#cs

Babbage's Three Laws of Difference Engines First Law: A difference engine must have at least six cogs. Second Law: A difference engine must be able to operate a loom. Third law: A difference engine must be able to kill a man, should the mood so take it. ↗

— Gideon Defoe

#humour #robotics #steampunk #romantic

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#ethics #philosophy #romantic

There is no single thing... that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says 'I am more than just my appearance'. If each object quivers with readiness to imply something other than itself, if each perception is a word in a poem dense with connotations, then the poet's selection of any given subject of speculation will become... a means of attuning himself to the rhythms and harmonies of reality at large. ... The notion of a network of correspondence is not an outmoded Romantic illusion: it represents a crucial intuition... ↗

— Roger Cardinal

#intuition #perception #poetics #poetry #poets

– I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#romantics #romantic

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone It's with O' Leary in the grave (September 1913) ↗

— W.B. Yeats

#irish-politics #yeats #romantic

Upon the publication of Goethe’s epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#classics #drama #faust #faust-legend #faustian

I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#debt #deficit-spending #government #loans #political-science

God does not play dice with the universe. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#science #science

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#philosophy #science #sense-of-wonder #spirituality #science

What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#science #science