pluton > pluton's Quotes

“At a time like this, we can't afford the luxury of thinking!”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“The journey is the reward”
― Steve Jobs

“I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“I say ‘Uhmm...’ a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it’s a CPU word. It means you’re assembling data in your head - spooling.”
― Douglas Coupland, Microserfs

“Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back?”
― W. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age

“Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honoring the homeless this year, and it was our airline's privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business-class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air-system code behind me, I order you back to 67E.”
― Douglas Coupland

“Why is it Americans are socially permitted to say 'fricking' when in fact everyone knows the word they're actually saying is 'fucking'?
…here you have some bland ho-bag telly presenter saying 'I'm so fricking mad' about whatever, while you, the home viewer, know she's three millimeters away from saying 'I'm so fucking mad'. But instead of being outraged because she basically said 'fucking' on TV, everyone giggles, like she's being cute.
…it's like ten times worse because the public is thinking 'fucking, fucking, fucking'. They're so full of shame or so socially conditioned that the mental effect of saying the word 'fucking' is technically amplified. By actually saying the word 'fucking' in real life, instead of 'fricking', you're doing American society a favor.”
― Douglas Coupland, Worst. Person. Ever.

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It's not necessary to tell all you know. It's not ladylike -- in the second place, folks don't like to have someone around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates them. Your not gonna change any of them by talkin' right, they've got to want to learn themselves, and when they don't want to learn there's nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It was all very puzzling—both that Jill could smell still more like Jill… and that Dorcas should wish to smell like Jill when she already smelled like herself… and that Jubal would say that Dorcas smelled like a cat when she did not. There was a cat who lived on the place (not as a pet, but as co-owner); on rare occasions it came to the house and deigned to accept a handout. The cat and Mike had grokked each other at once, and Mike had found its carniverous thoughts most pleasing and quite Martian. He had discovered, too, that the cat's name (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche) was not the cat's name at all, but he had not told anyone this because he could not pronounce the cat's real name; he could only hear it in its head.
The cat did not smell like Dorcas.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“you just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“A computer program can modify itself but it cannot violate its own instructions — it can at best change some parts of itself by *obeying* its own instructions.”
― Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“People are screwed up in this world. I'd rather be with someone screwed up and open about it than somebody perfect and ready to explode.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“Понимаете («п» – фонтан) – древняя легенда о рае… Это ведь о нас, о теперь. Да! Вы вдумайтесь. Тем двум в раю – был представлен выбор: или счастье без свободы – или свобода без счастья; третьего не дано. Они, олухи, выбрали свободу – и что же: понятно – потом века тосковали об оковах. Об оковах – понимаете, – вот о чем мировая скорбь. Века!”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful.”
― Amy Bloom

“Бороться и искать, найти и не сдаваться!»”
― Anonymous

“За горем приходит радость, за разлукой – свиданье. Всё будет прекрасно, потому что сказки, в которые мы верим, ещё живут на земле…”
― Veniamin Kaverin, Two Captains

“A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?"
"Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“Too much beauty undermines the marriage vows, too much knowledge leads to isolation, and too much wealth produces madness.”
― Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“He wondered, often, what it would look like if and when the shit in question hit the fan: The stock market at bottom was rigged. The icon of global capitalism was a fraud.”
― Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in math—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“As it says in the Bible, God fights on the side with the heaviest artillery.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“I’m electron pusher by trade;”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress