Dave > Dave's Quotes

“after all the folderol and hauling over coals stops, what did I learn?...here it comes, a better version of me.”
― F. Apple

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
― Confucius

“There comes always a moment when the desire to act, however ill the cause, is stronger than the wish to listen.”
― Kate Mosse, Sepulchre

“Love - true love - is a precious thing. It is painful, uncomfortable, makes fools of us all, but it is what breathes meaning and color and purpose into our lives.”
― Kate Mosse, Sepulchre

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Black soil flew up in divots; the horses’ heads pounded up and down like pistons, and he felt a sensation of rushing speed no machine could quite match as the great muscles flexed and bunched between his legs. Havel”
― S.M. Stirling, Dies the Fire

“There are things that I canna tell you, at least not yet. And I’ll ask nothing of ye that ye canna give me. But what I would ask of ye—when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I’ll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save—respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies. Do ye agree?”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“More praise for The Demon-Haunted World “As I close this eloquent and fascinating book, I recall the final chapter title from one of Carl Sagan’s earlier works, Cosmos. ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ is a rhetorical question, but I presume to answer it. My candidate for planetary ambassador can be none other than Carl Sagan himself. He is wise, humane, witty, well read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence.… I wish I had written The Demon-Haunted World. Having failed to do so the least I can do is press it upon my friends. Please read this book.” —Richard Dawkins The Times (London)”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?” “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“On occasion, those attending Socrates Café have met the love of their lives.”
― Christopher Phillips, Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart

“There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Good for you. The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don’t have to watch them widening.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. —CARL SAGAN”
― Matt Haig, The Humans

“There are moments when the inner life actually “pays,” when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.  Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

“What you can imagine depends on what you know.”
― Daniel Dennett