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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f09c114 | Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling | Isaac Asimov | ||
| d52e86d | Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That's Rule Three to a robot. Also every 'good' human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, h.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 1726d32 | Jessie rummaged through her purse for the necessary equipment. If there were one thing, Baley had once said solemnly, that had resisted mechanical improvement since medieval times, it was a woman's purse. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 169fc9b | Your problem is, you're trying to understand it. You need to just do it. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| fdea04c | We don't care about what you did yesterday--we care about what you're going to do tomorrow. | the-future | Cory Doctorow | |
| 93d8b9a | If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine -- any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door -- using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe. | programming | Cory Doctorow | |
| ba9dadd | I read my copy of On the Road and dug the scenery whizzing past. On the Road is a semi-autobiographical novel about Jack Kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around America, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. Hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. There's not really a plot -- Kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll o.. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 22a4e5d | What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!" | Jules Verne | ||
| eec785e | Ah!" I cried, springing up. "But no! no! My uncle shall never know it. He would insist upon doing it too. He would want to know all about it. Ropes could not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He would start, he would, in spite of everything and everybody, and he would take me with him, and we should never get back. No, never! never!" My over-excitement was beyond all description." | Jules Verne | ||
| da092fb | Mr. Fogg accordingly tasted the dish, but, despite its spiced sauce, found it far from palatable. He rang for the landlord, and, on his appearance, said, fixing his clear eyes upon him, "Is this rabbit, sir?" "Yes, my lord," the rogue boldly replied, "rabbit from the jungles." "And this rabbit did not mew when he was killed?" "Mew, my lord! What, a rabbit mew! I swear to you--" "Be so good, landlord, as not to swear, but remember this: cats.. | Jules Verne | ||
| 62585b1 | It was obvious that the matter had to be settled, and evasions were distasteful to me. | Jules Verne | ||
| aa959c2 | He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem. | Jules Verne | ||
| 4fb2012 | I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again! | Jules Verne | ||
| b4279ba | Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul. | Jules Verne | ||
| 2e1cc67 | What you do for money you do badly. | Jules Verne | ||
| 406a1e2 | That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease. | good-and-evil humanity infectious-diseases summary ugliness world | Don DeLillo | |
| 078105d | The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 4a33874 | Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be. This did not happen to me until I met (your mother). One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 554affe | I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me. A woman passing on the street said, 'A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.' | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0b485ba | I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit. | Don DeLillo | ||
| fecb417 | I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 0c925bf | In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive. | Don DeLillo | ||
| d904e34 | It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3d558de | The plane had lost power in all three engines, dropped from thirty-four thousand feet to twelve thousand feet. Something like four miles. When the steep glide began, people rose, fell, collided, swam in their seats. Then the serious screaming and moaning began. Almost immediately a voice from the flight deck was heard on the intercom: "We're falling out of the sky! We're going down! We're a silver gleaming death machine!" This outburst stru.. | authority death | Don DeLillo | |
| 42fc785 | There are no amateurs in the world of children. | Don DeLillo | ||
| a01ddc0 | If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 5658266 | Love, it seems to me, is that condition in which one is most contentedly oneself. If this sounds paradoxical, remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which the self may flourish. As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained around people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful- wherev.. | Tony Judt | ||
| 7d06619 | If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself. | Tony Judt | ||
| 7093189 | Is there anything more worthy of our tongues and mouths than to speak of the things of God and Heaven?" "I'm" | John Bunyan | ||
| 64cb995 | Complaints about reality are immature. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 855fe69 | You will live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know... | Timothy Findley | ||
| d980074 | Rodwell wandered into No Man's Land and put a bullet through his ears. On Sunday, Robert sat on his bed in the old hotel at Bailleul and read what Rodwell had written. To my daughter, Laurine; Love your mother. Make your prayers against despair. I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips. We survive in one another. Everything lives forever. Believe it. Nothing dies. I am your father always. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 319ea5e | We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so, we turn, among other things, to stories. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 60470d1 | with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. | impending-ending life-can-change-in-an-instant | Mohsin Hamid | |
| be31b2d | For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 331d269 | The gun of the father is always the undoing of the son. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 6b48fca | I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost. | poverty wealth | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 14157ce | Rompe las cadenas de tu pensamiento, y romperas tambien las cadenas de tu cuerpo | freedom inspirational life | Richard Bach | |
| 4958c06 | Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly. | Richard Bach | ||
| d8c008e | You are life, inventing form. No more can you die on sword or years than you can die on doorways through which you walk, one room into another. Every room gives its word for you to speak, every passage its song for you to sing. | Richard Bach | ||
| e34ab74 | Why is it," Jonathan puzzled, "that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he'd just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?" | Richard Bach | ||
| 5699ab5 | You find what you love and you learn everything about it. You bet your life on what you know and run from safety, off your mountain into the air, trusting the Principle of Flight to bring you soaring up on lift you cannot see with your eyes. | Richard Bach | ||
| d9455fd | We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. | life spirituality | Richard Bach | |
| 1585366 | Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is...? ...ourselves. | Richard Bach |