quotes
Ohne Musik wäre das Leben ein Irrtum.
— Friedrich Nietzche, Götzen-Dämmerung, Sprüche und Pfeile, 33
Changing your mind (in the face of new evidence or understanding!) is not something to be ashamed of, it is something everyone should be proud of.
— Uriel
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
— Terry Pratchett, Diggers
Jag är inte en människa. Det här är bara en dröm, och snart vaknar jag.
— Per Yngve Ohlin
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici.
— Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.
— Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie
The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without respect and without the fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability', and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd'. If he cannot lead, he goes alone. … He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar. … When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.
— Friedrich Nietzche, The Will to Power
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
— Michael Crichton, Aliens Cause Global Warming
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.
— George Bernard Shaw
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool.
— Richard Feynman
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.
— Leonard Nimoy
Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri.
— Archimedes
Some people have very sensitive corns, and the only way to live with them is to step on those corns until they are used to it.
— Wolfgang Pauli
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it.
— Aristotle
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
— Randall Munroe
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
— Milton Friedman, Interview with Richard Heffner on The Open Mind (7 December 1975)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
— Robert Heinlein
Ego vos hortor ut amicitiam omnibus rebus humanis anteponatis.
— Cicero
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier word.
— J. R. R. Tolkien
There's no sense being exact about something if you don't even know what you're talking about.
— John von Neumann
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
— Paul Graham, What You Can't Say
Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen.
— David Hilbert
Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. … Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
— Christopher Hitchens
Indeed, one could define science as reason's attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there'd be no need for a special theory of relativity: it'd be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there'd be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can't do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense.
— Scott Aaronson, Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
You are not important.
— Kodo Sawaki
Programmers with ego don't learn.
— Christian Grobmeier
