"We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious."
        -- Austerlitz

"In both poker and life, you can't read people any better than they can read themselves. You can, if you’re good, very accurately determine if they think their hand is good, or if they think they know the answer to your legal question. But you can't be sure if reality differs from their perception."
        -- Matt Maroon

"We should not complain about impermanence, because without impermanence, nothing is possible."
        -- Thich Nhat Hanh

"I've never been happy. I have a few memories, early in life, and it sounds dramatic to say, but when I reflect on my life, the best I've ever had were brief periods when things were simply less painful."
        -- Ilan Bouchard

Q: What are the "intuitive and metaphyscal arts"?
A: The gods alone know. Probably the old tired con-acts of fortune-telling and putting the hex on your neighbor's goat, glossed up with gibberish borrowed from pop science tracts in the last two centuries.
        -- The Aleph Anti-FAQ

"If you build a snazzy alife sim ... you'd be a kind of bridging `first cause', and might even have the power to intervene in their lives - even obliterate their entire experienced cosmos - but that wouldn't make you a god in any interesting sense.  Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on."
        -- Damien Broderick

"NORMAL is a setting on a washing-machine."
        -- Nikolai Kingsley

"I read a lot of fantasy and have wondered sometimes, not so much what I would do in a fantasy setting, but what the book characters would do in the real world."
        -- Romana

"That's the thing that's always fascinated me about Go. It is essentially an extremely simple game gone terribly, terribly wrong."
        -- Amorymeltzer

"Dealing with the sheer of volume of "stuff" available on the internet is like being a crackhead with OCD. In the course of one hour I've tweaked my fantasy baseball lineup, posted on this message board, read Yahoo news, answered my latest e-mail, downloaded guidance criteria for PAHs in soils in NY State, checked the discography of a couple of bands, sent a deliverable to a client, and checked the weather. If that isn't superstimulus I don't know what is.  It's amazing how much I can do, yet accomplish so little."
        -- Misanthropic

"We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts.  Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them."
        -- John K Clark

"I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
        -- Jonathan I. Katz

"There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything," and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyway."  Either way, nothing happens."
        -- Yvon Chouinard

"Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained."
        -- David Zindell, Neverness

"Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong."
        -- Paul Graham

"In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning."
        -- Jean Baudrillard

"Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it."
        -- Charles Murray

"The popular media can only handle ideas expressible in proto-language, not ideas requiring nested phrase-structure syntax for their exposition."
        -- Ben Goertzel

"The best part about math is that, if you have the right answer and someone disagrees with you, it really is because they're stupid."
        -- Quotes from Honors Linear Algebra

"Long-Term Capital Management had faith in diversification.  Its history serves as ample notification that eggs in different baskets can and do all break at the same time."
        -- Craig L. Howe

"Accountability is about one person taking responsibility. If two people are accountable for the same decision, no one is really accountable."
        -- Glyn Holton

"As for the little green men... they don't want us to know about them, so they refrain from making contact... then they do silly aerobatics displays within radar range of military bases... with their exterior lights on... if that's extraterrestrial intelligence, I'm not sure I want to know what extraterrestrial stupidity looks like."
        -- Russell Wallace

"Characterizing male status-seeking as egotistical is like characterizing bonobo promiscuity as unchaste."
        -- Liza May

"Introducing a technology is not a neutral act--it is profoundly revolutionary. If you present a new technology to the world you are effectively legislating a change in the way we all live. You are changing society, not some vague democratic process. The individuals who are driven to use that technology by the disparities of wealth and power it creates do not have a real choice in the matter. So the idea that we are giving people more freedom by developing technologies and then simply making them available is a dangerous illusion."
        -- Karl Schroeder

"Hans Riesel held a Mersenne record for 14 days in the 50's, calculated using the first Swedish computer. My old highschool computing teacher had worked as a student on the system and had managed to crush his foot when a byte fell out of its rack and onto him."
        -- Anders Sandberg

"Gentlemen, I do not mind being contradicted, and I am unperturbed when I am attacked, but I confess I have slight misgivings when I hear myself being explained."
        -- Lord Balfour, to the English Parliament

"You can only compromise your principles once.  After then you don't have any."
        -- Smug Lisp Weeny

"If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power."
        -- John McCarthy

"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
        -- Black Belt Bayesian

"I normally thought of "God!" as a disclaimer, or like the MPAA rating you see just before a movie starts: it told me before I continued into conversation with that person, that that person had limitations to their intellectual capacity or intellectual honesty."
        -- Mike Barskey

"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."
        -- Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC

"Even if I had an objective proof that you don't find it unpleasant when you stick your hand in a fire, I still think you’d pull your hand out at the first opportunity."
        -- John K Clark

"So often when one level of delusion goes away, another one more subtle comes in its place."
        -- Rational Buddhist

"Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
        -- John McCarthy

"How exactly does one 'alter reality'?  If I eat an apple have I altered reality?  Or maybe you mean to just give the appearance of altering reality."
        -- JoeDad

"Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage.   Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires."
        -- Black Belt Bayesian

"If we let ethical considerations get in the way of scientific hubris, then the feminists have won!"
        -- Helarxe

"The trajectory to hell is paved with locally-good intentions."
        -- Matt Gingell

"To a mouse, cheese is cheese; that's why mousetraps work."
        -- Wendell Johnson, quoted in Language in Thought and Action

"'Ethical consideration' has come to mean reasoning from an ivory tower about abstract non-issues while people die."
        -- Zeb Haradon

"I intend to live forever. So far, so good."
        -- Rick Potvin

"Yes, I am the last man to have walked on the moon, and that's a very dubious and disappointing honor. It's been far too long."
        -- Gene Cernan

"Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid."
        -- Spider Robinson, Distraction

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."
        -- Rene Descartes, Discours de la Methode

"Faith is Hope given too much credit."
        -- Matt Tuozzo

"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
        -- Pierre-Simon Laplace, to Napoleon, explaining why his works on celestial mechanics made no mention of God.

"A world ought to have a few genuine good guys, and not just a spectrum of people running from bad to worse."
        -- Glen Cook, A Shadow of All Night Falling

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance."
        -- Edward Flaherty

"We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there."
        -- Dana Gould

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."
        -- Matt Groening

"Things do get better, all the time, maybe just not as fast as I'd like. I do what I can. Don't ask me to hate, too."
        -- Michael Wiik

"Like a lot of people in the computer industry, Keith Malinowski had spent his whole life being the smartest person in the room, and like most of his fellows the experience left him with a rather high opinion of his opinions."
        -- Rick Cook, The Wizardry Quested

"The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to."
         -- George Bernard Shaw

"Beware `we should...', extend a hand to `how do I...'"
        -- Alan Cox

"I assign higher credibility to an institution if liberals accuse it of being conservative and conservatives accuse it of being liberal."
        -- Alex F. Bokov

"An open mind is a great place for other people to dump their garbage."
        -- Rev. Rock, Church of the Subgenius