Alistair Young > Alistair's Quotes

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“I'm lazy! I hate work! Hate hard work in all its forms! Clever shortcuts, that's all I'm about!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of 'Science is based on faith too, so there!' Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing. Then why do they say 'Science is based on faith too!' in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment? And a rather dangerous compliment to give, one would think, from their perspective. If science is based on 'faith', then science is of the same kind as religion—directly comparable. If science is a religion, it is the religion that heals the sick and reveals the secrets of the stars. It would make sense to say, 'The priests of science can blatantly, publicly, verifiably walk on the Moon as a faith-based miracle, and your priests' faith can't do the same.' Are you sure you wish to go there, oh faithist? Perhaps, on further reflection, you would prefer to retract this whole business of 'Science is a religion too!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Less Wrong Sequences

“And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I only want power so I can get books.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“First off, get your shit together. Panic doesn’t help. It never helps. Deep breaths, figure this out, make the right moves. Fear is the mind-killer. Ha. Geek.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face.”
― James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

“That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have.”
― Ramez Naam, Nexus

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”
― Laurence J. Peter

“Rowan sighed. “Yes.” She folded her hands before her on the table, sat gazing at them a moment. “But.” She looked up at the Outskirter. “Bel, no matter how clever we are, no matter how much we can discover, I believe that the common folk will, at the end of this, need magic. Even if we defeat Slado, or kill him, Routine Bioform Clearance will have to be reestablished according to its proper use, and maintained, and intelligently so.”
― Rosemary Kirstein, The Language of Power

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
― Ayn Rand

“Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“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

“Even a prison the size of a universe is still a prison. And it is every prisoner’s duty to escape.”
― John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence

“Fate lies within the light cone.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.”
― James S.A. Corey, Tiamat's Wrath

“The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods