Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer
Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
Context: Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality. After all, we are biological creatures, the result of a biological process that Darwin discovered but that the physical facts ordained. As we have just seen, the biological facts can't guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true, or correct one. If the biological facts can't do it, then nothing can. No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.
Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer
Source: The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
“Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”
Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist
Donald Knuth's webpage http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)
Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer
Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 512.
Marriage
Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer
Crossfire debate on censorship (1986)
“We have a moral obligation to act and not accept that this [gun violence] is inevitable.”
Chris Murphy (1973) American politician
"Meet the Senator Who Filibustered for 15 Hours on Gun Control" http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-senator-who-filibustered-for-15-hours-on-gun-control-20160620, RollingStone.com, 20 June 2016.
“Morals: They’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!”
Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human
Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3, p. 175