H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Joseph Browning

The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from skill the ability to access wealth.

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 - Lost Legacy

When I was a young student, I thought modern psychology could tell me the answers, but I soon found out that the best psychologists didn’t know a damn thing about the real core of the matter. Oh, I am not disparaging the work that has been done; it was badly needed and had been very useful in its way. None of ’em know what life is, what thought is, whether free will is a reality or an illusion, or whether that last question means anything. The best of ’em admit their ignorance; the worst of them make dogmatic assertions that are obvious absurdities.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough For Love

The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty." Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute—get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Gulf

If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, 'either-or' logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can't use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental proccess as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

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 - Glory Road

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

A dozen Heinlein quotations for sci fi day

Robert A. Heinlein - Friday

It is not written in the stars that I will always understand what is going on — a truism that I often find damnably annoying.

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 - Lazarus Long in Expanded Universe

Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.

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

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière

Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.

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.

Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford, 10 Things I Hate About You

Romantic? Hemingway? He was an abusive, alcoholic misogynist who squandered half of his life hanging around Picasso trying to nail his leftovers.

Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand

Among those I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

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.