Taras Basiuk > Taras's Quotes

“There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression “garbage in, garbage out.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“We make high demands on the people we expect to deliver justice, and we don’t always appreciate how much it eats away at them.”
― Val McDermid, Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime

“Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners. They function in industrial societies, as one writer put it, like salt and pepper “sprinkled on practically every conceivable kind of apparatus.” Yet every such society encounters, early on, the vexing problem of incompatible screw threads. Different screws have different measurements, including the thread angles. If those don’t line up between the males and the females, you are, so to speak, screwed. .... Screw thread incompatibilities grew even more worrisome with the advent of cars and planes—complex vibrating objects whose failure could mean death. The problem had hobbled the armed forces in the First World War, which led Congress to appoint a National Screw Thread Commission. Still, it took years, until 1924, before the first national screw thread standard was finally published. It wasn’t a big-splash innovation like the Model T or the airplane, but that hard-won screw thread standard quietly accelerated the economy nonetheless.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that’s not a bad deal.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn’t just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That’s why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It’s also why it is so hard to tickle yourself.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.”
― G.J. Meyer, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“I don't judge, not even myself.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Everything is true," he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“A mother, you son-of-a-bitch, is sacred!”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“People”—Geralt turned his head—“like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“Nonsense," said the witcher. "And what's more, it doesn't rhyme. All decent predictions rhyme.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“I need this conversation. They say silence is golden. Maybe it is, although I'm not sure it's worth that much. It has its price certainly; you have to pay for it.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion