Browse Quotes

618 quotes in the collection

• What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those…

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Trees Trees know these things – how to survive by bending with the wind stretching roots to quench thirst. When branches break from winter’s wet snow, trees know how to heal wounds make do with what remains. They even know how to die…

  Stephanie Shafran

• We should not 'move fast and break things' ! Instead we should use the Scientific Method: •Thoughtful deliberation and foresight •Hypothesis generation • Rigorous, careful and controlled testing •Update based on empirical data (with…

  Demis Hassabis

• Solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity

  mission statement, DeepMind

• WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

  Joseph Henrich

• The fantasy of escape from the needs of other is a fantasy of escape from empathy - and humanity - itself.

  Cory Doctorow

• I know that I know nothing. This is the first step we all must take in order to learn something.

  Alexander Kluge

• Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

  Gertrude Stein

• When I was 21, I pledged my life to the service of our people. Although that vow was made in my salad days when I was green in judgment, I do not regret nor retract one word of it.

  Queen Elizabeth II just before she died at age 96

• To protect your rivers, protect your mountains.

  Emperor Yu of China, 1600 B.C

• The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

  JBS Haldane

• We are raising a generation of algorithms that are like undergrads who didn’t come to class the whole semester and then the night before the final, they’re cramming. They don’t really learn the material, but they do well on the test.

  Alexei Efros

• When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will you realize that you cannot eat money.

  Native American, probably Osage or Abenaki/Algonkin saying

• We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwe’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.…

  Unnamed advisor to George W. Bush in an interview with David Suskind

• (About writing) Now I think of myself as a shopkeeper: It is my job to open up in the morning, sit, and wait for customers. If I get some, it is a blessed morning, if not, well, I'm still doing my job.

  Amos Oz

• Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

  Edgar Lawrence Doctorow

• Just keep writing. Even if its nonsensical. Even just one line a day. Or maybe even a phrase. Write something silly you randomly thought of. Write it on a piece of paper. In a notepad. Or in a post it note. Just write something. It doesn’t have to…

  Stephen King

• Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.

  Jack London

• This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear…

  Gary Provost

• The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When [the] images clash... it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

  George Orwell