Nich > Nich's Quotes

“We unfortunately seem to be unconsciously biased against those in society who come out on the bottom. We”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“The participants gave higher ratings to the studies that confirmed their initial point of view even when the studies on both sides had supposedly been carried out by the same method. And in the end, though everyone had read all the same studies, both those who initially supported the death penalty and those who initially opposed it reported that reading the studies had strengthened their beliefs. Rather than convincing anyone, the data polarized the group. Thus even random patterns can be interpreted as compelling evidence if they relate to our preconceived notions. The”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data.           A”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation—the role of chance. It”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“IBM pioneer Thomas Watson said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.” I”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be available to posterity. To that the presiding judge famously replied, “The republic has no need of scientists.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before—hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.24 But”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“The study showed that a combination of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin is no more effective in relieving arthritis pain than a placebo. Still, one eminent doctor had a hard time letting go of his feeling that the supplements were effective and ended his analysis of the study on a national radio program by reaffirming the possible benefit of the treatment, remarking that, “One of my wife’s doctors has a cat and she says that this cat cannot get up in the morning without a little dose of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate.”8 When”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“George Spencer-Brown, who wrote that in a random series of 101,000,007 zeroes and ones, you should expect at least 10 nonoverlapping subsequences of 1 million consecutive zeros.11”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“true randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn’t random. And so the company made the feature “less random to make it feel more random,” said Apple founder Steve Jobs.12 One”
― Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives

“I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The W. E. B. Du Bois Collection

“How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The W. E. B. Du Bois Collection

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong. This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“For all I know,” said Gargravarr’s ethereal voice, “I’m probably at one. My body that is. It goes to a lot of parties without me. Says I only get in the way. Hey ho.” “What is all this with your body?” said Zaphod, anxious to delay whatever it was that was going to happen to him. “Well, it’s … it’s busy you know,” said Gargravarr hesitantly. “You mean it’s got a mind of its own?” said Zaphod. There was a long and slightly chilly pause before Gargravarr spoke again. “I have to say,” he replied eventually, “that I find that remark in rather poor taste.” Zaphod muttered a bewildered and embarrassed apology. “No matter,” said Gargravarr, “you weren’t to know.” The voice fluttered unhappily. “The truth is,” it continued in tones which suggested he was trying very hard to keep it under control, “the truth is that we are currently undergoing a period of legal trial separation. I suspect it will end in divorce.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“But at present, the word begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. … So then, the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child goodbye and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism,” which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (Peirce 1998, pp. 334–5)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“He wasn't certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“I gave a speech once,” he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. “You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.” “Er, five,” said the mattress. “Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?” The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.”
― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

“But she also knew that the best thing about breaking a barrier was that it would never have to be broken again.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly

“The city of Hampton changed its official seal to depict a crab holding a Mercury capsule in its claw, adopting the motto E Praeteritis Futura: Out of the past, the future.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition of Hidden Figures—Celebrating African American Women Pioneers at NASA

“Out of that global audience, four hundred thousand NASA employees, contractors, and military support watched with particular interest, seeing in the craft that approached the Moon the measure of a screw, the blueprint of a hatch, the filament in a circuit, the fulfillment of a promise made by a president who hadn’t lived to see it carried out. They dotted the globe, those who had worked on Project Apollo, those who had made possible the day that had come. They clustered around displays and switchboards and dials and computers, monitoring every heartbeat of the spacecraft that had slipped out of the influence of its home planet and was now being enticed by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition of Hidden Figures—Celebrating African American Women Pioneers at NASA

“So much money spent so that between 1969 and 1972 a dozen white men could take the express train to a lifeless world? Why, Negro women and men could barely go to the next state without worrying about predatory police, restaurants that refused to serve them, and service stations that wouldn’t let them buy gas or use the bathroom. Now they wanted to talk about a white man on the Moon? “A rat done bit my sister Nell, with Whitey on the Moon,” rapped performer Gil Scott-Heron in a song that stormed the airwaves that year.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition of Hidden Figures—Celebrating African American Women Pioneers at NASA

“What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I endured,” Dorothy Vaughan told historian Beverly Golemba in 1992.”
― Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: Young Readers' Edition of Hidden Figures—Celebrating African American Women Pioneers at NASA