Ruyu Wang > Ruyu's Quotes

“Most people use statistics like a drunk man uses a lamppost; more for support than illumination”
― Andrew Lang

“I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.”
― Mark Slouka

“I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”
― David Sedaris, Calypso

“So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need. What does it really cost to take a moment to look someone in the eye, to give him a hug, to let her know, I get it. You’re not alone?”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“True bravery is when there is very little chance of winning, but you keep fighting.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“if the problem is fear, the answer is knowledge.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“Funerals are for the living, I have always believed, and the job of the eulogist is to acknowledge the enormity of the loss they have just suffered and to help them appreciate that the legacy and accomplishments of their loved one have not died with them.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“Never tell a man what his interests are. Be straight and open with him about your own interests. And try to put yourself in his shoes. Try to understand his hopes and his limitations, and never insist that he do something you know he cannot.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“The time will come when [his] memory will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“This can happen again. This is happening in other parts of the world now. And you have to speak out. You can’t remain silent. Silence is complicity.”
― Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

“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

“Diseases don’t ruin lives just because they rot off noses. They destroy people if the rest of society isolates them and treats them as undeserving of help and respect.”
― Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

“It is telling that, historically, quarantines extended primarily to those who had less wealth, power, and social clout.”
― Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them

“A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.”
― Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

“The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own "national security" to be paramount above all other consideration.

I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway."

This sort of thing, however, should remain cultural and benign. I'm against it if it means that each group despises others and lusts to wipe them out. I'm against arming each little self-defined group with weapons with which to enforce its own prides and prejudices.

The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.

Can that be done? The question is equivalent to: Can humanity survive?

I am not a Zionist, then, because I don't believe in nations, and because Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world. It sets up one more nation to have "rights" and "demands" and "national security" and to feel it must guard itself against its neighbors.

There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity. ”
― Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.”
― Isaac Asimov

“If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.”
― Isaac Asimov

“The Three Laws of Robotics:

1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law;

The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”
― Isaac Asimov

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“If you're in a fair fight, you didn't plan it properly.”
― Nick Lappos

“No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first, there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years, four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs record....In the popular view, they were divided into two kinds: bad Chinese and good Chinese. The bad ones were the ones in the lugubrious restaurants along the water front where one was as likely to eat like a King as to die a sudden death at the table, sitting before a plate of rat meat with sunflowers, and which were thought to be nothing more than fronts for white slavery, and many other kinds of trafficking. The good ones were the Chinese in the laundries, heirs of a sacred knowledge, who returned one's shirts cleaner than new, with collars and cuffs like recently ironed communion wafers.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“The American Negro is a unique creation; he has no counterpart anywhere, and no predecessors.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex