{"id":88,"date":"2013-04-24T14:08:57","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T13:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?page_id=88"},"modified":"2025-12-04T11:20:47","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T11:20:47","slug":"quotes-i-like","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/?page_id=88","title":{"rendered":"Quotes I like"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?<\/p>\n

T.S. Eliot<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out<\/em><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Richard P. Feynman,\u00a0<\/em>Feynman Lectures on Gravitation<\/i><\/div>\n

Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.<\/p>\n

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes<\/em><\/p>\n

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that we can make in a very narrow field.<\/p>\n

Niels Bohr<\/em><\/p>\n

You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.<\/p>\n

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes<\/em><\/p>\n

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.<\/p>\n

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country<\/em><\/p>\n

We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.<\/p>\n

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes<\/em><\/p>\n

To achieve great things you need a plan and not quite enough time.<\/p>\n

Leonard Bernstein<\/em><\/p>\n

Part of what academics do is generate ideas and teach. The other, perhaps more important part is to play the role of “the Bu*l*hit Police”.<\/p>\n

Mark Blyth, Austerity<\/em><\/p>\n

It ain\u2019t what you don\u2019t know that gets you into trouble. It\u2019s what you know for sure that just ain\u2019t so.<\/p>\n

Attributed to Mark Twain in The Big Short, but not corroborated.<\/em><\/p>\n

The future is already here \u2013 it’s just not evenly distributed.<\/p>\n

William Gibson in The Economist, December 4, 2003<\/em><\/p>\n

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.<\/p>\n

Predictions are offered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honoured in their day than prophets, and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist\u2019s business is lying.<\/p>\n

The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don\u2019t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It\u2019s none of their business\u2026All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent telling lies.<\/p>\n

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we\u2019re done with it, we may find \u2013 if it\u2019s a good novel \u2013 that we\u2019re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it\u2019s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.<\/p>\n

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.<\/p>\n

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.<\/p>\n

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.<\/p>\n

Ursula K Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969<\/em><\/p>\n

The past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.<\/p>\n

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1950<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.<\/p>\n

Kurt Vonnegut, interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are? T.S. Eliot Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-88","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2775,"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/88\/revisions\/2775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weknow0.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}