Jake > Jake's Quotes

“One day during the siege, Grant was observed walking the outer line when he encountered a mule-team driver beating and cursing one of the mules. He ordered the man to stop. The animal’s abuser, seeing a man with a blouse and no sign of rank, turned and began to swear at him. Grant had the man arrested and brought to his headquarters. Only then did the mule driver realize whom he had insulted. The man was ordered to be tied up by his thumbs. When released, the contrite soldier apologized for his language, telling Grant he did not know to whom he was speaking. Grant explained that he had punished the soldier not because of what he’d said to his commanding general: “I could defend myself, but the mule could not.”
― Ronald C. White Jr., American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Albert Einstein

“When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”
― Dmitri Shostakovich

“...our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.”
― Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

“A man's alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image of himself.”
― Stan Redding, Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake

“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.”
― Sigmund Freud

“It is not my prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“True generosity toward the future consists in giving everything to the present.”
― Albert Camus

“We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Entropy is the price of structure.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Can we do better?”
― Tim Roughgarden, Algorithms Illuminated (Part 1): The Basics

“Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.”
― Susan Sontag

“Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.”
― Susan Sontag

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“It makes you think the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much must perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There's more of a chance then that they'll survive.”
― Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs

“Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions”
― David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Frederick Douglass

“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world.”
― Pedro Domingos

“Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
― Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell

“Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Real misfortune is not just a matter of being hungry and thirsty; it is a matter of knowing that there are people who want you to be hungry and thirsty”
― Ousmane Sembène, God's Bits of Wood

“All of which is to say, I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don’t know what’s happening, nor do I care.”
― Charles Bukowski, On Writing

“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”
― Michel Foucault