(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
- Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
"Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
related: The Level Above Mine
"Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich." -- Mencius Moldbug
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."
Bertrand Russell, "Free Thought and Official Propaganda", in "Sceptical Essays".
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. ... Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old."
-- Donald Knuth
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."
-- David Hilbert
"The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."
-- Alhazen (Abū 'Alī al-Hasan ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Haitham)
"Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!"
(Variously attributed. TV Tropes says the Simpsons.)
Also variously interpreted. I take it as a caution against forgetting to actually win with one's towering genius.
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
-- Terry Pratchett, Mort, on mind-projection fallacy intuitions (and/or on Jack Sarfatti's theories of superluminal signaling)
"Imagine a world where everything changes to match the state of your mind, where evidence never pushes back against your theories, where your every thought is correct simply because you think it so. Can there be any better definition of hell for a man of learning? "
-- Bradeline, Fall From Heaven
"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."
-- Ambrose Bierce
-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
I neglected to record from which character the quote came.
—Ben Kovitz, Shallowness
Jon Elster
—Ben Kovitz, King on the Mountain
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." - Michael Shermer
"What's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics - the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem."
Lord Kelvin
“If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” -- Thomas Jefferson
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
"I don't, I've come to believe, have to agree with you to like you, or respect you."
--Anthony Bourdain.
Never forget that your opponents are not evil mutants. They are the heroes of their own stories, and if you can't fathom why they do what they do, or why they believe what they believe, that's your failing not theirs.
del
"Although the first solution is the one usually given, I prefer this second one because it reduces the need to think, replacing it by the automatic calculus. Thinking is hard, so only use it where essential."
--Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
"Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency." -- David Wong
http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/princess_ida/webop/pi_06.html
On an advertisement for a fitness product: "WHAT'S STRONGER? YOU, or YOUR EXCUSES?"
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
pg 126, The Three Pillars of Zen, ISBN 8070-5979-7
When I came across this quote, I was struck by its relevance to one of Eliezer's beisutsukai posts about finding the success... (read more)
An anti-rationalist quote. Dickens believes there is more to life than rationality. Does his satire upon us here have any basis in reality?
I quoted this in another comment, but I think it deserves to be in here as well. It used to be in the rec.backcountry FAQ.
"You have before you the disassembled parts of a high-powered hunting rifle, and the instructions written in Swahili. In five minutes an angry Bengal tiger will walk into the room."
-- Eugene Miya
"We have tried to do this in a hypothesis-independent manner because there is nothing more dangerous in life than a good hypothesis."
--Kári Stefánsson, deCODE Genetics
Two very similar quotes:
"It would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." - Paul Graham
"Mathematics is the study of precisely defined objects." - Norman Gottlieb
"I hold that moral intuitions are nothing but learned prejudices. Historic examples from slavery to the divine right of kings to tortured confessions of witchcraft or Judaism to the subjugation of women to genocide all point to the fallibility of these 'moral intuitions'. There is absolutely no sense to the claim that its conclusions are to be adopted before those of a reasoned argument." - Alonzo Fyfe
Albert Einstein
Saul Kripke
Stefan Banach
I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Most often two of these qualities come together. The officers who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Those who are stupid and lazy make up around 90% of every army in the world, and they can be used for routine work. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!
Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so. " - Marcus Aurelius
-- Alonzo Fyfe
-- William T. Powers
--Jorge Luis Borges
-- Hiruma Yoichi, Eyeshield 21
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 106
The Paradoxical Commandments
I didn't want to ruin the pretty formatting by posting it here, so go follow the link.
"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." - Mao Zedong
-- Dr. Richard Marken, Teaching Dogma In Psychology (PDF)
-- William T. Powers
What is truth?— Inertia; that hypothesis which gives rise to contentment; smallest expenditure of spiritual force, etc...
The easier mode of thought conquers the harder mode;— as dogma: "simplicity is the seal of truth"— I say: to suppose that clarity proves anything about truth is perfect childishness—
Parmenides said, "one cannot think of what is not";—we are at the other extreme, and say "what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (from fragments 537-539)
Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.
-Max Born
when the small projects upon the great, it can only come up with a small answer
--JD krishnamurthy
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, History Written By The Losers