Bea > Bea's Quotes

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.”
― John Milton

“She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“One ought not to judge her: all children are Heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb high trees and say shocking things and leap so very high grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless At All. September stood very generally in the middle on the day the Green Wind took her, Somewhat Heartless, and Somewhat Grown.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions?”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“If he speaks again without me knowing who he is, I will throw him out of the window. And I won't open it first.”
― Dan Abnett, Xenos

“But it doesn't take a thousand men to open a door, my lord."

"It might to keep it open.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Oh, how hard it is to part with power! This one has to understand.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Authority, without any condition and reservation, belongs to the nation.”
― Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

“Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

“I know not which lives more unnatural lives, obeying husbands, or commanding wives.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?"

"Yes. They're prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad."

"But are they more virtuous or more intelligent? Or more compassionate?"

"Ha!"

"Let's call that one a 'no.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

“Too many kings can ruin an army”
― Homer

“You can’t win unless you try to win, but you can lose by trying not to lose.”
― Jack Campbell, Relentless

“I need to stop getting into situations where all my options are potentially bad.”
― Jack Campbell, Dauntless

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“The Artificial’s speech pattern was an idiosyncratic mix of awkward and colloquial. It was unexpectedly endearing. “I just have good instincts. Mostly I love being in space.”

But you are not ‘in’ space. You are in your starship and your starship is in space. It is not so different than being on a planet.

“Oh, Valkyrie, you have no idea.”

Tell me then.”
― G.S. Jennsen, Vertigo

“Sometimes at night I worry about TAMMY. I worry that she might get tired of it all. Tired of running at sixty-six terahertz, tired of all those processing cycles, every second of every hour of every day. I worry that one of these cycles she might just halt her own subroutine and commit software suicide. And then I would have to do an error report, and I don't know how I would even begin to explain that to Microsoft.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth

“The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?"

"Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!"

"I guess that explains their rich military history, then.”
― Howard Tayler, The Tub of Happiness

“Somewhere out there, a higher
form of sadism won the first round.
Well, screw that. I'm not ready to be
pwned.”
― Clyde Dsouza, Memories With Maya

“Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?”
― Ken Levine

“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.

Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?

It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget