Robert's Favorite or Memorable Quotes


"But here is still more of the truth and all I’ll try to say about it.
Although long life can be a burden, mostly it is a blessing.
It gives time enough to learn,
time enough to think,
time enough not to hurry,
time enough to love."
-- Lazarus Long, in Time Enough For Love (1973) by Robert Heinlein

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations;
it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true." -- Arthur C. Clarke, Chapter 1: "In the Hall of the Knights" from
1984 Spring: A Choice of Futures, Ballantine (1984)
derived  from a speech at the 8th Marconi Fellowship Award, 11/6/82.
"Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable." -- Alan Harrington, The Immortalist (1969)
"The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying." -- Sir Thomas Browne
There are many virtues to growing old. (long pause)
I'm just trying to think of what they are. -- Somerset Maugham at 80
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying." -- Woody Allen
"Life is either a glorious adventure or nothing" -- Helen Keller (?)
"If you do not change the direction in which you are going,
you are likely to end up where you are headed." -- Chinese Proverb
"That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones,
which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been,
into every corner of our minds." -- John Maynard Keynes
"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients
in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease." -- Thomas A. Edison
"...(that) any general system of conveying passengers would ... go at a velocity
exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable" -- Thomas Treadgold, railway engineer (1835)
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." -- D. P. Barron
"The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might suspect, by the ignorant mass --which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught--but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a two-fold threat to academic mediocrities; it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole laboriously constructed intellectual edifice may collapse." -- Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers
"The history of human civilisation and social development is strongly intertwined with the pervasive role of MATERIALS--
namely, the substances that are accessible to mankind and can be processed to exhibit the desired properties for making things." -- Lawrence H. Van Vlack, author of Elements of Materials Science and Engineering
"When we die, we die - finally and completely and forever." from The Faith of an Atheist by George Liles,
written about Cornell Biology Prof. William Provine.
"MD" Magazine, March, 1994 pg. 60
"It is impossible to make significant change by force.
The only way to make significant change is to make the thing you want to change obsolete." -- R. Buckminster Fuller
"There is infinite hope, but not for Man." -- Frank Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist
    from David Zindell's Neverness, pg 1.
"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed,
I will gladly change.  I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody.  It is only
persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm."
-- Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS, VI, 21 (courtesy of Chris Russo)

"Drosam pieder pasaule" (The world belongs to the brave.)
-- a Latvian proverb (courtesy of Amara Graps)

"The deterioration of the environment produced by technology is a technological problem
for which technology has found, is finding and will continue to find solutions."
-- Sir Peter Brian Medawar

"Be happy while you're living, for no matter how long you live, you're a longer time dead."
-- Scottish Proverb (courtesy of J. R. Molloy)

"Impossible is a word humans use far too often."
-- Seven of Nine (courtesy of Adam Beberg)

"The more you love, the more you can love-and the more intensely you love.
Nor is there any limit on how many you can love.
If a person had time enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just."
-- Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough For Love)

"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself  into in the first place."
-- Jonathan Swift (courtesy of Alan Eliasen)

"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
-- Peter F. Drucker

"Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves possess."
-- Gandalf the Grey (J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings")
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost, Harper’s Magazine, December 1920

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

-- Max Plank, from the Scientific Autobiography of Max Plank

"The transfer of allegiance from one paradigm to another is a conversion experience that cannot be forced."

-- Thomas Kuhn

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

-- Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."

-- Alfred North Whitehead

"62,400 repetitions make one truth."

-- Aldous Huxley in Brave New World

"It doesn't matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat.
As long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat."

-- Deng Xiaoping

"That there's none so blind
As those who will not see."
-- The Moody Blues, I Know You're Out There Somewhere

"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal,
not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion
and sacrifice and endurance."
-- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech

"The idea is to die young as late as possible."
-- Ashley Montague

"I'll Sleep when I'm dead."
-- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

"....
Harry Stamper: What's your contingency plan?
Truman: Contingency plan?
Harry Stamper: Your backup plan. You gotta have some kind of backup plan, right?
Truman: No, we don't have a back up plan, this is, uh...
Harry Stamper: And this is the best that you c - that the government, the U.S. government could come up with? I mean, you're NASA for crying out loud, you put a man on the moon, you're geniuses! You're the guys that're thinking shit up! I'm sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You're telling me you don't have a backup plan, that these eight boy scouts right here, that is the world's hope, that's what you're telling me?
Truman: Yeah.
..."

-- Quotes from Armageddon (~1998)

"...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons..."

-- Popular Mechanics (March 1949)

"On one mission, Mr. Johnston's chopper and a second Black Hawk carried six dead American soldiers, which would have been an impossible fit if their bodies had not been so broken from the bomb blasts."

-- Juliet Macur in "The Heavy Burden of Retrieving Fallen Americans in Iraq", The New York Times October 1, 2005.


"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
-- Stephen F. Roberts


"It's my job, to create a fantasy."
-- Anne Heche

"All your people must learn before you can reach for the stars."
-- Kirk, "The Gamesters of Triskelion", stardate 3259.2

"The meat is rotten, but the booze is holding out."
Computer translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."
-- Noticed on /. April 21, 2007.


A quote from the movie "Armegeddon" We need to think up plan "B", and then plan "C", and then plan "D" for life as we know it...

WWW Quotations Sources


Creation date: circa 1996
Last Modified: 27 April 2006
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