David > David's Quotes

“At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, "Life is not worth living." We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day; nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head. Murderers would be given medals for saving men from life; firemen would be denounced for keeping men from death; poisons would be used as medicines; doctors would be called in when people were well; the Royal Humane Society would be rooted out like a horde of assassins. Yet we never speculate as to whether the conversational pessimist will strengthen or disorganize society; for we are convinced that theories do not matter.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature.”
― Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind

“Condorcet suggested that ‘force cannot, like
opinion, endure for long unless the tyrant extends his empire far enough afield to
hide from the people, whom he divides and rules, the secret that real power lies
not with the oppressors but with the oppressed’. The ‘mind forg’d manacles’, as
William Blake called them, are as real as the hand-forged ones.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“When the British invaders confronted the Iroquois on the east coast of North America, the British were able to draw upon technology, science, and other cultural developments from China, India, and Egypt, not to mention various other peoples from continental Europe. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the cultural developments of the Aztecs or Incas, who remained unknown to them, though located only a fraction of the distance away as China is from Britain. While the immediate confrontation was between the British settlers and the Iroquois, the cultural resources mobilized on one side represented many more cultures from many more societies around the world. It was by no means a question of the genetic or even cultural superiority of the British by themselves, as compared to the Iroquois, for the British were by no means by themselves. They had the advantage of centuries of cultural diffusion from numerous sources, scattered over thousands of miles.”
― Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History

“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to
say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. Chaos has a
nature all of its own. That nature is experienced as affective valence, at first exposure, not
as objective property. If something unknown or unpredictable occurs, while we are
carrying out our motivated plans, we are first surprised. That surprise—which is a
combination of apprehension and curiosity—comprises our instinctive emotional
response to the occurrence of something we did not desire. The appearance of something
unexpected is proof that we do not know how to act—by definition, as it is the production
of what we want that we use as evidence for the integrity of our knowledge. If we are
somewhere we don’t know how to act, we are (probably) in trouble—we might learn
something new, but we are still in trouble.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief

“When an inscrutable technology becomes an invisible technology, we would be wise to be concerned. At that point, the technology's assumptions and intentions have infiltrated our own desires and actions. We no longer know whether the software is aiding us or controlling us. We're behind the wheel, but we can't be sure who's driving.”
― Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us

“Fate whispers to the warrior, 'You can not withstand the storm.'
The warrior whispers back, 'I am the storm.'
Unknown”
― Jake Remington

“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales—because they find them romantic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy