Vladimiro Sousa > Vladimiro's Quotes

“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’

Which of us was right, boss?”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“You can knock on a deaf man's door forever.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and *look* for trouble.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other's brains with exquisite precision.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the edge of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in 'oro­nyms', strings of sound that can be carved into words in two different ways: The good can decay many ways / The good candy came anyways.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.)”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, jocks, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functioning illiterates [...].
English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“There are Stone Age societies, but there is no such thing as a Stone Age language.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Complex organs evolve by small steps for the same reason that a watchmaker does not use a sledgehammer and a surgeon does not use a meat cleaver.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“Evolution sceptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling. JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact...That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is....Evolution is the only game in town, the greatest show on earth.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“I shall be using the name 'history-deniers' for those people who deny evolution: who believe the world's age is measured in thousands of years rather than thousands of millions of years, and who believe humans walked with dinosaurs.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“I count religion but a childish toy
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.”
― Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

“BARABAS: For religion
Hides many mischiefs from suspicion.”
― Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

“Only those can understand us who ate from the same bowl with us.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III, Katorga: Exile; and Stalin is No More

“To taste the sea all one needs is one gulp.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

“Evil exists only when its known. Adam and Eve were public in their fall. To sin in private is not to sin at all”
― Molière, Tartuffe

“Believe one who hath proved it, how mightily he rises over his shield, in what a whirlwind he hurls his spear.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Candle in the Wind

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

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...”
― Isaac Asimov