Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes - August 2009 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 06 August 2009 01:58AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (118)
Tags: quotes

Comments (118)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 August 2009 03:52:00AM 13 points [-]

I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us. It's not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us - it's all sorts of dead old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They don't exactly live in us, but there they sit all the same and we can't get rid of them. All I have to do is pick up a newspaper, and I see ghosts lurking between the lines. I think there are ghosts everywhere you turn in this country - as many as there are grains of sand - and then there we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.

-- Ibsen, 1881

Comment author: gwern 06 August 2009 08:10:13AM 4 points [-]

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

--Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

Comment author: gwern 06 August 2009 08:12:21AM *  3 points [-]

"Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum."

--Lewis Mumford, quoted in The Clock of the Long Now

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit