Cyril > Cyril's Quotes

“What’s stopping me is I’m a Dahlite, a heatsinker on Dahl. I don’t have the money to get an education and I can’t get the credits to get an education. A real education, I mean. All they taught me was to read and cipher and use a computer and then I knew enough to be a heatsinker. But I wanted more. So I taught myself.” “In some ways, that’s the best kind of teaching. How did you do that?” “I knew a librarian. She was willing to help me. She was a very nice woman and she showed me how to use computers for learning mathematics. And she set up a software system that would connect me with other libraries.”
― Isaac Asimov, Prelude to Foundation

“The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence, so that some people imagine that it belongs to surreal or mysterious entities.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“In order to avoid this, the educational system must increase its supply of new types of training and its output of new skills at a sufficiently rapid pace.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“Private wealth rests on public poverty, and one particularly unfortunate consequence of this is that we currently spend far more in interest on the debt than we invest in higher education.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future

“Faith leaves a vacuum behind it when it goes away. We’re in it.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction—that, señores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard