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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fd89870 | you can't just move backward. You can't push the chicken back into the egg, wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don't just try to explain that he ought to do it--you offer him something he would rather have. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 5954e5f | But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what's going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny." | Frans de Waal | ||
| 956f7de | Scientist are human. Unraveling the knots of Nature's mysteries is a reward in itself; but even so, scientists like to hear the applause of the audience | science | Isaac Asimov | |
| f78ac7d | Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in." -- Isaac Asimov" | Penny Reid | ||
| c8f93af | We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth--if such a thing can even be said to exist. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 3e98976 | No individual death among human beings is important. Someone who dies leaves his work behind and that does not entirely die. It never entirely dies as long as humanity exists. | elijah humanity mortality robots | Isaac Asimov | |
| e102636 | ykh mwjwd agh bh wjwd bdy, chh my khwhd - jz pyn yn bdyt? | existence | Isaac Asimov | |
| f6f18b7 | Q. Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts concerning the future of Trantor? A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next three centuries. Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty." Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am. Q. On what basis? A. On the basis of the mathematics of psychohistory. Q. .. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| afa2c4b | Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs. | foundation science-fiction | Isaac Asimov | |
| 6bf5be1 | You know, there comes a point where you're not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you're just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. That's not very fucking helpful, you know. I'm holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it's not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I'm capable of. | help | Cory Doctorow | |
| aa6f919 | When in problem, or in doubt, run in cirles, scream and shout | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 100288a | The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders? | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 44be63b | For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 6e5a33f | I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| d72109a | my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity | piracy property | Cory Doctorow | |
| 417310a | IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT RECEIVES A NEW PROOF THAT FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE | Jules Verne | ||
| 755981d | Until I dicover the meaning of this sentence, I will neither eat nor sleep. "My dear uncle-" I began. "Nor you either," he added." | verne | Jules Verne | |
| 4481e6f | These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet--fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed. | manliness masculinity tools | Don DeLillo | |
| bfa5c4b | People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being. | Don DeLillo | ||
| 3dc4a2f | Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility--the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect--opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't. | Tony Judt | ||
| 22b7275 | Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure child of anxiety. | Tony Judt | ||
| 34d2326 | But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion. A democracy of permanent consensus will not long remain a democracy. | Tony Judt | ||
| af07cf5 | Now, Mr. Great-heart was a strong man, so he was not afraid of a lion. | John Bunyan | ||
| 226903e | I'll love you forever. And I have dipping sauce for you! I'll be your dipping sauce bitch! | Bryan Lee O'Malley | ||
| c99d548 | Dude... Things never were the same. Change is... It's what we get. I guess that's my problem - I'm always trying to beat the clock; outrun the universe... Like nothing can change me, as long as I change first. I feel like I'm in this river, just getting swept along... And if I hold on to anyone, if I'm holding on for dear life, I'm not getting anywhere. I'm stuck... I never wanted to get stuck. | Bryan Lee O'Malley | ||
| c89dea5 | Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment. | historical-figures history | Timothy Findley | |
| c63af26 | the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things, | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 15e4049 | If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren't differences at all. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| 87ea524 | A common strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism, which was defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers. I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who li.. | politics terrorism war | Mohsin Hamid | |
| 8c0b5dc | Fat" is a small word which belies its size in the girth of its connotations. Fat implies a certain ungainliness, an inefficiency, a sense of immobility, a lack of industry, an unpleasant, unaesthetic quality; unmotivated, unloved, unnatural, unusual, uninspired, unhappy, unlikely to go places or to fit, under the ground with a heart attack at fifty-five. In short, fat somewhat paradoxically involves the lack of many attributes which, you mu.. | Mohsin Hamid | ||
| c05e506 | We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it. You .. | poetry | Philip Levine | |
| 2b435f2 | Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them, | Richard Bach | ||
| b8b4b81 | The image is a dream. The beauty is real. | Richard Bach | ||
| 6fa6675 | What about everybody else Pye? How many lives can there be in one universe?'[...] 'How many lives Richard?'[...]'One.'. | Richard Bach | ||
| 42e3e6d | Jonahtan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short,and with these gone from his thought,he lived a long life indeed. | life never-stop-perfect-yourself | Richard Bach | |
| 4df8e00 | How about a drop of something to cut the phlegm? Why don't you stay sober today? We didn't come to New York to stay sober. | new-york-city sober | Dashiell Hammett | |
| a1d4708 | That's wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he's looking out for himself. Don't we all? I don't trust a man that says he's not. And the man that's telling the truth when he says he's not I distrust most of all, because he's and ass and an ass that's going contrary to the laws of nature. | spade | Dashiell Hammett | |
| 8fe314c | I said: "All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant and I don't want the child to be born with..." | humor | Dashiell Hammett | |
| 056405c | Men came in and dragged us apart. It took us five minutes to bring Nora to. She sat up holding her cheek and looked around the room until she saw Morelli, nippers on one wrist, standing between two detectives. Morelli's face was a mess: the coppers had worked him over a little just for the fun of it. Nora glared at me. "You damned fool," she said, "you didn't have to knock me cold. I knew you'd take him, but I wanted to see it." One of the .. | humor | Dashiell Hammett | |
| abe58ae | I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. | Dashiell Hammett | ||
| 94bccaf | She yawned. If the Lords of Entropy were to manifest themselves on Earth again as they had in the legendary past she felt she might welcome them as a relief, at least, to her boredom. Not, of course, that she believed in those terrible prehistoric fables, though sometimes she could not help wishing that they had really existed and that she had lived in them, for they must surely have been more colourful and stimulating than this present age.. | Michael Moorcock | ||
| 26f476e | The subtlest lie of all is the full truth. | paradox subtlety truth untruth | Michael Moorcock | |
| 9f479ed | But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young-- or old-- of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character. | topography woman woodsman | Norman Maclean | |
| b5fc1a6 | Poets talk about "spots of time," but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone." | Norman Maclean |