Ben Gutierrez > Ben's Quotes

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“if a theorem is geometrically obvious why prove it? This was exactly the attitude taken in the eighteenth century. The result, in the nineteenth century, was chaos and confusion: for intuition, unsupported by logic, habitually assumes that everything is much nicer behaved than it really is.     Good”
― Ian Stewart, Concepts of Modern Mathematics

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
― Edsger W. Dijkstra

“To me Everything and More reads, rather, as a discourse from a green, gridded prairie heaven, where irony-free people who’ve been educated to a turn in those prairie schoolhouses and great-but-unpretentious universities sit around their dinner tables buttering sweet corn, drinking iced tea, and patiently trying to explain even the most recondite mysteries of the universe, out of a conviction that the world must be amenable to human understanding and that if you can understand something, you can explain it in words: fancy words if that helps, plain words if possible. But in any case you can reach out to other minds through that medium of words and make a connection.”
― David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity