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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.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.
-- The Big Bang Theory
-- Randall Munroe
-- E. B. White
Aristotle
-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesn't catch on
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928
Sean M Burke
-- Richard Dawkins
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].
-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
-- John F. Kennedy
(For those interested, I'm pulling most of these quotes from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)
--Daniel Dennett
Francis Bacon
"Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
--Aldous Huxley
Philip K. Dick
"Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly." -- (unknown)
"Fifth Law of Decision Making: Decisions are justified by benefits to the organization; they are made by considering benefits to the decision makers." - Archibald Putt
-- Bertrand Russell in Faith and Mountains
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
-- Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/ritualcat.html
John McCarthy
"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."
-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
"People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)" -- Douglas Adams
-- the Agnostic's Prayer, by Roger Zelazny
To say that you're agnostic about something can mean two things: That you're not 100% certain, or that you're (approximately) 50% certain. If you're using the first meaning, nothing you've said is wrong... but it is extremely pedantic. It's true we can't be 100% certain that there is no God, but it's also true that we can't be 100% certain about any of our beliefs except perhaps mathematical truths. Would you go around saying you're agnostic about the possibility that Obama is Satan in disguise, or the possibility that the keyboard in front of you is actually a specimen of an as-of-yet undiscovered species of animals with keyboard-mimicry capabilities? Of course you wouldn't. So why would you bother mentioning your agnosticism about God?
Of course, there are some people who really are agnostic about God, in the second sense of 'agnostic'. They're wrong, but at least they're not being pedantic.
What annoys atheists like me is those who take advantage of the dual meaning of 'agnostic' to make us look like overconfident fools: They'll say that no one can know "with absolute certainty" that God doesn't exist and that it is therefore arrogant to believe that he doesn't exist. To someone who hasn't come to terms with the inherently probabilistic nature of knowledge, this can sound like a convincing argument, but to the rest of us it can be rather infuriating.
-- Scott Adams
-- Ben Casnocha
Information wants to be anthropomorphized. ~ Anonymous
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
Over on Hacker News mechanical_fish explains science
-- William T. Powers
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan
-E. O. Wilson
"[T]he purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity." - Calvin, Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes"
"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." -- Avicenna, Medieval Philosopher
-- Keith Stanovich, The Robot's Rebellion (p. xii)
--K. Eric Drexler
Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present ones, prevail over it.
Maxim 22 François de La Rochefoucauld
-- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
"Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician." G.W. Leibniz
"Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth."
-Aristotle
There will always be a large difference between those who'd ask themselves "why won't things work as they are meant to" and those asking themselves "how could I get them to work". For the moment being, the human world belongs to those who would ask "why". But the future belongs, necessarily, to those who'd ask themselves "how".
Bernard Werber
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Charles Babbage
I suspect that's giving mid-19th century members of Parliament way too much credit.
-- John Searle
Not exactly a quote, but close enough - http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-02-07/
-- St. Paul. (Phillipians 4:8)
(Yes, yes, someone who had a major hand in creating Christianity. I know. As context, I first encountered these words in the 1999 "Doomwatch" pilot, where they are spoken at the funeral of Dr Quist, and then googled it.)
--Arthur Schopenhauer
Reposting from the Open Thread:
From the Profit by "Kehlog Albran":
--Goethe
Otto Neurath, ‘The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle’, in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306
"I have no need of that hypothesis." -- Laplace to Napoleon
Fifth and last.
-- Anon
Bertrand Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, in John G. Slater (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, London, 1986, vol. 8, p. 33
-- Buddhist saying
Alan Perlis (concerning computer programs, but I think the same is commonly true elsewhere)
I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"
~Sir Walter A Raleigh
"The First Law of Innovation Management: Management by objectives is no better than the objectives." - Archibald Putt
--Richard Feynman
It's worth including the whole sentence:
--Anonymous
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York, 1945, p. 816
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/
del
--Avril Lavigne
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
~John Reader, Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man
"Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true." - Diax
I am not looking for intelligent disagreement any longer.... What I am looking for is intelligent agreement. ~ Ayn Rand
'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.'
I had recourse to use this one recently.
Quoting XKCD for cheap points Eliezer - I'll have to pull one of those out next month!
-- Eamon Collins, terrorist-turned-informer, from his memoir Killing Rage
"Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason." - David Hume
Note about the selection of this quote: While I am not inclined towards the position that reason is (and ought to be) slave to the passions, I considered this a good quote on the topic of rationality because it concisely presents one of the most fundamental challenges for rationalism as such.
George Zebrowski
Thomas Henry Huxley
Jacob Bernoulli
-- Terence Kelly
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
"I don't like spinach and I'm glad I don't because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it." -- (unknown)
"First Law of Advice: The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired." - Archibald Putt
The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman
-- Wittgenstein
He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood. - John Locke
"To understand the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matures, is an object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind."
-George Boole
"It is curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want."
-Spock
To conquer Chaos one must Learn, To maintain Stability one must Know, The dual struggle can be exhausting. --Donald Kingsbury
Ludwig Wittgentstein
--from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
We never desire passionately what we desire by reason alone.
La Rochefoucauld
deleted
Friedrich Nietzsche
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Creating Friendly AI, 2001
"As far as I know, this computer has never had an undetected error." -- (unknown)
-- http://www.necronomi.com/projects/amor/
"After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting."
-Spock
"People are limited in their ability to integrate many different pieces of evidence. Computers are not." -- Daphne Koller
"Information wants to be WRONG!" - Sam & Max: Moai Better Blues
"Eat shit. 50 million flies can't be wrong." -- (unknown)