#extra

You all say you need us. Well, maybe you do, but not to help, with the millions of bubbly new minds about to be unleashed, with all the cities coming awake at last. Together, you're more than enough to change the world without us. So from now on, David and I are here to stand in your way. You see, freedom has a way of destroying things. ↗

— Scott Westerfeld

#change

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?" I say, "I just told you what I really think." "Yes, but what's your gut feeling?" But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#extraterrestrial-life #god #science #intelligence

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features. ↗

— Primo Levi

#carved #change #erased #even #extraneous

The ugly is very appealing to man. It's instinct. One shrinks from the ugly, yet wants to look at it. There's a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror. ↗

— Sonya Levien

#devilish #extract #fascination #horror #instinct

How many of us have been attracted to reason; first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism. ↗

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

#attracted #been #conclusions #dazzling #draw

Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop. ↗

— Marcello Mastroianni

#extraordinary #gallop #imagination #makes #sun

I'm just an actor, but if the extra part of it is that I'm helping people or people are being helped by the virtue of what we're doing, then that's just a really nice added extra. ↗

— Christopher Meloni

#added #being #doing #extra #helped

What's been extraordinary about this president, Tim, and what's unique about this president is not that the administration is sputtering but rather everything he's taken on he's been able to accomplish. ↗

— Ken Mehlman

#about #accomplish #administration #been #everything

I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak. ↗

— Tim O'Reilly

#actually #applications #extract #feel #going

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#absolutely #absolutely nothing #behave #extraordinary #four