Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
~ Friedrich Schiller
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Author Archives: Seamas Anstruther
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You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
~ Iain Banks
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By reimagining college-admissions criteria, James Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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Three Silences there are: the first of speech, the second of desire, the third of thought.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
― Walter Benjamin
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Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
~ Henri-Louis Bergson
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In the modern world, each ideological wing has claimed a piece of paganism as its own. On the left, there are the world-worshippers, who elevate nature to the summit of sanctity. On the right, you see the worship of force in the forms of wealth, political power, and tribal solidarity. In other words, the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.
~ David Wolpe via The Atlantic
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In a very deep sense, I think the biggest miracle that we need to create the super powerful A.I. is already behind us. It’s already in the rearview mirror. We just needed an algorithm that could learn and a network architecture that could somehow encode the knowledge and the capability to reason.
~ Sam Altman
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One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it.
~ Elfriede Jelinek
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Great novelists are philosopher novelists — that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
~ Albert Camus
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