…
And don't spend your time lookin' around
For something you want that can't be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin' about it
I'll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you
While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.
Karl PopperAustrian-British philosopher of science and social and política e falsificationism and for criticism of Plato, Hegel and Marx as totalitarian opponents of open society1902 - 1994
For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.
Karl PopperAustrian-British philosopher of science and social and política e falsificationism and for criticism of Plato, Hegel and Marx as totalitarian opponents of open society1902 - 1994
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Richard DawkinsEnglish ethologist, evolutionary biologist and authorborn 1941
The rules of the game Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
Emanuel LaskerGreman chess player, World Chess champion1868 - 1941
What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.
Carl SaganAmerican astrophysicist, cosmologist and author1934 - 1996
Everybody is an atheist in saying that there is a god - from Ra to Shiva - in which he does not believe. All that the serious and objective atheist does is to take the next step and to say that there is just one more god to disbelieve in.
Richard DawkinsEnglish ethologist, evolutionary biologist and authorborn 1941
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 SaganAmerican astrophysicist, cosmologist and author1934 - 1996
What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings.
Karl PopperAustrian-British philosopher of science and social and política e falsificationism and for criticism of Plato, Hegel and Marx as totalitarian opponents of open society1902 - 1994
Response to being offered the opportunity to settle in another country. His Family had drowned while attempting to flee Syria as refugees. A photograph of his son's body washed up on a Turkish beach has been credited with initiating a greater global response to the humanitarian crisis. :
Response to being offered the opportunity to settle in another country. His Family had drowned while attempting to flee Syria as refugees. A photograph of his son's body washed up on a Turkish beach has been credited with initiating a greater global response to the humanitarian crisis. :
There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.
Alan WattsBritish American author and lecturer1915 - 1973
It was an impressive achievement, of course, and a human achievement by the members of the IBM team, but Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.
Garry KasparovRussian chess grandmaster and activistborn 1963