The Great Geek Manual

The miracle of your mind isn’t that you can see the world as it is, but that you can see the world as it isn’t. We can remember the past and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it’s like to be some other person in some other place. And we all do this differently.

- Kathryn Schulz in the TED Talk “Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong,” March 2011.

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

- B. F. Skinner

I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.

- Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an interview with TIME magazine.

Amidst the attention given to the sciences as how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are conventionally considered ‘useless,’ will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously.

- John Maeda, as quoted in “The universe will fly like a bird“

Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

- Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley, 1944.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships.

- Albert Einstein to the Editor of The New York Times, Princeton University, May 1, 1935.

Our consciousness is not a prison cell where we live, isolated from other minds, but a doorway into a social world where we can work together to achieve a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

- “Consciousness: why bother?” by Chris Frith, March 2, 2012.
Originally posted to the Guardian.

In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.

- Timothy Leary