Patrick Choi > Patrick's Quotes

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“Ultimately, saying that you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“...success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“If your antagonist can upset you, he owns you at some level.”
― George J. Thompson, Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion

“Never react to what people say. React to what they mean. Just remember: People hardly ever say what they mean.”
― George J. Thompson, Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion

“Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.”
― Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future

“So that morning in 1962 I told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“Thiss sentence contains threee errors.”
― Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

“You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“The reason you're reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“I was reminded of what is perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and businesses to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“I had hoped to serve my country, but instead I went to work for it. This is not a trivial distinction.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
― Edward Snowden

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”
― Edward Snowden

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Post-truth is pre-fascism.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning