Silvia Ferrara > Quotes

“There’s an alphabet in things, and it’s no coincidence. If you pay attention, if you really look, you’ll see that all around you is an architecture of letters, emerging from the shapes of things. It seems almost obvious: our sense of vision is much more alert to lines, to contrasts, than to the flat or formless surfaces that contain them. What’s happening at the edges, the borders, the interstices—that’s what strikes our eyes.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Humani nihil a me alienum puto,”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“In the 1950s, the neurophysiologist David Hubel began recording the activity of visual cells, using cats as his guinea pigs.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Human interactions, at any rate, are always imperfect and riddled with problems. And writing, as a product of these exchanges, is by definition an equally imperfect system. But none of these shortcomings or imprecisions spoils the broth. Nothing can stop the greatest invention in the world from relaying (however imperfectly) the most important thing in the world: our desire to be understood.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“human beings love to invent stories. Baboons, though no less fascinating than us, spend only 10 percent of their time interpreting, adopting, and imitating others’ actions. The rest of their time they dedicate to finding food and nourishment. Our percentages are the complete opposite. We spend an astonishing amount of time trying to understand others—putting ourselves in their shoes, empathizing, acting as a mirror for their emotions and intentions. This tendency has been a major force in the development of our social intelligence. Other factors, of course, have played a role, but we are the only species that uses imagination. Every day we create real, probable, possible, impossible, and absurd scenarios. An infinity of fictions, one layered atop the other. We create things that don’t exist in nature, such as symbols. Along with histories, laws, institutions, governments. All of this is made up. And all of it hinges on the exchange of information: storytelling, forging alliances, establishing and disrupting social equilibriums, gossip.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“The world is run on codes and cyphers, John. From the million-pound security system at the bank, to the PIN machine you took exception to. Cryptography inhabits our every waking moment. But it’s all computer generated, electronic codes, electronic cyphering methods. This is different. This is an ancient device. Modern code-breaking methods won’t unravel it. —Benedict Cumberbatch, in Sherlock Holmes, “The Blind Banker” (2010)”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“The power of memory is astounding. Before it, all writing, even the most enigmatic, eye-catching, intriguing script, is nothing more than an appendage, an artificial extension. Even Plato, in his day, was onto the idea. In fact, he was even stauncher in his belief—lurking in the invention of writing he saw the pernicious beginnings of a disease, one that “will implant forgetfulness in the souls of all who learn it. They will cease to make use of their memories, since, relying on what is written, they’ll call things to mind not from within themselves, but from without, by means of external signs.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“writing isn’t a tool. For the Egyptians, the Maya, the Chinese, the Mesopotamians, writing was a daughter of the gods. For our solitary inventors, it was a revelation, a divine gift, enlightenment itself. For us, it’s magic. And I say that unsentimentally, with science on my side. Because what you’re doing at this very moment is literally magical. And I mean “literally” literally, letter by letter. You’re reading words and sentences, without even realizing how quickly you’re doing it, how quickly you’re “processing” what’s written. And the magic here lies in your ability to enter the head of someone who’s not there with you, who isn’t speaking to you, who isn’t responding to you. Asynchrony, yes, but what a beautiful thing, this asynchrony! It’s an imperfect magic trick, since comprehension is not instantaneous—it must be pondered, interrogated, and there’s a margin of error. But it’s in this act of pondering, of “thinking it over,” that its perfection lies. It’s the silence of this dialogue that’s so revolutionary. The wheel does no such thing, nor does electricity. Nor even the internet. Writing does it. You do it.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“BEN KINGSLEY: The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons. ROBERT REDFORD: I don’t care. [He walks away] —Sneakers (1992)”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“In the words of our old pal Donald (Rumsfeld again, not Trump): “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Every written thing, in the end, is destined to collapse into dust, and even the hand that writes it is reduced to a skeleton. Lines and words fall from the page, they crumble, and it’s from these little dust piles that little rainbow-colored beings spring out and start leaping. The vital principle of all metamorphoses and all alphabets begins its cycle over again. —Italo Calvino, Collection of Sand”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Some things die hard, however, and we call these things emotions. And I’m not talking about emojis. I’m talking again about our brain and our evolution. For 200 million years now our emotional brain has been a work in progress. Our “rational” cortex, our cognitive apparatus, came later, around 1.8 million years ago. And our linguistic-symbolic development is even more recent. Emotions are as old as the earth, the”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“With uncertainty there’s little you can do—ontologically speaking, you cannot be certain about uncertainty. Yet, by definition, both uncertainty and risk are ways of projecting the future.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“We are all (not just those of us obsessed with undeciphered scripts) masters of confirmation bias. It is mankind’s most formidable intellectual enemy.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“If you have a secret, either conceal it or reveal it. —Arab proverb”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“Which is why the birth of bureaucracy means, in the end, the birth of writing.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“along with the aroma of three ingredients that affect us in powerful ways, engaging our intellect, our logical skills, and our intuition. All three challenge us to understand one another more deeply and truly. They help us to better see the world, to recognize and reorganize the data we absorb from our environment, and to piece it all together. They are mystery, competition, experiment.”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts

“The next aspect of science is its contents, the things that have been found out. This is the yield. This is the gold. This is the excitement, the pay you get for all the disciplined thinking and hard work. The work is not done for the sake of an application. It is done for the excitement of what is found out. Perhaps most of you know this. But to those of you who do not know it, it is almost impossible for me to convey in a lecture this important aspect, this exciting part, the real reason for science. And without understanding this you miss the whole point. You cannot understand science and its relation to anything else unless you understand and appreciate the great adventure of our time. You do not live in your time unless you understand that this is a tremendous adventure and a wild and exciting thing. These are the words of the physicist Richard Feynman, during one of the three lectures he delivered at the University of Washington in 1963.1”
― Silvia Ferrara, The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts