Cristina > Cristina's Quotes

“De todas las islas visitadas, dos eran portentosas. La isla del pasado, dijo, en donde sólo existía el tiempo pasado y en la cual sus moradores se aburrían y eran razonablemente felices, pero en donde el peso de lo ilusorio era tal que la isla se iba hundiendo cada día un poco más en el río. Y la isla del futuro, en donde el único tiempo que existía era el futuro, y cuyos habitantes eran soñadores y agresivos, tan agresivos, dijo Ulises, que probablemente acabarían comiéndose los unos a los otros.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Compassion does not, of course, mean to feel pity or condescend, but to feel with”
― Karen Armstrong, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

“Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Are you proud of yourself tonight that you have insulted a total stranger whose circumstances you know nothing about?”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.”
― Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

“Dividing a number by zero doesn’t produce an infinitely large number as an answer. The reason is that division is defined as the inverse of multiplication; if you divide by zero, and then multiply by zero, you should regain the number you started with. However, multiplying infinity by zero produces only zero, not any other number. There is nothing which can be multiplied by zero to produce a nonzero result; therefore, the result of a division by zero is literally “undefined.” 1A”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“In 1963, the chaos theorist Edward Lorenz presented an often-referenced lecture entitled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Lorenz’s main point was that chaotic mathematical functions are very sensitive to initial conditions. Slight differences in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different results after many iterations. Lorenz believed that this sensitivity to slight differences in the beginning made it impossible to determine an answer to his question. Underlying Lorenz’s lecture was the assumption of determinism, that each initial condition can theoretically be traced as a cause of a final effect. This idea, called the “Butterfly Effect,” has been taken by the popularizers of chaos theory as a deep and wise truth. However, there is no scientific proof that such a cause and effect exists. There are no well-established mathematical models of reality that suggest such an effect. It is a statement of faith. It has as much scientific validity as statements about demons or God.”
― David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

“There is indeed a fundamental beauty in mathematical abstractions. They so attracted the Greek philosopher Plato that he declared that all those things that we can see and touch are, in fact, mere shadows of the true reality and that the real things of this universe can be found only through the use of pure reason. Plato's knowledge of mathematics was relatively naive, and many of the cherished purities of Greek mathematics have been shown to be flawed.”
― David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

“For instance is no proof.”
― David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
― Svetlana Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Come get your apples! Chernobyl apples!’ Someone told her not to advertise that, no one will buy them. ‘Don’t worry!’ she says. ‘They buy them anyway. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Yo tengo miedo. Tengo miedo de una cosa, de que en nuestra vida el miedo ocupe el lugar del amor.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Las abejas se habían dado cuenta, pero nosotros no. Ahora, si noto algo raro, me fijaré en ellas. En ellas está la vida.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Yo sé qué carga es una persona vieja; los hijos te aguantan, te aguantan y, al final, acaban por herirte. Los hijos te dan alegrías mientras son chicos.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.”
― Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

“However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control.”
― Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

“It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its “false idols.” It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols—bigotry and fanaticism—worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it. 1”
― Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

“Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time.”
― Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

“Unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice.”
― Karen Armstrong , The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions

“This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“there is no ascent to the heights without prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano