Oleksandr Zholud > Oleksandr's Quotes

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
― Marc Bekoff

“I’m going to feel very weak and you’re going to feel very dumb. But that’s how it always is in the beginning. Learning starts with failure.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“If the law is malleable, Mr. Senlin, if it bends and conforms to man, then man will become resolute in his flaws. The law exists to give shape to man’s ideals. When you think about it, doesn’t mercy serve the wicked at the expense of the law?”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“Love, as the poets so often painted it, was just bald lust wearing a pompous wig. He believed true love was more like an education: it was deep and subtle and never complete.”
― Josiah Bancroft, Senlin Ascends

“The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony.”
― Frederick C. Crews, Postmodern Pooh

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon

“The criminal is a creative artist; detectives are just critics.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief

“..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you'd find living under a rock. Vermin.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“He has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange.
Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“the outside world is just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system.”
― Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Autobiography of a Corpse

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“We sainted St. Tammany (King Tamanend III) because he embodied moral perfection and every divine qualification that a deity could possess. I hold him in higher esteem than the saints of the Roman Catholic Church. He'll forever be the patron saint of America.”
― George Washington

“We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.”
― Larry Niven, Inferno

“Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled.”
― Larry Niven, Ringworld

“Long ago, Louis Wu had stood at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Louis's eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Louis Wu, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to see?
Now he reaffirmed that decision.”
― Larry Niven, Ringworld

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.”
― Robert Heinlein

“A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.”
― Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy

“Як і Пантелеймон Куліш, Іван Семенович свято держався фонетичного правописного принципу і не раз наполягав, шо писати треба так, як люде говорять. Ну, він не мав на увазі галичан, – це да.”
― Михайло Бриних, Шидеври вкраїнської літератури

“Росія - нікчемна, злиденна та агресивна країна. Вона значно гірша за інших, і все ж приречена на пекло.”
― Валентин Поспєлов, Стокгольм

“Не можна стати людиною о сьомій, якщо ти не був нею до сьомої.”
― Ілларіон Павлюк, Я бачу, вас цікавить пітьма

“This world is the product of a mind spinning a tale around one single notion, twisting and leaping towards the inevitable conclusion, trying to run from it but forever being drawn back, for the ending has already happened.”
― Khira Allen, Engineer of Stainless Souls

“Transmogrification—that’s the right word. It’s been on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite catch it. It’s a cumbersome word. It rolls through your mouth and then staccatos onto the floor in chunks of unnecessary syllables, like echoes of a thought already gone. It is a transformation, a metamorphosis that occurred not because I’d changed but because the rest of the world had.”
― Khira Allen, Songbird Ascension

“The most important and unpredictable side of technology will always be ... human.”
― Khira Allen, Songbird Ascension