Chris Aldrich > Chris's Quotes

“As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
― C.P. Snow

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.”
― Philip Nelson, Biological Physics: Energy, Information, Life

“The economy of early hominids and that of twenty-first century society have enormous differences, but they do share one important feature: in both of these economies, humans accumulate information in objects. Our world is different from that of early hominids only in the way in which atoms are arranged.”
― César Hidalgo

“To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.”
― Florence Nightingale

“Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.”
― Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie”
― Joseph Schumpeter

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”
― Ogden Nash, Collected Verse from 1929 On

“We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skill...we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.”
― Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

“If you can't do, you'd best shut up about it.”
― Esther Forbes, Johnny Tremain

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
― William Shakespear, Hamlet

“Sunny day
Sweepin' the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet”
― Joe Raposo

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
― C.P. Snow

“There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks [to humanity].”
― Nick Bostrom

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that’s the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth.”
― Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

“One begins to wonder if all the most interesting problems in physics are now in biology.”
― Nick Lane, The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life

“We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body.”
― nick lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

“A society built entirely out of rational individuals who come together on the basis of a social contract for the sake of the satisfaction of their wants cannot form a society that would be viable over any length of time. —FRANCIS FUKUYAMA”
― César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“For five years he [Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)] served as personal secretary to, yes, Francis Bacon. In fact, I've noted over a course of years that the job of a secretary can be utterly fulfilling just in case one's boss happens to be Francis Bacon.”
― Daniel N. Robinson

“In the U.S. there are two types of hipsters: those who know how to program and those who serve coffee.”
― César Hidalgo

“[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
― Jim Henson, It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider

“Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.”
― Charles T. Mathewes, Books that Matter: The City of God

“Child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart is its strongbox. As you study all of knowledge, you store up for yourselves good treasures, immortal treasures, incorruptible treasures, which never decay nor lose the beauty of their brightness. In the treasure house of wisdom are various sorts of wealth,and many filing-places in the storehouse of your heart. In one place is put gold, in another silver, in another precious jewels. Their orderly arrangement is clarity of knowledge. Dispose and separate each single thing into its own place, this into its and that into its, so that you may know what has been placed here and what there. Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory.

(translation by Mary Carruthers)”
― Hugh of Saint-Victor, The Three Best Memory Aids for Learning History

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. ”
― Edwin Schlossberg