41 Recent Quotes

Four Stages of Acceptance for Scientific Ideas

1. this is worthless nonsense;
2. this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view;
3. this is true, but quite unimportant;
4. I always said so.

The manager seeks compliance.  A manager makes a profit delivering industrial progress and productivity, which is done by doing what we did yesterday a little faster and a little cheaper.

The leader seeks to create the conditions for people to make a change happen. Leaders don't need authority, but they must coordinate the trust, focus, and connection of people are enrolled in a journey to do work that matters.

I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people would believe.

There are very few things I can say about my work that are better than saying nothing.

It was difficult at first, but gradually it got easier, and finally, I had enough confidence that I wasn’t afraid

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.

The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, but not educated enough to question what they have been taught.

We’ve got to rethink this question of war […] The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.

Nuance is the dead opposite of propaganda: it’s the essence of critical thinking.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

The world will be saved by beauty.

Sanity is a group project.

Also if you are one of the very, very, few beings with the ability to edit the universe PLEASE REPLY!!!

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.

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.

To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work.

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.

… he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

You never gain something but that you lose something

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

Trust, but verify.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

All healthy bodies are alike; each unhealthy body is unhealthy in its own way.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Ashes to metal, dust to concrete. 

You get what you tolerate.

I have only made this letter longer because I did not have time to make it shorter.