George Orwell, 1984

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love

Beware of the "Black Swan" fallacy. Deductive logic is tautological; there is no way to get a new truth out of it, and it manipulates false statements as readily as true ones. If you fail to remember this, it can trip you—with perfect logic. The designers of the earliest computers called this the "GIGO Law," i.e., "Garbage in, garbage out." Inductive logic is much more difficult—but can produce new truths.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein (writing about Stranger In A Strange Land)

I was asking questions. I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers. If I managed to shake him loose from some prejudice, preconception, or unexamined assumption, that was all I intended to do. A rational human being does not need answers, spoon fed to him on "faith," he needs questions to worry over—serious ones. The quality of the answers then depends on him... But anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself. It is an invitation to think—not to believe.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Friday

My grandparents used to tell me about a time when people were polite and nobody hesitated to be outdoors at night and people often didn't even lock their doors-much less surround their homes with fences and walls and barbed wire and lasers. Maybe so; I'm not old enough to remember it. It seems to me that, all my life, things have grown worse and worse.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Revolt in 2100, Postscript

The capacity for the human mind for swalling nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck"...

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - To Sail Beyond the Sunset

But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, and that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Kent Nerburn

Love has its own time, its own season, and its own reasons from coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls

Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four AM knows all my secrets. Four AM is when my dreams die.

Victor Hugo

The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that is has come to be disbelieved in. Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other. Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only. The rest is only the rest, and comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls give each other in exchanging this spark.

Tiffanie DeBartolo, Dream for an Insomniac

Anything less than mad, passionate, extraordinary love is a waste of your time. There are too many mediocre things in life to deal with and love shouldn't be one of them.

Alan Perlis

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman Good Omens

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

Dolly Parton

When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.

The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.

Taylor Caldwell

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Armand the Vampire

Two vampires from the new world, come to guide us into the new era as all we love slowly rots and fades away.

Charles Addams

Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.