Quotes

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out he hates the same people you do.

To find out who rules over you, simply determine who you’re not allowed to criticize.

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

When process is lost, there is good practice. When good practice is lost, there are rules. When rules are lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the beginning of chaos.

It is better to want what you have than to want what you have.

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of his children for their numerous stupidities, for which he himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only his non-existence could excuse him.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

We’re even wrong about which mistakes we’re making.

Never offer what you’d hate someone for accepting.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.

Most interesting phenomena have multiple causes. ~ N.P. Calderwood

Focusing is about saying no.

Jews, Muslims, and Christians claim that their holy books are so profound, and so prescient of humanity’s needs, that they could only have been written at the direction of an omniscient diety. An atheist is simply someone who has considered the claim, read the books, and found the claim to be ridiculous.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

Set aside half an hour every day to do all your worrying; then take a nap during this period.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you’re a consultant.

It’s better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to always be right by never having any ideas at all.

Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica.

Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.

Don’t believe everything you think.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Hire curious people. Even if they don’t have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything.

The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

We are what we only pretend to be. So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question.

Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

Writing is a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?

If a nation expects to be ignorant — and free — in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me, every single one, has had the exact same common denominator: accepting what was true over what I wished were true.

If you watch ‘Jaws’ backwards, it’s a movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they have to open a beach.

You don’t truly understand something until you think it’s obvious.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

I’d drag my dick through broken glass for a mile just to hear that woman fart over a walkie-talkie.

Be yourself, because the people who mind don’t matter, and the people who matter don’t mind.

As all these results were obtained, not by any heroic method, but by patient and detailed reasoning, I began to think it probable that philosophy had erred in adopting heroic remedies for intellectual difficulties, and that solutions were to be found merely by greater care and accuracy. This view I have come to hold more and more strongly as time went on, and it has led me to doubt whether philosophy, as a study distinct from science and possessed of a method of its own, is anything more than an unfortunate legacy from theology.

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

Change breaks the brittle.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.

However little television you watch, watch less.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

As it turned out, the obvious clearly stated, and combined with new observations, was sometimes close to revolutionary.

The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Republicans are the leading cause of underage drinking.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I don’t like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.

It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.

Silly is you in a natural state, and serious is something you have to do until you can get silly again.

I’m not okay and you’re not okay, but that’s okay.

If Bush was president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would all be dead.

Talk doesn’t cook rice.

ONCE I LIVED IN CAPITALS, MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC, but now I’m sadly lowercase, with the occasional italic.

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

In the information age, it’s not just whose army wins, but whose story wins.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

When I type the word “queue”, I just type “q’ and start alternating u’s and e’s for a little while and hope something good happens.

It’s just endless what you can learn from a single work of art. You can fill up the crevices of your life, the cracks of your life, the places where the mortar comes out and falls away–you can fill it up with the love of art.

If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, “What would I do if I were a horse?”

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine.

As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish, I wish, he’d go away.

Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers.

If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes ‘culture’, and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western ‘moral thinkers’, including feminists.

Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.

A bug in the code is worth two in the documentation.

A fault tolerant system must report the faults even as it tolerates them.

An algorithm must be seen to be believed.

If I look over my life, every single step of maturing for me, every single one, has had the exact same common denominator, and that was accepting what was true over what I wished were true.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

He who is unaware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.

When white men first effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive than dead.