“Nothingness is everything to philosophers. If you wonder what everything is, then you also wonder what nothing is. The question is whether you can talk about it and still make sense. Heidegger thought that although being and nothing are not something, we nevertheless have a sense of them in moods like anxiety, joy and boredom. I’m writing a book about Heidegger, which means I’m writing about nothing. The good thing about nothing is that there’s so much of it. Pretty much everywhere you go, there it is.”
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“Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.”
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“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
― Computing machinery and intelligence
― Computing machinery and intelligence
“Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.”
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“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― The God Delusion
― The God Delusion
Mona’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mona’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Biography, History, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Science fiction, linguistics, time-travel, cyberpunk, artificial-intelligence, theology, ancient-history, anthropology, archaeology, geography, european-history, government, presidents, political-science, sociology, social-issues, social-science, education, words, humanities, classical-studies, world-history, cultural-studies, internet, society, academic, grad-school, material-culture, theory, american-history, art-history, microhistory, and books-about-books
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