The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Source: As quoted in "Voicing With a Heart"
Remark made by von Neumann as keynote speaker at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947, as mentioned by Franz L. Alt at the end of "Archaeology of computers: Reminiscences, 1945--1947", Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 7, July 1972, special issue: Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Association for Computing Machinery, p. 694.
Interview with David Shankbone (2007)
“Choose the duty that you can most effectively execute: that is, finally, all we can do in life.”
A Stranger to Command (Crown & Court 0.5, 2008)
“Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him?”
Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Context: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
“Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.”
Source: House of Chains (2002)
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics
