Antonio > Antonio's Quotes

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

[Address at Rice University, September 12 1962]”
― John F. Kennedy

“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
― Jesus Christ

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713

“We’re going to advance! Advance! We’ll stop at nothing to advance!”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Know thyself.”
― Socrates

“In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.”
― Alan Kay

“God made the integers; all the rest is the work of Man.”
― Leopold Kronecker

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”
― Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

“We are now in a position to turn to problems of the definition of mathematics. The definition I advocate is briefly this: Mathematics is the science of formal systems.”
― Haskell B. Curry, Outlines of a formalist philosophy of mathematics

“Veni, vidi, vici. (I came, I saw, I conquered.)”
― Julius Caesar

“The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”
― Anonymous

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
― William Blake

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”
― Jean-Luc Picard

“You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.”
― Nikola Tesla

“Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ‘conquer’ Earth, to steal their ‘precious’ physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ‘competition’…as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. Conquering the Galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.”
― Greg Egan

“Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round.”
― Greg Egan, Oceanic

“Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“There’s a cellular automaton called TVC. After Turing, von Neumann and Chiang. Chiang’s version was N-dimensional. That leaves plenty of room for data within easy reach. In two dimensions, the original von Neumann machine had to reach further and further - and wait longer and longer - for each successive bit of data. In a six-dimensional TVC automaton, you can have a three-dimensional grid of computers, which keeps on growing indefinitely - each with its own three-dimensional memory, which can also grow without bound.

And when the simulated TVC universe being run on the physical computer is suddenly shut down, the best explanation for what I’ve witnessed will be a continuation of that universe - an extension made out of dust. Maria could almost see it: a vast lattice of computers, a seed of order in a sea of random noise, extending itself from moment to moment by sheer force of internal logic, “accreting” the necessary building blocks from the chaos of non-space-time by the very act of defining space and time.”
― Greg Egan, Permutation City

“It was a rigorous result in information theory that once you could learn in a sufficiently flexible manner – something humanity had achieved in the Bronze Age – the only limits you faced were speed and storage; any other structural changes were just a matter of style.”
― Greg Egan, Schild’s Ladder

“Oooh, look at me, I looked up a quote!”
― Randall Munroe