hate mongers and instantly turned into a venue for child pornographers, sexual predators, and scam artists. Humanity never failed to find a way to become its own worst enemy. “I”
― Douglas E. Richards, Wired