stevenvh.net

Quotes

This used to be “Some of my favorite quotes”. But the list is becoming longer and longer, and “some” is no longer the right word for it. Hence: a collection of my favorite quotes, in no particular order.
(Several quotes about religion and atheism were taken from the Positive Atheism's Big List of Quotations.)

Category
People

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

I’ve had a wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

Groucho Marx

How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?

Oscar Wilde

I am not young enough to know everything.

Oscar Wilde

Of course America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Oscar Wilde

Did you know that on the Canary Islands there is not one canary? And on the Virgin Islands same thing: not one canary.

unknown

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Sun Tzu

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men.

Marvin Minsky

Minds are simply what brains do.

Marvin Minsky

An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

Marvin Minsky

Eternity is awful long time, especially towards the end.

Woody Allen

The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriousity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

Stephen Fry

If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more happy people in the world?

Stephen Fry

People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t.

Stephen Fry

How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?

Stephen Fry

You can’t just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children.

Stephen Fry

If God exist, I want him to tell me himself. I don't want to hear it from anybody else - and in case you're wondering, that includes you.

Pat Condell

Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God.

Steven Weinberg

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.

Erwin Schrödinger

AI is the attempt to do badly what people do well.

John MacCarthy

To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

Hubert H. Humphrey

If you are going to tell people the truth, you have to make them laugh, or they'll kill you.

Oscar Wilde

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.

Elena Gorokhova

Reality is that which, once you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Philip K. Dick