Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer
Source: Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Quantum explanations http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/ (April 2008), part of his Quantum Physics Sequence http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/. <br class="br">Context: There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.
Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer
Source: Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Sean Russell (1952) author
Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 32 (p. 460)
Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician
2. Stylistic Questions. p. 19.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)
“Paran shook his head, his only surprise the realization that nothing surprised him anymore.”
Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon
Source: Gardens of the Moon (1999), Chapter 15 (p. 446)
Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.
Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic
New Year's Address to the Nation (1991)