When I debug a program, I expect to re-create the exact same behaviour a number of times, testing out revisions of the code and undoing them where necessary. When I query a computer system, I expect not to alter it. In contrast, human communication is irrevocable. Nothing can be unsaid. (Consider a judge laughably asking the jury to “forget” a piece of testimony.) It is also, in this way, unrepeatable—because the initial conditions can never be re-created.
Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive (2011)
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If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.
Malcolm X
As feminists have long understood, every apparent pairing is in fact an orgy, consisting of the two participants and the entire social world.
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess (2024)
When time is money, as it is now, free time is never free. It’s expensive.
Eula Bliss, Having and Being Had (2020)
Before the Great War, advanced atomic research was concentrated in three institutions: Cambridge, Copenhagen and Göttingen. The three labs worked in symbiosis: discoveries made in Cambridge were explained in Copenhagen and questioned in Göttingen. Scientists behaved like ants: each took a small fragment to a breach in the anthill, only to find that it was then taken away and used elsewhere by another ant.
Gerard J. De Groot, The Bomb: A Life (2004)
I believe that women’s magazines provide vivid, albeit grossly exaggerated, evidence of a basic human female adaptation, which Colette referred to as women’s “instinct for spontaneous comparison”: viz., to learn from observing other females how to stimulate, and use to advantage, male desire. This is analogous to the human abilities—which almost surely represent adaptations—to observe another person’s skilled tool-using performance, to imagine oneself performing the same activity, and to use this imagined performance as a template with which to compare the sensations of one’s own performances. Human females have always been objects of male sexual desire, and it is difficult to believe that a natural environment ever existed in which females did not have some opportunity to increase their reproductive success by learning to manage and manipulate this desire. Learning to be effective as an erotic stimulus is underpinned by the abilities to imagine oneself as a sex object and to discriminate and identify with sexually attractive women.
Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979)
To someone who said, “Most people laugh at you,” he replied, “And, probably, asses laugh at them. People pay no heed to asses. I pay no heed to them.”
Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, as translated by M. D Usher in How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism (2022)
He is quite clear about the writer’s responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever.
Julian Barnes, Arthur and George (2005)
He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence.
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (1921)
There was also a gentle, devout Muslim nationalist revolutionary, one Amadou of Niger, who drifted about the restaurant of the Friendship Hotel in billowing white robes, a silver teapot of holy water in hand, murmuring ‘bonjour, bonjour’ to the seated diners. He had no particular interest in Communist doctrine; China held another sort of attraction for Amadou. After his arrival, he informed the director of the State Broadcasting Administration that the Koran permitted him to have four wives. He had already taken three in Africa but was reserving a spot for a Chinese consort and wanted to purchase one while in China. When the director explained that this would be impossible, an agitated Amadou protested that he was not asking for a handout; he was willing to pay for a woman. After managing his disappointment, he taught African languages in China for a few years before returning to Niger, where he started his own transportation business. He then tried to assassinate the king in a public procession, was caught and executed.
Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History (2019)
