Setting loose on the battlefield weapons that are able to learn may be one of the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made. It could also be one of the last.
"Machine Learning for Expert Systems"
She'd taken the harlot century she'd been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now -- seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears -- she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite its zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.
Weaveworld
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
As I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn't there. / He wasn't there again today. / I wish, I wish he'd stay away.
"The Psychoed"
A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors...
The Screwtape Letters
Well, to be fair I did have a couple of gadgets he probably didn't, like a teaspoon and an open mind.
In David Fisher's The Creature From the Pit
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision of his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force, which it received from him.
I joy to journey among the stars, high above, to leave the earth and this dull abode, to ride on the clouds and stand on stout Atlas' shoulders, looking down from afar on men as they wander aimlessly, devoid of any guiding principle, to unroll for them the scroll of fate...
The Metamorphoses
I was up at five, you know, we do have staff problems, I'm so sorry, it's all done by magic.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.
At the bidding of a Peter the Hermit millions of men hurled themselves against the East; the words of an hallucinated enthusiast such as Mahomet created a force capable of triumphing over the Graeco-Roman world; an obscure monk like Luther bathed Europe in blood. The voice of a Galileo or a Newton will never have the least echo among the masses. The inventors of genius hasten the march of civilization. The fanatics and the hallucinated create history.
Now, if you play straight with me, you'll find me a considerate employer. But cross me, and you'll soon discover that under this playful, boyish, exterior beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic maniac.
Blackadder II: "Head"
Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?
... that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
In "Weber's Der Freischütz", 18 July 1894
But the Machine God... Ah, He is a special God. He loves his gears and his pumps, his springs and his transistors, his printed circuits and his boilers. He is not a jealous God, like some, but he is an attentive God. He tends to business, and keeps his world of machines functioning. But every now and then, every once in a while, every few centuries in a mind that is Machine and not Man, the Machine God finds one He can care about more than the others.
"Ernest and the Machine God"
To make a name for learning / when other roads are barred, / take something very easy / and make it very hard.
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
Sandman #19: A Midsummer Night's Dream
To conclude, all other living creatures live orderly and well, after their own kind: we see them flock and gather together, and ready to make head and stand against all others of a contrary kind: the lions as fell and savage as they be, fight not with one another: serpents sting not serpents, nor bite one another with their venomous teeth: nay the very monsters and huge fishes of the sea, war not amongst themselves in their own kind: but believe me, man at man's hand receiveth most harm and mischief.
The Natural History, tr. Philemon Holland
The plot involves ... excuse me for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the words "the plot involves". I'm back. The plot involves a mysterious painter...
Reviewing The Beyond
For non-deterministic read "Inhabited by pixies."
In a world deeply divided between those who are prepared to believe nothing and those who are ready to believe anything, it is a tricky business to enter into a discussion of matters that can be dismissed either as miracles or as lies.
The Brazen Horn
I used to look down on the world for being corrupt, but now I adore it for the utter magnificence of that corruption.
One of the busiest areas of feminist research today is the gender critique of the sciences. ... Students are taught ... that Newton's Law of Mechanics and Einstein's relativity are gender-laden. Regarding the latter, Sandra Harding says that the only remedy is "to reinvent science and theorizing itself to make sense of women's social experience."
Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
"Why Humor Is Funny"
The waste that he hated, I thought, was through him like blood in his veins. He had saved nails and wasted life. He had lived alone, but if he was a hermit he was neither religious nor philosophical. ... He worked hard all his life at being himself, but there were no principles to examine when his life was over. It was as if there had been a moral skeleton which had lacked the flesh of the intellect and the blood of experience. The life that he could recall totally was not worth recalling; it was a box of string too short to be saved.
"A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails"
Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man -- who has no gills.
The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary
There are too many people, and too few human beings.
Institutions feel no pain. Only people can feel the relentless pain of illiteracy, the desperate bafflement of a mind unskilled in the ways of logic and thoughtful attention, and dimly aware, but aware nevertheless, of its own confusion. Schools do not have minds; they have guidelines. Their guidelines run, when it isn't too inconvenient, as far as what they are not at all ashamed to call the parameters of basic minimum competency. Basic minimum competence (why do they need that y?) is not literacy. It is, however, just enough a counterfeit literacy to convince the minimally competent to fancy themselves literate, except, of course, for those moments of desperate pain.
The Underground Grammarian, March 1981.
I end with a word on the new symbols which I have employed. Most writers on logic strongly object to all symbols... I should advise the reader not to make up his mind on this point until he has well weighed two facts which nobody disputes, both separately and in connexion. First, logic is the only science which has made no progress since the revival of letters; secondly, logic is the only science which has produced no growth of symbols.
I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language -- and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.
Generation of Swine