#singular

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best - out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters. ↗

— May Sarton

#agree #ambiguous #best #clear #crystal

Losing a child is probably the singular most horrible thing. ↗

— Laura Schlessinger

#horrible #losing #most #probably #singular

In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity. ↗

— Samuel George Morton

#compose #disposition #diversity #extreme #far

Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#trolls #design

I have a secret thought from some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world. ↗

— David Brainerd

#god #i #may #observed #perhaps

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own. ↗

— Basil Bunting

#common #jug #kind #listen #look

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

#artificial-intelligence #computers #gay #homosexuality #singularity

In all my years of performing, no audience member has ever actually assaulted me. I consider this to be the singular triumph of my performing career. ↗

— Rupert Holmes

#assaulted #audience #audience member #career #consider

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ↗

— John Keats

#appear #excess #fine #highest #his