Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Atheism is cheap on people, because it snobbishly says nine out of ten people through history have been wrong about God and have had a lie at the core of their hearts.
When you go to a political convention, the best place to spend time is at the numerous parties put on by lobbyists. And you don't go for food. You go to beg for money.
We are trying to enable anyone in the world to be their own educational DJ, creating educational materials, sharing them with the world, constantly innovating on them.
At the beginning of each lecture I say, 'Here's a set of events unexplainable by common sense, and I promise you'll be able to solve this mystery at the end of class.'
Understanding the history of matter and searching for its most interesting forms, such as galaxies, stars, planets and life, seems a suitable use for our intelligence.
If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation.
There is no real answer [to the U.S. economic crisis] but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.
I think scientific arrogance really does give a great degree of distrust. I think people begin to think that scientists like to believe that they can run the universe.
Merely by existing and evolving in time - by existing - any physical system registers information, and by evolving in time it transforms or processes that information.
The child plays at being an adult long before he is one, and so you can play with more desirable beliefs while you are still growing into that more beneficial picture.
We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?
My theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.
More than 20 years on, sustained competition, informed customers and the rapid growth of new technology provide the necessary environment for substantial deregulation.
Autism's an important part of who I am, but I'm a college professor and an animal scientist first. And I wouldn't want to change 'cause I like the logical way I think.
Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.
What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.
Your body will argue that there is no justifiable reason to continue. Your only recourse is to call on your spirit, which fortunately functions independently of logic.
We do not have an ecological crisis. The ecosphere has a human crisis. Our 'story' about our place in the scheme of things has somehow gone awry in the industrial age.
Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn't saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.
You know, parenting is so personal. And we're all afraid that we didn't quite get it right. And it feels like the stakes are so high. By we - what if we made a mistake?
This 1965. We went to trial on our city. We were obviously borrowing tactics and strategy from the Black freedom movement, and we were echoing their approach to things.
Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.
Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
If the technology is disruptive, on the other hand, the odds are that at the end of the transition, the leaders will have been toppled and new companies will be on top.
There are cases in which somebody has demonstrated just such an outrageous disregard for the bounds of an acceptable decision that you want a measure of accountability.
Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else.
Most teams aren't teams at all but merely collections of individual relationships with the boss. Each individual vying with the others for power, prestige and position.
Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.
I am sick of death and worst of all this sickness feeds on itself, the more afraid I am the more I am afraid the more I flee the more I am afraid the more I am haunted.
If you leave the church service thinking about how good the pastor was, he has missed the mark. If you leave consumed with Christ, the pastor has been used by the Lord.
What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.
The current financial crisis calls out for new products and services as well as more, not less, information about what is safe and profitable in the future environment.
We don't have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding. Even discussing why we should use reason employs reason!
In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.
I can't speak for others, but I find the fundamental idea that a life worth living is one during which one strives every day to become a better person to be compelling.
A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.
If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.
You can't get there alone. People have to help you, and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks. You get people to help you by telling the truth, by being earnest.
The fact that fashion goes out of fashion and then comes back into fashion based solely on what a few people somewhere think they can sell, well to me, that’s insanity.
The more the climate is forced to change, the more likely it is to hit some unforeseen threshold that can trigger quite fast, surprising and perhaps unpleasant changes.
Western society has many flaws, and it is good for an educated person to have thought some of these through, even at the expense of losing a lecture or two to tear gas.
Look, we ought to do this for our kids... We ought to have a high school so that every kid who grows up here - they're all our kids - gets a good high school education.
It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated.
I'm the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.
Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. So instead of speaking to highly agreeable audiences, target suggestions to people with a history of originality.
For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.
We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.
Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?” If so, he says, “You may be outscored but you will never lose.
Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.
Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.