#ra

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes. Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange. Some, downright weird. But then again, you’d have to be. To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors. ↗

— Christopher Hopper

#computer-science #strangeness #weirdness #writing-process #science

It's a long story. Want a refill?" "No, let's start the steak. Where's the button?" "Right here." "Well, push it." "Me? You offered to cook." "Ben Caxton, I will lie here and starve before I will get up to push a button six inches from your finger" "As you wish." He pressed the button. "But don't forget who cooked dinner. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#science-fiction #stranger-in-a-strange-land #science

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance. ↗

— William A. Dembski

#chance #coincidence #darwinism #evolution #god-of-the-gaps

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. ↗

— Sam Harris

#morality #muslim #science

He holds her with the strength of a million-man army, but with all the tenderness of her heart lying naked in the palms of his hands. ↗

— Laura Kreitzer

#phantom-universe #science-fiction #scifi #summer-chronicles #time-travel

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#literature #reading #words #writing #funny

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#justice #majority #minority #perspective #politics

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters. ↗

— Abraham Lincoln

#democracy #elections #voting #democracy

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#criticism #democracy #oppression #democracy

Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ↗

— Alexis de Tocqueville

#government #serious #democracy