
Quoted in Ben Elgin, "Google's Goal: "Understand Everything," http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_18/b3881010_mz001.htm BusinessWeek (2004-05-03).
Travis McGee series, One Fearful Yellow Eye (1966)
Context: In many ways life is less random than we think. In your past and mine, there have been times when we have, on some lonely trail, constructed a device aimed into our future. Perhaps nothing ever comes along to trigger it. We live through the safe years. But, for some people, something moves on the half-forgotten path, and something arches out of the past and explodes in the here and now. These are emotional intersections, when lives cross, diverge, then meet again.
Quoted in Ben Elgin, "Google's Goal: "Understand Everything," http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_18/b3881010_mz001.htm BusinessWeek (2004-05-03).
New Theories of Everything (2007)
Context: We say that the string is 'random' if there is no other representation of the string which is shorter than itself. But we will say that it is 'non-random' if there does exist such an abbreviated representation.... In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.<!--Ch. 1, p. 11
"Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are" (2005), p. 243
Context: In 1879, American economist Francis Walker tried to explain why members of his profession were in such "bad odor amongst real people". He blamed it on their inability to understand why human behavior fails to comply with economic theory. We do not always act the way economists think we should, mainly because we're both less selfish and less rational than economists think we are. Economists are being indoctrinated into a cardboard version of human nature, which they hold true to such a degree that their own behavior has begun to resemble it. Psychological tests have shown that economics majors are more egoistic than the average college student. Exposure in class after class to the capitalist self-interest model apparently kills off whatever prosocial tendencies these students have to begin with. They give up trusting others, and conversely others give up trusting them. Hence the bad odor.
“Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.”
Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters
A Voice from the Attic (1960)
Context: There is no reason to suppose that people today feel less than their grandfathers, but there is good reason to think that they are less able to read in a way which makes them feel. It is natural for them to blame books rather than themselves, and to demand fiction which is highly peppered, like a glutton whose palate is defective.
“How many lives we live in one,
And how much less than one, in all.”
Life's Mysteries; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 442.
Variant: That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate on life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Context: "All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."