Cristian > Cristian's Quotes

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“I will set aside the point that I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”
― Frederick Brooks

“Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.”
― Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“People often think I'm a faker, but I'm usually honest, in a certain way--in such a way that often nobody believes me!”
― Richard Feynman

“Mathematics is a language plus reasoning; it is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

“We are lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. ”
― Richard Feynmann

“So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“There is no authority who decides what is a good idea.”
― Richard Feynman

“Words can be meaningless. If they are used in such a way that no sharp conclusions can be drawn.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

“Thank you very Much, I enjoyed myself”
― Richard P. Feynman

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir