Tue Le > Tue's Quotes

“Playing well requires study—period. There are more and less sophisticated ways to play the game, and those unwilling to face up to the reality of chess knowledge will be consigned forever to be ineffective, ignorant underachievers. (Understanding this hard truth didn’t amount to acting on it, but it was at least a good first step.)”
― David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess

“In a sense, all schooling in the United States was an elaborate training session for the free market, democratic, meritocratic, modern, bloodless warfare that would dominate their adult lives.”
― David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain

“Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.”
― Pericles

“Time is the wisest counsellor of all”
― Pericles

“When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.”
― Pericles

“Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.”
― Norbert Wiener

“Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.15 And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

“Communism has no greater ally in this country than the half-baked hysterical charges against leaders of this country by political opponents.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Who Can Hold the Sea: The U.S. Navy in the Cold War 1945-1960

“Geopolitical and demographic forces are so rooted in the unchangeable that political action often generates little but noise.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“American involvement in the Persian Gulf has not been in order to secure energy supplies for the United States, but instead to supply energy for its energy-starved Bretton Woods partners in Europe and Asia. Put more directly, the Americans do not protect the Persian Gulf kingdoms and emirates so that the Americans can use Middle Eastern oil, but so that their Bretton Woods partners in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Pakistan can.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“There are good solid reasons as to why nearly every major expansionary power of the past has been based in a temperate climate zone, and why all those that have lasted have been riverine-based.”
― Peter Zeihan, The Accidental Superpower: Ten Years On

“The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoners recover, the fortunes of the upper classes hit the bottom. Economic distress of the elites and lack of effective government feed the continuing internecine wars. But civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. Some die in factional fighting, others succumb to feuds with neighbors, and many just give up on trying to maintain their noble status and quietly slip into the ranks of the commoners. Intra-elite competition subsides, allowing order to be restored. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and another secular cycle begins. 'So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.”
― Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

“We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
― Richard Feynmann

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The real question is whether China can even hold itself together as a country.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“Many condemn Donald Trump for destroying the global Order. Let’s be real here. If there is one thing that Americans on both the Left and Right agree on, it is that the United States should pursue a more modest role in foreign affairs. The push for an American retrenchment did not begin with Trump, nor will it end with him. Besides, if a single American election can upend the Order—in an era when there is no nuclear-massed superpower foe—it was never as stable and durable as anyone thought. A more accurate assessment is that despite Donald Trump’s trademark brashness, American policy trajectory hasn’t changed much. In the seventh year of George W Bush’s presidency, the United States initiated a broad global drawdown of its troop levels. That disengagement continued both under Barack Obama and Donald Trump. At the time of this writing, the Americans now have fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since the Great Depression.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

“In many ways, industrialization is a straitjacket. The suite of industrial technologies improves literacy and mobility and reach and wealth and health, but without the inputs of oil, natural gas, iron ore, phosphates, bauxite, lead, copper, and so on, the whole process collapses in upon itself.”
― Peter Zeihan, Disunited Nations: Succeeding in a World Where No One Gets Along

“In one sense, the world seen through such eyes looks starkly unequal. “A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas,” Shannon began, gesturing toward a rough graph of the distribution of intelligence. “There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get a half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in. Those are the people beyond the knee of the curve.” He was not, he quickly added, claiming membership for himself in the mental aristocracy—he was talking about history’s limited supply of Newtons and Einsteins.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Robert said: ‘Oh my God!’ and Joe calmly replied, ‘Please don’t exaggerate, just call me Professor.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“The Universal Laws of Health Care Systems:

1. "No matter how good the health care in a particular country, people will complain about it"
2. "No matter how much money is spent on health care, the doctors and hospitas will argue that it is not enough"
3. "The last reform always failed”
― T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

“A lot of what we "know" about other nations' approach to health care is simply myth.”
― T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care

“Mathematical rigor is like clothing; in its style it ought to suit the occasion, and it diminishes comfort and restricts freedom of movement if it is either too loose or too tight.”
― George F. Simmons

“The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, “refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.”
― Morris Kline

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever