taʔaf Avedisian

“Cryptography is a science of deduction and controlled experiment; hypotheses are formed, tested and often discarded. But the residue which passes the test grows until finally there comes a point when the experimenter feels solid ground beneath his feet: his hypotheses cohere, and fragments of sense emerge from their camouflage. The code 'breaks'. Perhaps this is best defined as the point when the likely leads appear faster than they can be followed up. It is like the initiation of a chain-reaction in atomic physics; once the critical threshold is passed, the reaction propagates itself.”
― John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”
― Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism

“I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves