John Brew > John 's Quotes

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Nothing is ours, except time.”
― Seneca

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World

“The way rockets work right now is they are all expendable. So, you fly them once, and you throw it away. You can imagine if any mode of transport was expendable, it wouldn’t be used very much. But whether it’s a plane, a boat, a car, a bicycle, or a horse—they’re all reusable. If a 747 costs about a quarter-billion dollars and you need two for a round-trip, nobody is paying half a billion dollars from London to New York and back.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“It was 1995, the dawn of the Internet era. “I thought the Internet would be something that would fundamentally change the nature of humanity,” he said during a speech in 2012. “It was like humanity gaining a nervous system.” So, he told his professor he was taking a deferment to see whether he could start an Internet company, and the teacher said, “Well, I don’t think you’ll be coming back.” That was the last time they ever talked.”
― Christian Davenport, The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

“The birds had been given everything they needed. A home in the thin, pure air: a moment of weightlessness, a reprieve from the gravity of life.”
― Vanessa Diffenbaugh, We Never Asked for Wings

“It is the chief characteristic of the religion of science that it works.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“If there is a silver lining to suffering trauma, it is the opportunity to learn about one’s self, to trail mental fingers over a previously unrecognized core of inner strength.”
― Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town

“The River is a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded people that includes everyone from low-stakes poker pros just trying to grind out a living to crypto kings and venture-capital billionaires. It is a way of thinking and a mode of life. People don’t know very much about the River, but they should. Most Riverians aren’t rich and powerful. But rich and powerful people are disproportionately likely to be Riverians compared to the rest of the population.”
― Nate Silver, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything