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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 469c9ed | and he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 6264bc3 | You'll have such proof as exists. You are the only one responsible for your own wants. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 44a417b | And Elvex said, "I was the man." - In "Robot dreams" (Short story)" | science-fiction | Isaac Asimov | |
| f7fe75d | Yet because they did not know one another, and could not understand one another, and dared not trust one another, and felt from infancy the terrors and insecurity of that ultimate isolation -- there was the hunted fear of man for man, the savage rapacity of man toward man | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 6b4a773 | I'm being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 610353c | The thanks of a weak one are but of little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way- and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite unseemly great." | appreciation magnifico thankfulness thanks | Isaac Asimov | |
| daca3a4 | The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feelin.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| cba997a | There are degrees of justice, Elijah. When the lesser is incompatable with the greater, the lesser must give way. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 6d0aba5 | A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 419efe5 | Down--down--the results can be followed; and all the suffering that humanity ever knew can be traced to the one fact that no man in the history of the Galaxy, until Hari Seldon, and very few men thereafter, could really understand one another. Every human being lived behind an impenetrable wall of choking mist within which no other but he existed. Occasionally there were the dim signals from deep within the cavern in which another man was l.. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| fe769b0 | it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| bc28a8a | He didn't believe that, surely." "Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being insulted would only lead to humiliation. And since he didn't want that, the simplest path to follow was to believe what I said." | willful-ignorance | Isaac Asimov | |
| 2d26d66 | Kill us in the clear light on the Moon, where the sky is black and soft, where the stars shine brightly, where the cleanliness and purity of vacuum make all things sharp. - Not in this low-clinging, fuzzy blue. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 7883938 | What do you require to exchange your ideas for mine?" "You think my convictions are for sale?" "Why not?" came the cold response. "Isn't that your business, buying and selling?" "Only at a profit," said Mallow," -- | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 26dac7e | When everything impossible had been eliminated and what remains is supernatural, then someone is lying. | evidence rationality scepticism | Isaac Asimov | |
| c2ce85c | It amounts to a diseased attitude--a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 19857d0 | It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject--written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that? | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 67874c6 | The psychohistoric trend of a planet-full of people contains a huge inertia. To be changed it must be met with something possessing a similar inertia. Either as many people must be concerned, or if the number of people be relatively small, enormous time for change must be allowed. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| ac42fd5 | Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time. | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 4d8637e | I don't know. How did Beethoven hear the Ninth Symphony in his head before he wrote it down? The brain's a pretty good computer, too, isn't it? | Isaac Asimov | ||
| 80d318e | The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 69326e8 | I understand the world can be cruel place and there are people out there counting on naive kids like you to take advantage of. Don't just think because it's video games people can't get hurt. | video-games | Cory Doctorow | |
| cf82291 | The law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 030d6ab | The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you're doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you're still only doing that because that's what you choose. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 4bbe1ad | Start at the beginning," he said. "Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don't need a plan, you need a vector." | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 4b7fb65 | There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people. .. | funny humor | Cory Doctorow | |
| 74e433c | There's something else," he said. "What?" "I wasn't going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do this." "Jesus, Jolu, what?" "I hate to say it, but you're white. I'm not. White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they're about .. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 0dc1c76 | Making other people feel like assholes was a terrible way to get them to stop acting like assholes. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 7be2524 | A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 7b77051 | Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| e9f67d4 | I had spoken to the universe, and the universe hadn't given a damn. | Cory Doctorow | ||
| 8653ffd | It must be, for there is a logic to everything on this earth and nothing is done without a reason, that God sometimes lets scientists discover. | Jules Verne | ||
| 840f210 | The colonists had no library at their disposal; but the engineer was a book which was always at hand, always open at the page which one wanted, a book which answered all their questions, and which they often consulted. | Jules Verne | ||
| b5c105c | God, if he believed in Him, and his conscience, if he had one, were the only judges to whom he was answerable. | god independence | Jules Verne | |
| bcf98e5 | It is better for us to see the destination we wish to reach, than the point of departure | psychotherapy well-being | Jules Verne | |
| 9760271 | Was he being devoured by one of those secret rages, all the more terrible because contained, and which only burst forth, with irresistible force, at the last moment? | Jules Verne | ||
| c2d2e73 | Why, you are a man of heart!" "Sometimes," replied Phileas Fogg, quietly; "when I have the time." | Jules Verne | ||
| eee35bb | Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is the resultant of a hundred thoughts that come and .. | character-building writing-advice | Jules Verne | |
| d978d98 | Why lower oneself to taking pride from being American or British, when you can boast of being man! | Jules Verne | ||
| f8be5b8 | I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, tha.. | Jack London | ||
| 7488603 | 'exist because there are no longer any , settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are ? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society. | memory milieux-de-memoire rituals vestiges | Tony Judt | |
| 1cf69ec | The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not run on time. | Tony Judt | ||
| 8d7d35f | Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. | Tony Judt | ||
| 0cd52e9 | We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, 'race,' 'gender,' or 'sexual orientation,' and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but .. | intellectual liberal | Tony Judt |