Viktor Kirilov > Viktor's Quotes

“You know something is profoundly wrong with our economy when Big Tech has a higher take rate than the mafia.”
― Ritchie Torres

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
― Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
― Carl Jung

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.”
― George Carlin

“Happiness is only real, when shared.”
― Christopher McCandless

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”
― Warren Buffett

“Senator, we run ads.”
― Mark Zuckerberg

“The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.”
― Frans de Waal

“Those who tell the stories rule society.”
― Plato

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.”
― David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

“...human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.”
― Robert Wright