Avaz > Avaz's Quotes

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Why, they are so sure of themselves that they do not even hurry. They move slowly, phlegmatically; they speak of necessary centuries. They swallow worlds at leisure; creep through systems with dawdling complacence.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

“What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.” “No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“[Ford said] ".. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur. "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going in for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was. And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The robot had no feelings, only positronic surges that mimicked those feelings. (And perhaps human beings had no feelings, only neuronic surges that were interpreted as feelings.)”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“A knotty puzzle may hold a scientist up for a century, when it may be that a colleague has the solution already and is not even aware of the puzzle that it might solve.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“My father then said, ‘Mike, I’ve told you how dinosaurs went extinct. An asteroid crashed into the Earth. The world first became a sea of fire, and then sank into a prolonged period of darkness and coldness.… One night, you woke from a nightmare, saying that you had dreamt that you were back in that terrifying age. Let me tell you now what I wanted to tell you that night: If you really lived during the Cretaceous Period, you’d be fortunate. The period we live in now is far more frightening. Right now, species on Earth are going extinct far faster than during the late Cretaceous. Now is truly the age of mass extinctions! So, my child, what you’re seeing is nothing. This is only an insignificant episode in a much vaster process. We can have no sea birds, but we can’t be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil? Your last birthday, I gave you that lovely Ferrari and promised you that you could drive it after you turned fifteen. But without oil, it would be a pile of junk metal and you’d never drive it. Right now, if you want to visit your grandfather, you can get there on my personal jet and cross the ocean in a dozen hours or so. But without oil, you’d have to tumble in a sailboat for more than a month.… These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Everything you see before you is the result of poverty. But how are things any better in the wealthy countries? They protect their own environments, but then shift the heavily polluting industries to the poorer nations.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The insanity of the human race had reached its historical zenith. The Cold War was at its height. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Earth ten times over could be launched at a moment’s notice, spread out among the countless missile silos dotting two continents and hidden within ghostlike nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines patrolling deep under the sea. A single Lafayette- or Yankee-class submarine held enough warheads to destroy hundreds of cities and kill hundreds of millions, but most people continued their lives as if nothing was wrong. As an astrophysicist, Ye was strongly against nuclear weapons. She knew this was a power that should belong only to the stars. She knew also that the universe had even more terrible forces: black holes, antimatter, and more. Compared to those forces, a thermonuclear bomb was nothing but a tiny candle. If humans obtained mastery over one of those other forces, the world might be vaporized in a moment. In the face of madness, rationality was powerless. *”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn't of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point—to embalm them.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“And yet he felt repelled by the teaching machines. For the entire Public School was geared to a task which went contrary to his grain: the school was there not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines. It was the link to their inherited culture, and it peddled that culture, in its entirety, to the young. It bent its pupils to it; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Sheep are funny," the Whitlock said. "Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they'll spot that from a mile away." The Whitlock chuckled. "They're smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn't having read a lot of big books, or knowing long words...it's being able to spot what's to our advantage. It's got to be useful to be real smartness.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn’t hate the cabinet door, I hated my life… My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfiring- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“The only way you’ll know the extent to which you understand reality is to put your ideas and understanding into action. If you don’t test your ideas against the real world—keep contact with the earth—how can you be sure you understand?”
― Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

“Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.”
― Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts

“« You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”
― Shane Parrish, The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts