41 Random Quotes

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors – between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

— Ayn Rand «Atlas Shrugged»

If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

— Jon Ronson «The Psychopath Test
» in #daring, #imagining & #teaching

Data doesn't really exist unless you have at least two copies of it.

— Jack Schofield «Schofield's Second Law of Computing
» in #making, #nerding & #teaching

The scientist lives in a world of matching, their idea of proof is just matching evidence against evidence. Any breakthrough beyond that paradigm is as disturbing to the scientist as to the educator.

— Marshall McLuhan «via The Summer Way with Norman Mailer 1968 » in #breaking, #laughing & #making

If you can only obey and not disobey, you are a slave; if you can only disobey and not obey, you are a rebel … (you act out of anger, disappointment, resentment, not in the name of a conviction or a principle).

— Erich Fromm «On Disobedience and Other Essays (paraphrased)
» in #daring, #teaching & #wilding

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.

— François de La Rochefoucauld

… cities foster only self-love, while jungles are alive with spirits.

— Sylvain Tesson «The Art of Patience» in #wilding

Politically I want only that the children have bright eyes, the rivers be clean, food and sex be available and nobody be pushed around.

— Paul Goldman «“Growing up Absurd”»

… we're just fucking monkeys in shoes.

— Tim Minchin «Confessions»

[Twitter is] such a mess – it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.

— Mark Zuckerberg in #laughing

Do not be satisfied with hearsay or with tradition or with legendary lore or with what has come down in scriptures or with conjecture, or with logical inference, or with weighing evidence, or with liking for a view after pondering over it, or with someone else's ability, or with the thought ‘the monk is our teacher'. When you know in yourselves ‘These things are unwholesome' then you should abandon them. When you know in yourselves, ‘These things are wholesome, blameless, commended by the wise, and being adopted and put into effect they lead to welfare and happiness,' then you should practice and abide in them.

— The Buddha «“Kalama Sutta”»

What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?

— Henry David Thoreau «Walden»

Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky «Winter Notes on Summer Impressions»

There is nothing wrong with making things up. You blame yourself, you blame other people, you guess at reasons — these are all examples of made up stuff. There is a plot line, and what you are making up is drama; is art. Yet if you think that this art is real, then you begin to suffer. You are building a prison cell to live in. It is the job of the koan to take down the walls of such prisons, to undermine your fictions. Then, you might discover that you are not really suffering from other people or from circumstances you’re suffering from your maps, your stories, your fiction, your prison. You are suffering from bad art.

— John Tarrant «Bring Me the Rhinoceros»

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

— Proverb «Chinese
»

To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.

— Kondiaronk «via The Dawn of Everything
» in #teaching & #wilding

Blame no one, expect nothing, get out there and do epic shit.

— Larry Santoyo in #daring, #imagining & #working

The only option is politeness—remember always that you are dealing with other primates.

— Paul Ford «Launch»

No man can be forced to be healthful, whether he will or no.

— John Locke «A letter Concerning Toleration
» in #eating, #healing & #reflecting

If you find yourself acting to impress others, or avoiding action out of fear of what they might think, you have left the path.

— Epictetus « Encheiridion: The Manual for Living
»

And then there's a school of thought that holds that, even if AI is possible, the Singularity idea is hogwash — it just looks like an insuperable barrier or a permanent step change because we're too far away from it to see the fine-grained detail. Canadian SF writer Karl Schroeder has explored a different hypothesis: that there may be an end to progress. We may reach a point where the scientific enterprise is done — where all the outstanding questions have been answered and the unanswered ones are physically impossible for us to address.

— Charlie Stross «Shaping the Future
»

Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

— Charles Bukowski

Aim low. Fail frequently. Surprisingly, that's the path to freedom.

— Jim Coudal «Digital is Analog»

Making wholeness heals the maker.

— Christopher Alexander

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

— William Blake

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

— George Bernard Shaw in #laughing & #teaching

I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing.

— Albert Einstein

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

— Oscar Wilde in #daring & #wilding

I'm a raging alcoholic who sells booze for a living, but it works for me, I love the opposites in my life.

— Harry Denton «nytimes.org (on being sober in the hospitality industry)»

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

— Jon Postel «RFC-1122originates in RFC760»

There's nothing I love more than hearing, watching, or reading someone doing the one thing they can't not do.

— Mark Pilgrim

Travel light and trust in serendipity.

— Mike Brown «Ignite Wellington»

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.

— Albert Einstein in #failing & #laughing

Sarge is once again proof that communities can do great things, even communities of irritable, cantankerous, grudge-holding, flaming Free Software nuts. 😉

— Steve Langasek «speaking about the release of Debian Linux 3.0»

What is artificial intelligence? A poor choice of words in 1954.

— Unknown «via Ted Chiang, The machines we have now are not conscious» in #laughing

Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.

— Bill Mollison

A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid having to exercise his superior skill.

— Unknown «The Pilot's Maxim»

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence, the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

— Bill Mollison in #eating, #healing & #making

Boardwatch Internal Guideline #17: When you have a bear that is already struggling with a toothache — avoid poking it in the eye with a stick

— Jack Rickard «inet-access»

Truth walks barefoot, lies keep switching shoes.

— Unknown in #crying

When will we begin to learn from what is being born instead of what is dying?

— Murray Bookchin «The Revenge Against the Commons»