The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do.
—B.F. Skinner, 1969
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Quotes
Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.
—William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.
—William James, 1902And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman, 1855My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
—John Quincy Adams, 1844Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
—Anthony Burgess, 1964Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness.
—André Gide, 1897No man ever distinguished himself who could not bear to be laughed at.
—Maria Edgeworth, 1809Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
—Epictetus, c. 100A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
—Ralph Nader, 2000It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
—Lewis Strauss, 1954In every man is a wild beast; most of them don’t know how to hold it back, and the majority give it full rein when they are not restrained by terror of law.
—Frederick the Great, 1759Nature resolves everything into its component elements, but annihilates nothing.
—Lucretius, c. 57 BC