Hikaiko > Hikaiko's Quotes

“No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean.…”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“In the face of madness, rationality was powerless.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“By the time you’re my age, you’ll realize that everything you once thought mattered so much turns out to mean very little.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Men want power because it makes them feel good. Women want power because it lets us do things.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Did you know that when caterpillars make a cocoon, their bodies totally dissolve? They become nothing, before they become something else.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“If I become lost, I will never be found again”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Because if I allow myself to be angry, I will never stop.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“Many people do terrible things. But we can either eat our anger and make it fuel us or we can let it eat us alive.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“And who the hell are we,” he finally said, voice low and thick, “to carry something so precious?”
― Carissa Broadbent, Daughter of No Worlds

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: Breve historia del mañana

“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. [...] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others. Human”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey”
― Yuval Noah Harari, ההיסטוריה של המחר